Message 127
1) A Reef Ball mold system was ordered from Nassau, Bahamas
2) So far, the world tour has received host offers from Oman, Tansania
Africa, Maldives, Kuching Malaysia, West Malaysia, Bali Indonesia, British
Columbia, and Hawaii.
3) Two more Ultra Sized Reef Ball molds will be donated through the Reef
Ball Foundation for the Sidney Pier Artificial Reef Program in Sidney,
British Columbia. The SPARS project continues to do excellent science and
research on Reef Balls. A 7 minute segment about their Reef Ball program
aired on the Discovery Channel recently.
4) The Reef Ball Foundation received a $5,000 grant from Sarasota County’s
Boater Improvement Fund to sponsor a study with students from Sarasota’s
New College about selecting optimal sites for using Reef Balls at the base
of channel markers. The county currently has funding to place a Reef Ball
at the base of approximately 70% of all new channel marker installations
or channel marker repairs. The county wants to make sure that the best
sites get Reef Balls and areas less optimal are the channel markers that
don’t get the extra habitat. The study will look at site selection from
both a fishing orientation and a biological one.
5) The Living Classroom Foundation and the Reef Ball Foundation are
working to jointly apply for a national seagrant grant.
6) We have recently overhauled our Research page on the website.
http://www.reefball.com/research.htm
We have gone through our library of research and added all titles in our
possession to the internet page. Additionally, we bolded studies that
related directly to Reef Balls. (If your study related directly to Reef
Balls and we forgot to highlight it please let us know because with over a
thousand papers on the site and we are sure we missed some). We also
expanded contact information for reef researchers and provided more links
where available. For the moment, it is all one page for easy text
searches but within a week or two we will break the page up for faster
loading and navigation and index the pages to the site wide search engine.
7) Gray's Reef scoping meeting will be held in Atlanta on Monday, 12/6.
8) Dr. Lee Harris has been asked to help Choice Hotel’s International
engineer a Reef Ball beach protection reef for a Guatemala property.
9) United States Secretary of Education, Dick Riley will join the Reef
Ball Coalition at a convention for educators…dates and location to follow
in a later update.
10) Jason Seeley of the Reef Ball Coalition will graduate from college
with a major in education next week and will assume a full time position
with the Reef Ball Coalition. Jason has been working full time in summers
and part time during the school year for the Reef Ball Coalition.
Congratulations Jason.
11) Molds were delivered today to Tampa Bay Watch Foundation for use in
sea walls/docks around Tampa Bay.
www.reefball.com
|
