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[splashing water]
[narrator] A few miles off the Texas Gulf Coast, a research
expedition is about to begin.
[Brooke laughs]
[narrator] Brooke Shipley-Lozano is Chief Scientist of
the Artificial Reef program for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
[mask breath]
[narrator] Chris Ledford is the diving safety officer.
They're part of a team spending the next four days on board the M/V Fling.
[splash]
[narrator] The Gulf of Mexico has very few naturally
occurring reefs.
[splash]
[breathing underwater]
[narrator] So artificial ones like oil platforms, reef
balls, and decommissioned ships... give barnacles, coral, and other invertebrate
sea-life the hard surfaces they need to survive.
[Brooke] The monitoring program is essential to the
entire artificial reef program because if we don't monitor the reef structures, then
how will we know whether the fish are there. Whether it's a good structure.
[narrator] Both Brooke and Chris help manage an artificial
reef program that covers 4000 acres across nearly 70 sites.
[Brooke] What I'm working on is the database that contains
all of the data that we have collected from 1993 through 2011.
[Brooke] One of the things that I'm hoping to do eventually
is be able to take all of that and run a spatial implication model using fuzzy logic, which
is what my Ph.D. was, to then determine if we're putting reefs too closely together.
[Chris Ledford] I love just playing around down there, which
is kind of hard to do when I'm on a work dive, but we always make some time for that.
[Brooke] I probably feel closer to, you know, the God
and all the spiritual aspects when I'm at sea in the water than I do even in a church.
It's just you and God's creations and perfection.
[narrator] For Texas Parks and Wildlife, this is Abe
Moore.