REEF

It's free to join the REEF Environmental Education Foundation, and when you do, you can begin conducting fish counts on your own or join any REEF trip, of which there will be at least 13 in 2024, including Cozumel, Honduras, Bonaire, Indonesia, and the Maldives. And in the process, you'll be learning how to ID every critter on the reefs as well as learning their behaviors.

REEF was started in the early '90s by Paul Humann and Ned DeLoach as a natural extension of the splendid Caribbean fish, invertebrate, and coral ID books they had published.

The website is chock full of information, and one site I enjoy checking before I travel lists the hundreds of fish one might see in any region and the number REEF members have reported in their 30 years of reporting. For example, if you want to go where great hammerheads swim, REEF members have reported 53 in the Bahamas and Grant Turk but only one in the Greater Antilles/Virgin Islands region. Of course, more divers may have visited the Bahamas/Grand Turk region, but you get the idea.

Click here https://www.reef.org/db/reports/dist to research species on their website and click here https://reef.org to visit their website and become a member.

- Ben Davison