We sat up and dropped our lures into the water, quickly finding out that keeping one's surfboard steady in a 10-foot swell while trying to fish a reef makes for a clumsy operation.
Catching reef fish with a net is difficult, and increasingly so as populations decline.
Coral-reef fish tend to grow slowly, take many years to reach reproductive age, and then spawn in only a few localised sites.
Crocodile-tagging safaris, where researchers measure and label the crocs as part of a monitoring program, are night-time affairs, taken after a candlelit three-course meal of delicious reef fish washed down with chilled Chilean sauvignon blanc.
The pet shop passed the fish on to Blue Reef Aquarium in Hastings.
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There are about 590 fish species and 396 reef at Wakatobi Islands.
He reckons that, unlike over-exploited oceanic fisheries, which can rebound if the boats go away, reef-fish populations pushed to the brink of extinction may never recover.
Currents are strong, which keeps the water nutritious, the reef alive and lures big pelagic fish.
Divers and snorkelers can become members of REEF (for free) and enter their own fish survey observations online.
The next morning we decided to fish from our surfboards, which we would paddle out to the edge of a reef, visible from shore with polarized glasses.
With luck and good timing you are likely to see schooling reef sharks and manta rays, the occasional dolphin pod, and thousands of colourful fish swirling and flaring like fireworks.
The Guardian is estimated to have damaged about 4, 000 square meters (about 43, 000 square feet) of the reef, a UNESCO World Heritage site that is home to about 500 species of fish and 350 species of coral, as well as whales, dolphins, sharks, turtles and breeding seabirds.
Ingels compares it to the way schools of fish move as one, never bumping into each other or anything else as they speed along a reef.
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This changes the reef into an entirely new type of ecosystem whose habitat is no longer suitable for many of the fish that once inhabited it.
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