Night vision on the reef

We've just returned from a week on Heron Island on the southern Great Barrier Reef. On this trip,  we did some highly experimental work with night-vision type equipment to allow us to see what happens on the reef at night when no one is around. Specifically, we were interested to find out who's making the grazing halos we've been studying there - beyond the players we've observed from our daytime remote videos. To do this we used a fleet of modified, infrared-sensitive GoPro cameras, as well as unmodified GoPros, and red lights mounted on a custom-made rig designed by Osmar Luiz. Despite some hiccups (i.e., flooded cameras) and some eerie lagoon snorkels at dusk (i.e., dinner time for some of the reef's larger inhabitants!), the trip was a great success. A huge thanks goes out to the awesome team of field assistants, too: Vincent Raoult from Macquarie University, Veronica Radice from the University of Queensland, and Nathan Caromel from Griffith University. We also had the good fortune of working with Morad Ait-Habbouche, a veteran French filmmaker working on a climate change documentary.

We're just starting to process the nighttime videos now and are excited to see what we find...