HAPPY PLANET
Can innovation, entrepreneurship and investment make the planet happier and healthier? Entrepreneur and investor Abigail Carroll thinks so. Through conversations with founders, investors, and thought leaders, in over a dozen countries and counting, Abigail shares this thought-provoking and hope-promoting world with her audience. And always with a little humour.
HAPPY PLANET
Citizen Scientists, a Whole Lot of Data, and a Whole Lot of Fun. Mead Kraka, REEF
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It’s Happy Planet Wednesday!
Today I'm joined by Mead Krówka from REEF (Reef Environmental Education Foundation), a marine conservation nonprofit based in Key Largo that connects people directly to ocean protection through hands-on citizen science. You might want to become one and join one of their Field Survey trips around the world. Sounds like a good vacation to me.
From tracking fish populations worldwide to leading efforts against invasive lionfish, Reef is turning everyday ocean lovers into powerful stewards of our reefs. The phenomenal amount of marine data collected is available on their searchable online database.
With the help of people like you and me, Reef is shaping the future of marine conservation.
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,Welcome to the podcast where we celebrate innovation for a happy planet. I am your host, Abigail Carroll. Today I'm joined by Mead Kraka from Reef, a marine conservation nonprofit based in key Largo that connects people directly to ocean protection through hands-on citizen science. From tracking fish populations worldwide to leading efforts against invasive lionfish reef is turning everyday ocean lovers into powerful stewards of our reefs. Meat is here to tell us how this work is shaping the future of marine conservation, but let's hear it from Mead.
AbigailWelcome to the podcast, Mead.
MeadThank you. It's good to be here.
AbigailI'm delighted to have you here. You work for, reef, which is, an organization based in the Keys,, tell me a little bit about what Reef does.
MeadReef is a marine conservation nonprofit based here in Key Largo. It started in 1993, with the initial goal of the, what's called the Volunteer Fish Survey Project to collect, data on fish species and abundance, all over the world. So we've broken up the world into about 11 different regions where citizen scientists can go out with a slate in a paper. And mark down each species and the abundance of that fish species. Or in some of our more temperate regions, we do invertebrates analogies. And just get to upload that onto our database, which is now the world's largest database of fish, marine fish species, and their abundance. As of recently, we're over 315,000 entries. And all of this is free to access., Anyone can go onto reef.org and find. Any type of data set that they want to,, work with from there.
AbigailI did it earlier today. I went and looked at Gloucester and it came up with all these different species, including eel, grass and things like that. And, and I could see the world map divided into zones. And you can,, hone in on really a very specific. That's incredible. Just incredible.
MeadYeah, it's really exciting. So that's our flagship program, but we also have a bunch of other programs that we run. Here in the key specifically, we work with, we have what's called our invasive species program, which focuses on the removal and education of the invasive line fish here in the Atlantic Basin. We do research down in the Cayman Islands on the, Nassau Group, spawning aggregations and monitoring how those have increased over the years. It's a conservation success story, working with fishermen, government agencies and research organizations. Is,, over 20 years to, protect this keystone species. We do a lot of education programs, both here in the Keys. We have school groups. We say we ke teach,, K to gray., So anyone who wants to learn about anything related to our marine ecosystem, we're able to offer education for them,, as well as., Leading trips all over the world as well. So we do field survey trips, so if you're interested in doing one of these or getting into these surveying,, you can join us anywhere around the world. We run about 15 trips a year and we teach the fish that you're gonna see out there how to survey, how to upload., It's a really fun experience to, have a vacation that count.
AbigailThat's really interesting 'cause I was gonna ask you how you manage these citizen scientists.. so you get them to go on a training trip, and then after that they are certified to do local testing, or how does it work?
MeadSo the trips are a good way to get a foot in the door if you want to go somewhere on the exotic side. But anyone can submit a survey. As long as, one's fish species, you're able to submit that and upload it., The way that we vet our data coming through is, there's certain experience levels that you can have. So anyone starts out as a level one surveyor to where, say you go out, 15 species, you submit that online and upload it. That goes through, some of our staff who are experts in fish identification. They go down and see an, error check to see if there's anything that is outstanding. For example, if you saw a fish that was seen 0.01% of the time, we are gonna reach out to you and say, Hey, do you have a photo of that? Just to make sure we're getting
Abigailyeah, of course.
