Ted is doing an excellent job monitoring this reef by surveying the corals frequently, especially this summer when the data from the satellite and buoy recorded temperatures well over the bleaching threshold with a max seasurface temperature of 29.9 ℃ and max seafloor temperature of 29.5 ℃ (10 meters depth). The bleaching threshold for this reef is 28.4 ℃, and the temperature stayed consistently above the bleaching threshold for almost one and a half months between August and September. In September came hurricane Ian who, luckily, missed this reef but brought with it cooler water which cooled down the reef to more comfortable temperatures. As you can see in the last two surveys above, the coral is slowly recovering from bleaching, and the big dip in the graph is caused by hurricane Ian which drastically cooled down the reef. The survey taken on September 27th displays how badly the corals were bleached during this period, and the survey taken right when the heatwave started on August 2nd displays the coral being fully healthy before the heatwave.

Ted was born in 1964 and grew up in and around the ocean surrounding Bermuda for most of his life. He always enjoyed swimming in it, diving under it, and sailing over it so much that he decided at an early age to forgo eating any kind of seafood as his contribution to not damage or take anything away from the ocean.

Ted's first effort in ocean science was at the beginning of 2014 when he first learned about the invasion of lionfish in the Bermuda waters and became motivated to find a way to protect Bermuda's marine environment from them. He concluded that an effective custom-built trap that caught only lionfish with little or no by-catch would be the best solution and started to test some innovative trap design concepts. Bermuda banned the use of fish pots in 1990 due to their indiscriminate killing of by-catch, so it was imperative that any new designs were not going against that mandate.

He learned a lot from his trap design and test efforts but hasn't had success catching any lionfish, even after using GoPros to try and record what was happening with the lures and bait he was using. The upside is that few fish were seen in it, over the years, but it was never confirmed if they could have escaped on their own. After concluding that GoPros were not adequate for the task of continuous monitoring, he started looking for self-cleaning underwater camera systems and discovered View into the Blue in 2016. Since then, he has been trying to get one of their camera systems to Bermuda for this research effort and has now purchased one that will live stream from the coral reef and help understand how effective the Lionfish trap is. This project is called WELT (Webcam for Experimental Lionfish Trap), but Ted got inspired by the idea that this project could be more than just WELT. He introduced Bermuda College to the potential for doing all kinds of new, innovative research using the new technology that View Into The Blue and Aqualink have brought to the table.