On practically every dive, researcher Alejandra Hernandez brings a digicam alongside.
Nonetheless some distance some distance from contemporary social media culture, she uses her lens as a tool to effect facts, no longer selfies. As a coral reef ecologist, Alejandra is basically serious about community and population dynamics and how organisms reply to a changing atmosphere.
By combining photogrammetry with enhanced machine, she and her group are ready to stitch these photos together to contrivance underwater ecosystems and topographies. And in turn, photo mappings generate huge facts sets about plenty of coral colonies, together with depth, habitat, how they thrive, right win 22 situation, and so forth.
When she’s no longer within the self-discipline, Hernandez spends time within the lab poring over these facts and developing in-depth reef maps that record the overall health and vitality of marine ecosystems.
After we reached her, she used to be shopping for a particular coral species, Sunray Lettuce Coral, which attributable to climate change is changing into more difficult and more difficult to win.
“This coral feeble to be neat commonplace help within the 80s,” she explains. “It’s endemic to the Caribbean, however now it’s very rare. So I’m using these maps to canvas parts of the reef and win it. It takes plenty of sampling and photography to detect since it’s so low abundance, so I’m enthusiastic to lumber attempting to win what’s the explanation for this huge decline.”
Dreams to Actuality
A native of Caracas, Venezuela, Alejandra grew up near the ocean because her grandfather used to be from a conclude-by island. Traditional holidays to chat over with supposed that from an early age she used to be within the water taking part in and exploring.
These early experiences planted the seeds for the curiosities that might per chance bloom later in her lifestyles. Each time she visited, sleek questions arose.
“How invent these animals location up to live underwater?” she remembers asking herself. “How are they doing it? Why invent they detect this methodology? How might per chance maybe they breathe? How might per chance maybe they relish? I was constantly pondering about these items, even though there had been no utterly different marine biologists or ecologists in my family.”
To prepare up on these questions, Hernandez studied marine biodiversity for her undergraduate degree. As a complement to her stories, she interned in a coral reef lab in 2006, and that used to be when she earned her Birth Water dive certification.
Those preliminary lab/diving opportunities helped Alejandra write her thesis, however her diving and occupation in fact accelerated while working as a learn assistant in a single other lab the attach she studied no longer supreme coral reefs, however also rocky shores, mangroves, and utterly different marine environments. That probability, she says, in fact unfolded what she might per chance maybe invent within the water.
Along with her undergrad and a ton of lab work underneath her belt, in 2014 she headed to Australia to compose her Ph.D. and entire her tutorial training.
Deepening the Development
Her tough resume effect her on the shortlist of Cal Academy’s Scientific Diving Program, which supplied her a job in 2018. Working underneath Mauritius Bell, Alejandra purchased trained up on the PRISM 2 Rebreather.
A well-known part of CalAcademy’s learn mandate involves the sign of the ocean’s mesophotic zones, which exist at depths roughly 120 to 450 feet deep. The P2 enables CalAcademy’s researchers to fetch admission to these depths for extended sessions of time without the constraints of delivery-circuit equipment. With out rebreather functionality, great of Alejandra’s learn for CalAcademy might per chance maybe be no longer ability.
“I converse staunch with the group on the Academy,” Alejandra explains, “And with rebreathers, strive to be on the quit of your game. So for me, it used to be in fact well-known to win a community the attach I could per chance maybe feel delight in that.”
Contrary to how most folks delivery diving, Alejandra now underneath no circumstances in fact had a recreational part. Most of us clutch to lumber diving for fun, she jokes, however that variety of diving largely ideal makes her bored and willing to fetch technical.
“For me,” she says, “I constantly ideal wished to work with corals, so recreationally, I’ve done some diving, however most of my growth in diving is for learn. It’s droll, on every occasion you invent a major time out, you’re delight in: ‘Ugh! I ideal wanna invent some dives for fun!’ Nonetheless when I invent a dive for fun, I fetch bored, haha.”
“It’s delight in, good ample … Now what?”
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