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By Jackie Selbitschka, Reef Check Washington Regional Manager
Every year, scientific divers from all over the world come together for the American Academy of Underwater Sciences (AAUS) symposium to learn about organizational updates, participate in professional certification courses and share current scientific diving research with the goal to advance and facilitate safe and productive scientific diving. In March, the symposium was held in Seattle, Washington and hosted by the University of Washington, NOAA and the Seattle Aquarium. With the symposium being hosted by partner organizations in the backyard of our Washington region, Reef Check was asked to lead a couple events throughout the week- a local fun dive and a Reef Check experience workshop.
To kick off the week, we gathered at Saltwater State Park on Monday morning to experience some Pacific Northwest diving at its best. Rhoda Green with Friends of Saltwater State Park met us there to give a brief history of the park and the development of the marine preserve. This site used to be home to bull kelp forests, but what is now left is mostly sparse understory kelp. This is a Reef Check monitoring site as well as a planned restoration site with the Friends of Saltwater State Park, but on this day we were going to go for fun and dive a little deeper than our transect typically takes us. This time of year the visibility can be great- around 30 ft- prior to the spring plankton blooms. We got to enjoy that water clarity on the artificial reefs that go down to around 80 ft deep, with a vertical height of 20 ft and about 2-4 ft of rock structure that create habitat for 6-foot Lingcod and large schools of Black, Brown, Copper and Quillback Rockfishes. Since 2009 these reefs have become home to large colonies of plumose sea anemones, nudibranchs, urchins and sea stars— all of which we found exploring the cracks and crevices that this reef structure creates.
On Wednesday, the Reef Check workshop was held at the Seattle Aquarium with divers coming to get a taste of what our volunteers learn during their training courses and experience underwater during surveys. Having access to the exhibits at the Seattle Aquarium gave us the rare opportunity to practice species ID with living examples. After a morning of protocol review and species ID practice, we suited up to have the unique experience of diving in the heart of downtown Seattle right off the pier of the Seattle Aquarium. In Washington kelp is perennial, with bull kelp, as well as most of the understory kelp species, dying off over the fall months, reproducing and recruiting over the winter and starting to grow back in the spring. Because of this, our kelp transects were full of tiny kelp recruits. Most were not large enough to count on Reef Check transects, but it was exciting to see these beds in the early stages of growth. Despite the kelp bed being mostly recruits, our invertebrate transects were full of stars, crabs and even a couple of Wolf Eels! We wrapped up the day sharing our practice transect results and reflecting on the experience. This event allowed us to connect with scientific divers hailing from Minnesota, California, Oregon and Washington to share how we engage citizen science divers to participate in monitoring efforts.
The 2025 AAUS Symposium had record breaking attendance despite many agencies and individuals being affected by federal travel bans leading up to the event. Being able to attend events like the AAUS Symposium that bring together the most experienced scientific divers from around the world creates unparalleled opportunities to build partnerships between agencies, learn from each other and advance safe scientific diving practices.