MeadIt goes all the way up to level five surveyors, or level fours and fives is where you have to take a test of, depending on the region sometimes a hundred species and their families with the 95 to a hundred percent accuracy.
AbigailIn general how are these citizens going about collecting inver information? Are they diving, are they, what is what? You know how are they happen to be in the ocean looking at fish?
MeadYeah, a majority of our, Simpson Science volunteers are divers. So going out on a dive and collecting information, but you can be snorkeling, you can be swimming. You don't have to be a dive. To become a part of Reef that leads into one of our programs is called Oceans for All to where we want to introduce this to people who may not have the access to go out there or don't, are not able to be a diver. It's if you want to go out and snorkel, you can still contribute and collect information.
AbigailIt seems to me really impactful to engage citizen scientists. In your mission? Can you talk a little bit about that and how you think that is helping, or what impact that has?
MeadYeah. So with our mission, we want to, explore, discover, make a difference. And with that we want to engage people of all backgrounds and walks of life to become interested in our oceans. And for example, we have a new center that is free for the public to visit down here in Key Largo, to where it has focuses on all of our different,, aspects to where we have families visiting the keys or people coming in who don't know anything about marine conservation or anything about fish species. And coming in, talking with us, learning about it, and then realizing, wow, this is important. We should protect this. 'cause the more people know about something,, the more willing they are to protect it. It.
AbigailWhere are you in the journey in terms of data collection? It's, you've got this global network now and you're pulling up information. You said you have 315,000 entries. What's the end game in terms of data collect collection? When will you feel like, oh, we've got a real. Grasp on this, or do you feel like that already?
MeadIt is, I feel like it's always ongoing., 'Cause when we're looking at this data, we can go back 20 years and compare that data to what we're seeing today. And we can track any species that have been introduced. For example, the line fish when they were introduced. We can see their populations moving and growing. We can track how species are moving. Say if our oceans are warming, we can see what direction these species are going., And then overall,, inclines or declines of population species, we can see okay, 15 years ago,, Goliath Group or, Nassau Groupers in the Cayman Islands were not abundance and now they are, almost abundant. We can see that population growing. So it's, I think it's a fluid,, database to where the more information that we get, the more, the stronger it can be.
AbigailYeah. Are there some trends that are really just very clear to you that listeners might be interested in that you,
MeadThat's a great question., What comes to mind for me is seeing the incline and then balancing out of line fish in the Caribbean., So we can see this with our, the data that we collect through our line fish derby that we take place, takes place every year. And we can see how these populations started to rise and grow and go past its carrying capacity. And then with the introduction of learning how to remove and constantly, actively removing these start to balance out to, not a sustainable level, but trending towards having it under control.
AbigailOkay. I wanna get back to that, but tell us a little bit about the Lionfish Derby, because I know that's one of these, mitigating, actions.
MeadYeah. We host the Florida Keys Lionfish Derby. This is going to be our 17th annual,, derby. This takes place in the last weekend of April. So it's that Thursday the 23rd through Sunday, the 26th. This is an opportunity for teams to go out and collect as many line fish as possible off of our reefs. They're aggressively invasive and can decimate local fish populations. So the more that we remove the healthier our reefs can become. With these, we have teams of two to four that go out and collect. We have cash prizes that go out to the fishermen. For the largest collected, the smallest collected, the smallest live collected, and also the most and this past year with 13 teams and two days of fishing, we had 1,600 and I think 18 line fish removed from our reef.
AbigailWhat is the, what kind of population are we looking at down there? You got 1600 out, but what, like what, from what,
MeadYeah, so that's a good question. When it comes to population density in their native ranges, so that's like the Indo-Pacific for the red line fish I'll focus on that one. It's anywhere from six to 20 per Hector.
AbigailOkay.
Meadwe're looking at it here, it could be upwards of over 400 individuals per hectare. That is in a, it depends on the location. We're seeing that on the reefs where they're regularly removed or where people go to a lot. For example, in here, in the Keys we have our Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. A lot of those sites are, have divers and snorkelers multiple times a day, 365 days a year. So you're not gonna see as many there. But if you go deeper to the locations that aren't dived as often, or even areas that are past recreational dive limits, that's when populations really start to grow.
