Marine reserves can be difficult beasts to manage. It is impossible in practical terms to put a fence around them, unlike mainland reserves. The next best thing is to try and mark the boundaries, and at Tapuae Marine Reserve, the boundaries are marked by a number of buoys. Unfortunately, the sea being the place that it is, these buoys sometimes get broken off and lost. The other day we wend searching for the mooring for one buoy that had disappeared. Imagine trying to search for something that you only have a vague idea of where it is, and you can only see 2 metres in front of you! After spending some time trying to find it, we eventually gave up and went and checked some of the other buoys. Floating in the ocean, the buoys attract their own marine life. Each buoy was covered in a thick mat of seaweed, and barnacles. The ropes were weighed down with mussels. If they were left to grow, they would eventually cause the buoy to sink, and so they have to be cleared. With Callum on SCUBA, and starting at the bottom, I started at the top and worked my way down, scraping thousands of small mussels off the rope.
It turns out the mussels were home to thousands of other creatures - crabs, worms, and most of all, amphipods. Amphipods are small crustaceans, in the same family as sandhoppers. When we got out of the water, our wetsuits were a crawling mass of these amphipods! We washed most of them off into the sea. It was amazing to see how the mussels created their own ecosystem.
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