Beautiful Oceans Coral Reef Ecosystem & Food Web
Did you know that Nassau groupers - although they are mostly solitary - sometimes appear in enormous schools, particularly during annual spawning events when aggregations of up to 30,000 individuals have been recorded? You'll learn lots of interesting science facts like this about the coral reef ecosystem and food web in this outstanding program. After taking the Coral Reef Guardian course, for nature lovers every dive will be a new challenge and the reef a playground. Discover the amazing feeding relationships between the organisms that inhabit a fringing reef, learn how energy travels through the coral reef ecosystem, and spend 2 dives and a snorkeling tour investigating the different feeding behaviors on the reef.
As part of our commitment to protecting the underwater environment and our advocacy for environmental education, we are proud to be able to offer the popular marine science educational courses from Beautiful Oceans. The course fee includes Coral Reef Guardian Manual, online access to the Beautiful Oceans eAcademy, 2 dives, creature discovery kit and certification.
This course is ideal for all divers, from entry level divers who wish to gain more from their dives to dive professionals who wish to become coral reef experts in order to give their students and divers a better diving experience. A unique benefit of taking your training with the Utila Dive Centre is that you can immediately enroll in the online portion of this program!
Beautiful Oceans Coral Reef Ecosystem & Food Web is the 'Who Eats Who' of the coral reef. This program will help you understand what constitutes a coral reef ecosystem and how food webs result in the movement of energy from organism to organism. You will also learn about seagrass and mangrove ecosystems, which are associated with coral reefs. This program will introduce you to some of the major groups of organisms that live on coral reefs, such as phytoplankton, zooplankton, algae, plants, coral, fish, sponges, echinoderms, arthropods, worms and mollusks. You will also learn some of the basic interactions that occur between these groups, discover example species and learn some of their interesting behaviors. Finally, this program will introduce you to the Beautiful Oceans Coral Reef Organism Behavior Tool and will provide you with an easy way to apply this tool to creatures you encounter on coral reefs. This tool will teach you how your creature of interest gets the energy it needs to survive and when the best time to observe the creature is. The online portion of this program is comprised of 30 online topics containing compelling text, beautiful pictures, fascinating videos, over 100 interactive online quizzes, a final comprehensive knowledge review and an online certificate of completion for print out. You will receive the following accompanying program materials upon arrival at Utila: a 130-page full-color course manual, a luxury collector's binder, and 2 Creature Discovery Kits (comprised of a letter-sized paper insert and a plastic pocket dive slate).
Course benefits;
• Understanding how coral reefs function as an ecosystem allows you observe the big picture of life on the reef and appreciate the importance of each individual organism
• Recognizing the major organisms that exist on coral reefs and their position in the food web helps you familiarize yourself with the entire ecosystem
• Knowing how one organism interacts with another can tell us a great deal about its role in the ecosystem — what scientists refer to as its 'ecological niche'. Knowing an organism's niche can help us understand and even predict some of the behaviours and interactions we witness during our exploration of coral reefs through both scuba diving and snorkeling
• Understanding the morphology of an organism tell divers and snorkelers a lot about the lifestyle and behaviour of an organism
• To help us learn more about the coral reef food web and some of Caribbean's most common reef organisms, we have created the Beautiful Oceans Coral Reef Organism Behaviour Tool/Food Web. This tool will help you understand more about each organism you encounter on your discovery dives and snorkel tours — WHAT the position of a particular organism in the food web is, HOW it gains energy, and WHEN it gains energy — allowing to you find creatures, and observe and predict behaviours that you may otherwise miss.
By the end of this course;
• You will be able to describe the characteristics of a coral reef ecosystem
• You will understand the connection between coral reefs, mangroves and seagrass ecosystems
• You will understand how predation, competition and symbiosis are part of a healthy functioning ecosystem
• You be able to describe the process of photosynthesis
• You will be able to explain the difference between a herbivore, omnivore and carnivore
• You will be able to name the major groups of organisms on coral reefs
• You will able to identify and name example species in each of these groups
• You will be able to understand and even predict some of the common behaviours of coral reef organisms
• You will discover what, when and how certain example species eat
• You will learn to appreciate all life on coral reefs from the tiniest phytoplankton to the shark
'Contact Us' to book onto this program and start online learning today. For more information, please go to the website of Beautiful Oceans. We offer the Beautiful Oceans Science Instructor Development course for PADI Divemasters and Instructors, which trains you in each course and allows you to teach both Beautiful Oceans courses.
