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NASA Project in Puerto Rico Trains Students in Marine Biology

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NASA Project in Puerto Rico Trains Students in Marine Biology

oceanos2024loiacono-3020.jpg?w=1536
A forested green peninsula of Culebra Island juts into the blue waters of the Caribbean as a rain storm hits in the distance. The teal blue surrounding the island indicates shallow waters, home to the island's famous coral reefs.
Credits: NASA Ames/Milan Loiacono

Tainaliz Marie Rodríguez Lugo took a deep breath, adjusted her snorkel mask, and plunged into the ocean, fins first. Three weeks earlier, Rodríguez Lugo couldn’t swim. Now the college student was gathering data on water quality and coral reefs for a NASA-led marine biology project in Puerto Rico, where she lives.  

“There is so much life down there that I never knew about,” Rodríguez Lugo said. “And it’s beautiful.”  

“There is so much life down there that I never knew about, and it’s beautiful.”

Tainaliz Marie Rodríguez Lugo

Tainaliz Marie Rodríguez Lugo

OCEANOS 2024 Intern

Long golden tendrils of a soft coral drift toward the camera, surrounded by purple sea fans. These sea fans, many slightly larger than a dinner plate, are rounded and so flat they are almost two dimensional. The corals sit on a reef surrounded by vibrant blue water, and are tall enough to almost touch the ocean surface just above them.

The sea whip and purple sea fans in the photo above are found off the coast of Playa Melones, Culebra, a small island off the east cost of Puerto Rico and a popular destination for snorkelers.

Puerto Rico is home to more than 1,300 square miles of coral reefs, which play a vital role in protecting the island from storms, waves, and hurricanes. Reef-related tourism provides nearly $2 billion in annual income for the island.

A chunk of brown, orange, yellow and white lumpy coral stands out agains the blue of the sea floor around it. A few of the coral lobes on the right are bright white, and a few vibrant red sea sponges dot the coral.

But coral reefs in Puerto Rico and around the world are experiencing more frequent and severe bleaching events. High ocean temperatures in regions around the globe have led to coral bleaching, which is when corals expel zooxanthellae – the colorful, symbiotic microscopic algae that live inside coral tissues and provide 80-90% of its nutrients. When stressors persist, the corals eventually starve and turn bone-white.

In April 2024, NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) announced that the world was experiencing a global bleaching event, the fourth on record. You can see bleached spots in the lobed star coral pictured above, which is also colonized by Ramicrusta, an invasive, burnt orange algae that poses an additional threat to reefs. 

Students Are Given Ocean Research Tools

A man wearing a teal long-sleeve and black short holds a white 3D-printed staghorn coral clump, which looks like a dinner plate with three nine-inch tree trunks sprouting from it. Around him, about a dozen high school interns in orange long-sleeve shirts and snorkel gear tread water in the teal blue of the bay.

Beginning in June, the month-long program that Rodriguez and 29 other local students participated in is called the Ocean Community Engagement and Awareness using NASA Earth Observations and Science for Hispanic/Latino Students (OCEANOS).  The goal of OCEANOS is twofold: to teach Puerto Rican students about marine ecology and conservation, and to train students through hands-on fieldwork how to use marine science tools to monitor the health of coral reefs.

The course included classroom instruction, scientific fieldwork, collecting and analyzing ocean data from La Parguera and Culebra Island, and a final presentation. 

In the photo, OCEANOS instructor Samuel Suleiman shows a 3D-printed clump of staghorn coral to a group of students off the coast of Culebra. In areas where coral habitats have been damaged, conservationists use 3D-printed corals to attract and protect fish, algae, and other wildlife. 

A female high schooler in an orange long-sleeve shirt, black leggings, and snorkel equipment swims parallel to the sea floor, holding a compact camera. The ocean floor is a pale teal covered in bumpy coral, with a thin yellow line of a tape measure running through it.

To practice coral surveying techniques and evaluate biodiversity,students used compact cameras to snap a photo every half second, recording seven-meter by seven-meter quadrants of the ocean floor. Back on land, the students stitched these images – roughly 600 images per quadrant – into high-resolution mosaics, which they then used to catalog the types and distributions of various coral species.  

Low Light, Poor Water Quality, and Invasive Species Threaten Coral Reefs

oceanos2024loiacono-3498.jpg?w=2048

Students also built their own low-cost instruments, with sensors on each end to measure temperature and light, to help assess water quality and characteristics.  

The ideal temperature range for coral falls between 77- 82 degrees Fahrenheit (25-28 degrees Celsius). Water above or below this range is considered a potential stressor for coral and can impair growth. It can also increase the risk of disease, bleaching, and reproductive issues.    

Coral relies on light for growth. Less light means less photosynthesis for the zooxanthellae that live inside the coral, which in turn means less food for the coral itself. Cloudy water due to excessive sediment or phytoplankton can dim or block sunlight.

A man in a snorkel mask and a pale yellow long-sleeve shirt floats in bright blue water, left hand extended to hold two brown fuzzy balls of cyanobacteria. In the background, the sea floor looks like mini sand dunes marching off into the gloom, littered and in some places completely covered in the dark brown piles of cyanobacteria.