AbigailSo what is the consequence of having that kind of density of population of this invasive species? What do they do? What is, what's actually happening?
MeadYeah, they have been documented to prey on over 170 different species of our native fish. I like to break these into three categories. We have our ecologically important species, so these are. Cleaner shrimps, parrot fish that eat the algae off of the corals. Those that are important for the ecological functions of the reef. We have our recreationally important fish. So these are the pretty fish, the ornamental reef fish that people travel here to the keys to go out and see without divers and tourists coming down. That is a majority of our economy down. Here especially for fishermen, over 60% of the people that come to the keys come to go fishing. So if we take those away, it would decimate everything. We also have our commercially important fish. A lot of people who both visit here and around the country love seafood and we have a very important fisheries population down here. So we've been seeing in stomach samples of these line fish. Juvenile groupers and snappers showing up that have been consumed by these invasive fish?
AbigailYep. Gee, we know what caused this invasive species like the lionfish to be, take over.
MeadYeah, so there's a few different reasons as to why they're successful. The first sighting of them was off de Beach in 1985, and that was no 1986. And that was, assumed to be from a aquarium release. So either a home aquarium we don't know exactly 'cause we can't trace it back to one specific individual or two individuals. But since then, the reason their population has skyrocketed again, I like to break it into three reasons. One is they can reproduce young and very efficiently. So it only takes two individuals to spawn. They can reach their maturity after about one year. And each time that they spawn, which can be every two to four days they can release 30 to 50,000 eggs. So it's constantly making more they are really efficient because they can eat anything that they can fit in the width of their mouth. Their stomachs can expand o to over 30 times their original size
AbigailAnd they're pretty big fish, right?
MeadThey're on the smaller end. They're not huge. The largest one that we have ever caught in their invasive range is 19 and a half inches. But they, yeah, they can get, they can be pretty, pretty hefty. And then they're also venomous, so they don't have any natural predators here, and they do have 18 venomous spines covering their body which can make it tricky to to collect them. 'Cause you do it right and you get stung, that is, it's not a good time. That is absolutely crazy to imagine that this is, could be a problem that was started with an aquarium release that's just. What a wake call that is. of course. Yeah. No, it always comes back to the people.
Abigailokay, so you said the numbers were getting not great, but the rise is slowing what's the situation now and how are the reefs reacting and responding?
MeadIt depends on the location that you go to. So for example I'll talk about our Florida Keys National Ring Sanctuary down here. This is a federally protected, section of water of our reefs to where regular collection isn't. You need special permitting to go spearing for line fish in there. During our derbies, we do provide those permits. But with these, with regular collections going out we host some collection and handling workshops throughout the year. And through our derby we can see drops in the population after those collections. But if we stop. Going out and removing them, then they'll start to rise up again. So the more education and the more regular collecting that we can do to go out is really important. There's a few restaurants out here as well that serve line fish in there on their menus. So getting people to recognize it as a food source. I like to say it's the most sustainable fish you can eat here in the Atlantic. 'Cause by removing that, you are saving. Our native species.
AbigailYeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I believe that the skin, there are some people using the skin for fish leathers, which are becoming a little bit in vogue right now. So that's exciting too. It's fun to think that we're not just killing for the sake of killing, but we can actually use these animals to help in other ways.
MeadYeah, that's a big aspect to the education that I like to push. When, if we're either dealing with a school group or new spears, going out to remove them is, it's not this animal's fault that they're invasive, so we want to make sure we treat them with the utmost. I like to use every single fish that we remove gets used. So that's either file and used as tastings during our events that we have here. We take the non venomous fins off of them, dry them and turn that into line fish jewelry, which is really pretty. We have kits and pre-made jewelry on our website available for purchase. And we keep a majority of the fish as well in we freeze them and use them for dissections for education. So we go through external and internal anatomy, looking at the stomach content analysis. So every single fish that comes through we make sure has use.
AbigailAmazing. So what are the, the best method of removal to help curtail this population?
