This week long field trip to Marsa Shagra on the Red Sea has been designed to immerse you in coral reef ecology, to provide practical experience of relevant survey techniques, and to improve your marine life identification skills.

As this field trip requires you to be a qualified diver, it provides an ideal follow on theme to Diving as a Practical Skill. Together they will take you from never having dived before right through to surveying marine life on one of the Red Sea's best reefs. This field trip to Marsa Shagra makes up the optional element 'Coral Reef Survey Techniques' in the 'Practical Biology' module, in the second year.

The aim of the field trip is to survey the fish, mobile invertebrates and benthic substrate of the stunning Marsa Shagra house reef. Each day you will be expected to complete an exercise on one or two of your dives. This will be a co-ordinated team effort, with each buddy pair collecting data from different parts of the house reef. Together we will build up a picture of the marine life right across the house reef. As a result you will learn internationally recognised
standard techniques for surveying fish, corals and other invertebrates such as giant clams, in addition to how to
measure fish behaviour.

We will be based at Ecolodge Shagra Village, 40km South of Marsa Alam airport. The marine life of the Southern Red Sea is truly stunning. Not only is Marsa Shagra home to an outstanding house reef, but the field trip allows you to dive on it whenever you want in your buddy teams at no extra cost! You have unlimited opportunities to observe and learn about the marine life. In addition, Elphinstone reef, notable for sightings of sharks and other large pelagic species, is situated just 20 - 40 minutes by zodiac off-shore from Marsa Shagra.

A typical diving day will begin when you get up. Breakfast is served from at 6.30am but you are welcome to take an early morning dive on the house reef first. What better way to set yourself up for breakfast than a sunrise dive? The light's glorious as the sun rises to the east of the reef and you'll catch the change-over between the reef's nocturnal and diurnal inhabitants. After breakfast you'll have the option to dive on the beautiful house reef, join a truck or an
in-range speed boat to dive the various nearby sites. After lunch you can either dive the house reef or go on a truck dive to another site. In the evening, night dives are available on the house reef before dinner, you just need a torch! Before dinner we meet to talk about what we've seen during the day, to plan we're doing the tomorrow and to collate
your results from each day's surveys.

The costs of this field trip are subsidised by the department. The cost to students of the 2010 trip was £650. It included flights, transfers, accommodation, all meals and soft drinks, unlimited diving on the house reef, two guided truck dives per day and appropriate insurance.

For further information, please contact Dr Andrew Smith.
Email: andrew.smith@anglia.ac.uk

Photos from our field trip.....

Click image to enlarge