First Ever Online "Fishinar"; A Webinar Made for Fish Dorks~

Earlier this evening, I was able to attend my very first "fishinar"!
It's like a seminar, on the web, that covered fish!
There were some pretty cool people online tonight!
One of them was my teacher, Donna Brown, along with some of her colleagues; Liz Foote and Janna Nichols, along with other "students" who wanted to learn more about fish!
We're all members of this online website called reef.org. REEF stands for Reef Environmental Education Foundation.

Their mission is "To conserve marine ecosystems for their recreational, commercial, and intrinsic value by educating, enlisting and enabling divers and other marine enthusiasts to become active stewards and citizen scientists. REEF links the diving community with scientists, resource managers and conservationists through marine-life data collection and related activities."

Basically, they want to help protect the marine ecosystem, so they do it through educating the public and try to get them physically involved with doing fish surveys by snorkeling or even diving.

I've done a few fish surveys myself, with Uncle Rick Long and some other awesome fish dorks like myself!

Every Sunday morning, a group of people go out to La Perouse to do fish surveys for the reef website. We also get to dork out on what types of fish we saw or share "fish tales" about what had happened in the water. It's so much fun~

Anyway! The fishinar I attended online earlier tonight was for Hawaii's Top 15 most common fishes and ways to identify them in the water.
The 15 fish they had covered was
1. Bird Wrasse
2. Convict tang aka Convict surgeonfish
3. Orange spine unicornfish
4. Raccoon butterflyfish
5. Saddle wrasse
6. Moorish Idol
7. Manybar Goatfish
8. Pacific Gregory
9. Hawaiian white spotted toby
10. Brown surgeonfish aka Lavender tang
11. Hawaiian sergeant
12. Yellow stripe goatfish
13. Orange band surgeonfish
14. Threadfin butterflyfish
15. Reef triggerfish

I would go over all the different characteristics that Donna and Liz went over in the fishinar, but you can actually review the fishinars online.
First, you need to go to reef.org and sign up to be a member of the REEF community. Afterwards, you can navigate through the website to find where they archive the fishinars.
It says that recorded fishinars are only available through the website for one week after the fishinar was aired. However, reef members can contact Janna to ask for archived fishinar sessions. (I know what I will be doing later~)
Next week Wednesday on March 28th at 5:00pm Hawaii time, they will be having another online fishinar covering Caribbean fishes. I'm excited for that one because I don't think I even know any Caribbean fish. More to learn!

If you love fish as much as I do, you should REALLY check out this website. It feels so cool to be apart of an online community that loves something as much as you do. They even have some REEF gear like polo shirts or hats. Dive flags or water bottles. It's really cool!
I strongly urge you guys to at least visit the website or read up about it.
If you're a self proclaimed environmentalist and FISH DORK like myself, you must ABSOLUTELY sign up for this website!

reef.org

Check it out!