MeadYeah, there's removal is the easiest. Spearfishing is the easiest way to remove them. They like structure so you can keep catch them on like regular hook and line. I'm a terrible fisherman that way, so it has not worked for me. But they like structure. They like to be near or inside of the reef. And by spearing you can get out and target specifically that fish. That way you can ensure there is no bycatch at all. We've tried and there's been a few organizations that have tried a few different methods of trapping them with varying success. Since they do like structure, we've learned that they like natural structure better when it is available. But it was a little bit more, successful out in the Gulf where it's more sandy,
Abigailthey'll get into a Have a heart.
MeadYeah. So we've tried like they're they've been bycatch and lobster traps before, so we thought, oh, we can try that, like a modified lobster trap, but that it increases bycatch possibilities and spearing is the easiest way to get out and remove. We can also go netting for them when you want to capture a live individual. There have been, it's also in some areas where you're not allowed to carry a spear. You can carry a net and remove them that way.
Abigailyeah. So when you have the derby, are people are spearfishing. Or they're just doing anything.
MeadYeah. So we, when you're, spearing for line fish, you use what's called a, a pole spear. Another name for, that's a Hawaiian sling. So it's basically, it has a, it's called a paralyzer tip on the tip, which is a three-pronged,, tip on that. It's not one of the actual spear guns. It is something that just uses kinetic energy., It's safer to use. We also, use, special containment devices. 'cause once you have that fish who is very venomous on the spear, you do not want to touch it either below or above the water until you are in a safe, non-moving environment. It, the ones the containment devices that we use is a company called Zookeeper. They're a big sponsor of our derby. They're a really great organization. We have a talk coming up this next month in, January, that'll be recorded on our website from the, owner of Zookeeper, all about their experiences in line fish removal. And that is, a good, the best way that I've used to,. To store and, keep safe when you are, working with these venomous animals.
AbigailYeah. So how did you get involved in this?
MeadYeah. So I started with Reef about just about two years ago now. I studied environmental science and wanted to stay in the marine sciences. And, I've been an avid in marine conservation as long as I can remember and. Really wanted to get involved in the Invasive Species Project and it worked out. Working with our team is both a mixture of in-person and remote people, but, everyone comes down at least a few times a year and it's a great organization to get your foot in the door with all aspects of marine conservation.
AbigailYeah. No, it's amazing. For people who are interested in going to the Derby, what should they do?
MeadYeah, so you can go to reef.org/derby. That'll take you to our page there that has everything from the event schedule. How to register. Right now we have our early bird registration open, until March 20th. And that is less of a deposit to put down for registering. It takes two to four people to form a team. So grab your friends, come on down to the keys and have some fun here. And it's gonna be the April the 23rd, we have our captain's meeting. And then fishing's the 24th and 25th. And it all culminates on the Sunday, the 26th, where we have what's called our Lionfish Derby and Arts Festival. So this is a full festival here in our reef campus in Key Largo. Where we have vendors from other local nonprofits and conservation organizations, we have artists who's going to be line fish tastings, live music. The scoring is going to be going through. So we measure every single fish that comes through. By the end of the day, if you're doing them scoring, you're covered in scales Yeah, it's a really fun time to learn more about conservation and doing something that, that matters directly to our reefs here in Florida.
AbigailYep. So we talk a lot about tech on this podcast, and I'm just curious because you're doing a lot of, data gathering, data analysis identification of fish, and and measuring a fish, and I'm just wondering what kind of text do you text you guys use to help you with this mission?
MeadYeah, we're working on a project right now. Our conservation science team is working what's called the SMILE Project. This stands for Size Matters, innovative length estimate. To where it is using Olympus TG six cameras with an orca laser mounted on them to go out and collect data and photos of the broad side of fish with the laser right in the middle of the broad side of that fish of our fisheries related fishes. So right now we're focusing on our larger groupers, larger snappers parrot fish and hogfish. So this is then being collected. We go through and annotate these images and then these are sent off,, to, AI engineers who are then building a tool that can use that to estimate the length of the fish to then we can look at the health of the fisheries, in the long run. So we're still in the field testing,, portion of this. We have a bunch of, organizations that have collaborated. With us on this, such as we have Scripps oceanography or ocean Oregon States Noah, there's a lot others. That's if you want to learn more about that, you can visit our website, reef.org/smile. And we're still also trying to get the end goal for this is to get it to where it is affordable and able for. People to have their own cameras and their own lasers to collect this data and send it into us.
