Reef Check Underwater Science

"People protect what they love.” ~ Jacques Yves Cousteau When I was a kid, my family and I used to love watching “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.” Every week we’d set out the TV tables and share our dinner with the French marine explorer as he led us on underwater adventures and taught us to appreciate the beauty of science and the sea. His show is one of the main reasons I became an environmental reporter and earned my scuba diving certification in Monterey Bay, and it made a similar positive impact on millions of other kids and families across the globe.  Although it aired almost a half century ago, the message of Cousteau’s program was never more relevant than it is today. Pollution, climate change, and intense resource depletion now threaten ocean landscapes on an unprecedented scale and galvanize Cousteau disciples like me to search for ways to help. So I was excited to learn about Reef Check, a nonprofit founded in 1996 that turns scuba divers into citizen scientists and deploys them to collect data about the world’s coral reefs and, more recently, about the kelp forests and rocky reefs in my home state of California.