Additional threats to coral include fishing equipment, boat groundings, chemical runoff, and invasive species.  

In the photo above, OCEANOS instructor Juan Torres-Pérez holds two clumps of cyanobacteria, a type of bacteria that has choked a section of reef near Playa Melones. The exact cause of this excessive cyanobacteria growth is unclear, but it is likely due to land-based pollution leaching into nearby waters, he said. In the background, dark brown piles of cyanobacteria littering the ocean floor are visible. 

Students Help Grow and Plant New Coral

A male high school intern in a neon orange long sleeve shirt leans over in chest-high water, tying a four-inch piece of gold coral into a stringy net. Around him are the fuzzy outlines of six other students and instructors engaged in the same task, somewhat obscured from the haziness of the blue water.

Suleiman walked students through the process of planting new coral, which involved tying loose staghorn and elkhorn corals into a square frame. Each frame holds about 100 individual pieces of coral.  Suleiman leads a group called Sociedad Ambiente Marino (SAM), which has been working for more than 20 years to cultivate and plant more than 160,000 corals around Puerto Rico.

Three scuba divers in full wetsuits kneel on the sandy ocean floor releasing a stream of steady white bubbles that rise all the way up. The divers are pulling on thin ropes attached to a white PVC square frame, which is cross-hatched with string and tied-in yellow coral pieces. At the surface, a male instructor in a teal long-sleeve and snorkel gear and seven high school interns in bright orange long-sleeves and fins watch on.

Divers anchored these frames to the ocean floor. Under ideal conditions, branching species like elkhorn and staghorn coral grow one centimeter per month, or about 12-13 centimeters per year, making them ideal candidates for coral reef restoration. By comparison, mountainous and boulder coral, also prevalent in the Caribbean Sea, grow an average of just one centimeter per year. 

A square white PVC frame floats in teal water, held up by a white balloon. Inside the frame is are criss-crossing string holding roughly 100 yellow pieces of coral. In the background are clumps of dark green sea grass, agains the pale blue of the sandy sea floor.

The frames will remain on the ocean floor for 10 to 14 months, until the corals have quadrupled in size. At any given time, SAM has about 45 of these frames in coral ‘farms’ around Culebra, totaling almost 4,500 corals. 

Shot from the sea floor looking up, a man in snorkeling equipment and a teal shirt is silhouetted against the blue water and the bright light of the sun, visible at the ocean's surface. In the bottom-center of the frame is a lumpy mass of brown-orange coral.

Once the corals are ready to be planted, they will be added to various reefs to replace damaged or bleached corals, and shore up vulnerable habitats.

In the photo above, Suleiman gathers loose corals to place around an endangered coral species Dendrogyra cylindrus, more commonly referred to as Pillar Coral (front left). This underwater “garden,” as he called it, should attract fish and wildlife such as sea urchins, which will give the endangered coral — and the other species in this small reef — a better chance of survival.

A New Generation of Marine Scientists

Fifteen high schoolers in bright orange long-sleeve shirts stand on dark grey rock littered with tan sand. Behind them is a small cliff of the same rock, topped in bright green foliage. On either side and sitting in front of the students are five instructors, wearing teal long-sleeve shirts.

From the 2023 OCEANOS class, roughly half of the undergraduate students went on to pursue marine science degrees, and many hope to continue with a post-graduate program. For a scientific field historically lacking diverse voices, this is a promising step.

Among the high school students in the 2023 class, three went on to change their degree plans to oceanography after participating in the OCEANOS program, while others are finding ways to incorporate marine science into their studies.

Francisco Méndez Negrón, a 2023 OCEANOS graduate, is now a computer science student at the University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras and wants to apply robotics to marine ecology. “My goal is to integrate computer science and oceanography to make something that can contribute to the problems marine ecosystems are facing, mostly originated by us humans,” Méndez Negrón said. He returned to the OCEANOS program to serve as a mentor for the 2024 class. 

As for Tainaliz Marie Rodriguez Lugo, she managed to overcome her swim anxiety while discovering a love of the ocean. She credited the instructors who were patient, encouraging, and never left her side in the water. 

“I was really scared going into this internship,” Rodríguez Lugo said. “I didn’t know how to swim, and I was starting a program literally called ‘Oceans.’ But now I love it: I could spend all day in the ocean.”

I was really scared going into this internship. I didn’t know how to swim, and I was starting a program literally called ‘Oceans.’ But now I love it: I could spend all day in the ocean.

Tainaliz Marie Rodríguez Lugo

Tainaliz Marie Rodríguez Lugo

OCEANOS 2024 Intern

When asked how she would describe coral to someone who has never seen one, Rodríguez Lugo just laughed. “I can’t. There are no words for it. I would just take them to the reefs.” 

For more information about OCEANOS, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/oceanos

The OCEANOS program’s final session will take place next year. Applications for the 2025 OCEANOS program will open in March. To apply, visit:

https://nasa.gov/oceanos-application

Photographs and story by Milan Loiacono, NASA’s Ames Research Center

About the Author

Milan Loiacono

Milan Loiacono

Science Communication Specialist

Milan Loiacono is a science communication specialist for the Earth Science Division at NASA Ames Research Center.

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Aug 28, 2024

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