AbigailAmazing. Given what you're seeing on a day-today basis you're in the, you're in the throes of, ocean and climate, conservation. Are you optimistic? Are we on the right path?
MeadYeah, it's really, it depends on the issue at hand. I would say. For us when it comes to collecting this, all the data that we do, the more, the better. And we are actively engaging more people. We're seeing the concern and the, the wants of people to become more involved is rising. Especially with our new center. People are coming through learning about this and then sharing it with people around them. So it's an always growing aspect., With, fish populations, again, it depends on the location, but just for example, from our grouper moon, which is the Nassau Groupers in the Cayman Islands we've seen,, exponential increase of these spawning aggregations once protections have been put into place,, while also working with the government organizations and the fishermen to make sure that there's compromise amongst everyone. To where livelihoods aren't impacted, but these spawning aggregations, which are essential for the protection of the species, is protected and is, able to keep growing year after year back to those historical levels.
AbigailDo you think we'll reach those historical levels or are we just in a different world right now?
MeadI'd say it's a shifting baseline to where we'll never get back to the original, what everything used to look like. For example, with Lionfish, we're never gonna get rid of them fully. They're always going to be here. It's just keeping it at a sustainable level to where they're not taking over completely.
Abigailyeah. So everybody can thrive. So do you get to go in the water a lot and dive.
MeadA decent amount. I've led a few field survey trips. I just got back from one leading one with our citizen science volunteers to the Philippines, which was a really fun time. So we got to go dive and collect data and allow I have about 30 of these lovely phish ID forms to upload still. And like whenever we get a chance to do education, it is our team leading that education. So we have about half of our teams here in Florida. We have interns and fellows that come to learn everything there is to learn about marine conservation. And they get to, to grow and lead all of these programs that we're running.
AbigailAmazing. People listening who, don't have a direct connection with the ocean, but are interested and might wanna get involved. Are there things that you can recommend to them that they could do? Maybe go to the Lionfish Derby, but other actions that they could take that could either with or without your organization that could help everybody.
MeadYeah., With our organization, it's the education that is. The big part, and anyone can learn. We have a lot of free resources on our website to, we have recorded, we call that their webinars, we call them fish. Ours of different regions, different species of different regions. We have a monthly seminar series called Fish and Friends that is live streamed to our Facebook and YouTube, once a month. And anyone in the world can tune in and watch these are, local researchers, members of the community that are involved in actively in, in marine conservation. That, and,, sharing what you learn. So if you go on a deep dive of, learning about line fish and you're really passionate about that, share it with those around you. The more that people know about it, even though you may not be here in Florida and it may not directly impact you. The more people know about it, the more of a call to support there can be.
AbigailSo through this global network of citizen scientists you are collecting just. Huge amounts of data about what's going on in the water. What are the applications? I can see, you can identify trends and you can get, you can educate yourselves. Are there other people benefiting from this data? And,, and who's using it and how.
MeadYeah. So all of our data is free for anyone to access, including,. Research organizations. So all of our data, if you are a researcher and you're thinking, Hey, I could really use data on, Sergeant Fish in Hawaii, reach out to us, we can send the raw data files of everything that we have collected over the years or whatever question it is you're looking to answer. And these are actively being used in research publications. Our most recent one that just got published is using,. Hydrophone placements, yields of detection and spawning sites, about group or moon project. This was published here in 2025. And these go back, decades of research that is actively using this data
AbigailWow. That's a huge boon to scientists, isn't it?
Meadof, yeah, and the more that we're able to share it out the better.
AbigailYep. Hopefully we'll get some people listening to this,, podcast and hopefully they'll sign up for the lionfish derby or inquires. How to become a citizen scientist and help you collect more data.
MeadYeah.
AbigailThank you so much for talking to me today about what you're doing, and I wish you all the best of luck.
MeadThank you. It was great. Great experience chatting with you.
AbigailOkay? Thanks.
