I started the week off by attending a game plan meeting for Sport Diver magazine. This meeting is when Patricia (Editor-in-Chief), Becky (Managing Editor), Elizabeth (Art Director) and Chelsea (Photo Editor) discuss the upcoming issue. They break down every section and go through every item and story. This ensures that nothing is left out, and by the end of the meeting everyone knows the status of the different stories and features.
After the meeting Patricia showed me how Bonnier tracks the popularity of online articles. We can see how many shares and likes posts get and break it down further and determine which link brought a user to the site. Not just which social media link they clicked from, but whether they clicked the headline, the image, or another part of the link that caught their eye. I also learned the Scuba Diving‘s website has just gone through a major update. The site moved to the newest version of Drupal, and as a result the design was made to be responsive. This means that the site adapts to the size of the web browser, optimizing the experience for computers, tablets, and phones. Sport Diver will be going through a similar update in the coming months.
To wrap up the first day Patricia assigned me to do research for Scuba Diving‘s next Ocean Action brief. This segment of the magazine highlights groups and organizations, like last month’s WildAid Shark Savers, that are active in marine conservation and gives divers tips on how they can help the cause. For my Ocean Action I’ve decided to research the Manta Trust.
The second day Ashley Annin, the Managing Editor for Scuba Diving, assigned me a second story. This one covered a recent demonstration at the Manta Ray Bay Resort scuba show where 360Heros and wild life filmmaker Bill Macdonald showed off a virtual shark dive using an Oculus Rift. I researched the company’s camera rig that holds 6 GoPro cameras and got to work setting up an interview with Bill Macdonald, who shot the footage.
On Wednesday I went to an Intern Acquisition meeting with fellow interns Katie and Lauren. This meeting is essentially were we check in with our editors and update them on our progress. During the meeting I pitched an idea for a short segment based on a story I had come across that morning. In Australia Adventure Bay Charters has been using heavy-metal music to attract sharks on its cage dives and had recently used this technique to help a Shark Week documentary crew find some great white sharks.
That afternoon Alex Bean showed me how to get into the Sport Diver and Scuba Diving websites in order to post stories online. A lot of it seemed familiar because of my experience with html, but I’ll really get a feel for it once I’m assigned to get one of our print articles up on the website!
Thursday I had my first interview. I spoke to Bill Macdonald over the phone about people’s reactions to the virtual shark dive as well as his experience filming the 360 degree footage in Yap. Bill was so excited to share his story with me I hardly had to ask any questions! Besides the information on the story he also imparted some wisdom from Philippe Cousteau, “When you’re showing film to someone, impact occurs when you show somebody something new, something totally outside their experience.”
Later that day I also got to proofread a couple of articles. At first I had trouble keeping focus. I was supposed to be checking for errors and typos, but I kept getting caught up in the stories and would need to start over!
Friday I finished up my story about baiting sharks with heavy-metal music and was assigned two stories for Sport Diver. One was about The Ocean Cleanup, which is an organization that is planning to clear out half of the plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch using a passive collection system that utilizes the gyres’s currents. The other story is about The Whales of Bristol a statue that was created to celebrate Bristol’s status as European Green Capital 2015. The exhibit itself features two life sized whales made out of wicker wood swimming through a literal ocean of plastic. It is meant to bring attention to the beauty and fragility of the ocean as well as the damage that is caused by humans. I ended the week researching these new assignments and sending out interview requests.
Can’t wait to see what next week brings!
ides many resources to get started with fish identification. We sell starter kits, identification books, and provide fish identification lectures that are open to the public. Divers can use underwater paper and slates to record their data during their dives. Not only is it important to properly identify the fish, but part of the survey is recording the abundance of each species. Divers assign an abundance category to each species: single (1), few (2-10), many (11-100), or abundant (101+). They can complete these fish surveys while diving and report the data back to REEF. Over time, this has created the world’s largest fish sightings database!
. It is so rewarding to learn all the names of the fish topside and then be able to correctly identify them underwater! Although we do like to see the large fish of the reef, like sharks and rays, we usually get more excited when we spot an elusive, small fish that we have been searching for. For instance, it has been exciting to begin learning goby species and find them darting across the sand. In many cases, you have to get really close to see the identifying markings. Dive after dive, I am slowly learning to identify more and more fish!
ddled our way through the mangrove trails. Nobody fell in, but some of the kids decided it was too hot and needed to cool off in the water. All of them had a great time naming fish that they had just learned and exploring the mangrove ecosystem. On Wednesday, Abbey and I helped taking the group on a glass-bottom boat tour. Thankfully, no one got seasick and we had a great view of one of the coral reefs, including two nurse sharks! That afternoon, the Florida Exotic Bird Sanctuary brought in a rescued owl and gave a short presentation on the effects of bioaccumulation in an ecosystem. We finished the day by letting the kids tye-dye their camp shirts. We began the last day of camp by taking a boat out to Grecian Rocks and snorkeling on the coral reef. Many of the kids were able to correctly identify fish species and were enthusiastic about what they saw underwater. I would have loved to have gone to the Ocean Explorers camp when I was younger!
