When marine biologists need to identify a single coral colony among more than a thousand scattered across the reefs of Mozambique, they face a challenge that sounds deceptively simple: How do you find an individual organism underwater when you have already photographed it months or even years ago? For Love The Oceans, a grassroots marine conservation organization working in Jangamo Bay since 2014, the answer used to involve printing, laminating, and hauling stacks of reference photos beneath the surface. Today, a DIVEVOLK underwater phone housing and a smartphone have replaced that impossible paperwork — and transformed the way their team conducts coral research.
The Challenge: Tracking 1,000 Coral Colonies by Hand
Jangamo Bay, located along the southern coast of Mozambique, has long been recognized as a biodiversity hotspot. But years of ecosystem imbalance, declining herbivore fish populations, and climate-related stress events have taken their toll. Overgrown macroalgae now smother large sections of reef, crowding out coral and limiting new recruitment. The once-vibrant reefs are under pressure, and understanding exactly how these ecosystems are changing requires painstaking, long-term monitoring.
Love The Oceans took on this challenge with two ambitious coral projects. The first, a Coral Recruitment and Mortality Project, is the first long-term coral demographics study ever conducted in Jangamo Bay. Over four years, the team has tagged and photographed more than 1,000 individual coral colonies, building a dataset that tracks growth, survival, and mortality across the reef. This project is part of a global coral demographics research program led by the University of Leeds, comparing how demographic rates differ across tropical and subtropical reefs worldwide.
The second initiative, Project BEAM (Biodiversity Enhancement and Algae Management), is a pilot ecosystem intervention designed to restore reef health by clearing macroalgae from designated plots and monitoring whether targeted removal can accelerate coral recovery. Collaborating with researchers from James Cook University and Lancaster University, the team identified more than 50 staghorn and star coral colonies at two separate sites for this study.
Both projects demand the same exacting workflow: map the reef, identify control and experimental colonies, place physical tags beside each colony, create distribution maps for relocating them, and then photograph and measure every single colony at regular intervals. When you are working with over a thousand tagged corals, the logistics of simply matching colony to reference photo become staggering.
The Old Way: Laminated Photos and Underwater Paperwork
Before DIVEVOLK entered the picture, Love The Oceans relied on a method that was functional but brutal. Every previously photographed coral colony had its image printed, laminated, and carried underwater. Divers would flip through hundreds of plastic-coated sheets while submerged, trying to match color, shape, and texture to the living coral in front of them — all while managing buoyancy, air supply, and limited bottom time.
Imagine rifling through a stack of 1,000 laminated photos while floating above a reef in a current. Colors fade on printed paper underwater, making identification unreliable. The process was slow, physically awkward, and introduced significant room for error. For a research project that depends on precisely matching the same individual colony across multiple survey intervals, this was a serious bottleneck.
The Solution: DIVEVOLK Housings Bring the Lab Underwater
The breakthrough came when the team began using DIVEVOLK SeaTouch 4 Max PLUS underwater smartphone housings. The concept was straightforward but powerful: pre-load reference photographs of previously surveyed corals directly onto the phone, seal it inside the housing, and take it on every dive.
The phone's backlit screen proved to be the key advantage. Unlike laminated prints, which lose color saturation the moment they enter the water, the screen maintains full color fidelity at depth. Researchers can scroll through their digital library of coral portraits, compare the on-screen image directly to the living colony in front of them, and confirm identification in seconds rather than minutes.
"The DiveVolk housings have been incredibly useful for us to be able to match colonies underwater. We're able to pre-load photos of corals which we have taken previously, and use these photos to locate the exact coral and retake the photos. The reason this is transformational is that the phones underwater are backlit so you still can see colour. Without this, we had to print, laminate, and take with us photos of over 1,000 coral colonies and manually go through them underwater — you can imagine trying to go through that level of paperwork while submerged."
— Francesca Trotman, Operations Lead, Love The Oceans
But the benefits did not stop at photo matching. The team also loads reef maps onto the phone, allowing divers to navigate directly to specific tag locations without surfacing to check paper charts. And perhaps most unexpectedly, the housing enabled a new form of underwater communication: instead of relying on basic dive sign language, team members can now type messages to each other on the phone screen, coordinating complex tasks in real time.
Project BEAM: Restoring Reefs One Plot at a Time
Project BEAM represents Love The Oceans' hands-on approach to coral reef restoration. The premise is direct: clear the macroalgae that is smothering corals, create open substrate where new corals can settle and grow, and monitor the results over time to build an evidence base for whether targeted algae removal actually accelerates reef recovery.
The fieldwork is rigorous. Researchers from James Cook University (Hilary Smith) and Lancaster University (Dr. Jemma Mayall and colleagues) collaborate with the Love The Oceans team to design the experimental framework. At two separate sites in Jangamo Bay, they identified more than 50 staghorn and star coral colonies, dividing them into control groups (left untouched) and experimental groups (where algae is actively cleared).
Each colony is tagged with a physical marker, its GPS-equivalent position plotted on a distribution map, and then photographed and measured. Divers use PVC quadrat frames — grid-like structures placed over reef sections — to standardize their measurements and ensure every photo captures the same area at the same scale.
The SeaTouch 4 Max Platinum housing plays a central role during every survey dive. Researchers pull up the distribution map on their phone to navigate to the correct plot, then switch to the reference photo gallery to confirm they are looking at the right colony before taking fresh measurements. What once required multiple dives and extensive surface preparation now happens in a single, streamlined workflow.
Coral Demographics: Building a Global Dataset from Mozambique
The Coral Recruitment and Mortality Project is where Love The Oceans' data contributes to something much larger. As part of the University of Leeds global coral demographics program, the Jangamo Bay dataset is compared with similar studies from reefs across the tropics and subtropics, helping scientists understand how demographic rates — birth, growth, and death of individual colonies — vary by region, species, and environmental conditions.
Over four years of tagging and photographing more than 1,000 colonies, the team has built one of the most comprehensive coral population datasets in southern Mozambique. Early findings suggest that historic stress events have already reshaped the reef, with more tolerant genera now dominating large areas — a pattern that has profound implications for predicting how these reefs will respond to future bleaching events and storms.
In April 2025, the project reached a milestone when University of Leeds students traveled to Mozambique for a two-week intensive field session, photographing all 1,000-plus colonies as part of the annual survey cycle. The efficiency gains from using DIVEVOLK housings were immediately apparent: students could match and re-photograph colonies far faster than would have been possible with the old laminated-photo method, maximizing the science accomplished during their limited field time.
Why Smartphones Are Changing Marine Field Research
The Love The Oceans story illustrates a broader shift in how marine field research is conducted. Traditional underwater data collection relied on specialized (and expensive) equipment: dedicated underwater cameras, custom monitoring rigs, and reams of waterproofed paper. Smartphones, paired with reliable underwater housings, are democratizing access to these capabilities.
A phone inside a DIVEVOLK SeaTouch 4 Max Kit is simultaneously a high-resolution camera, a reference photo library, a navigation tool, a mapping device, and a communication platform. For a grassroots organization operating on a conservation budget in rural Mozambique, that versatility is not a luxury — it is the difference between a project that can scale and one that cannot.
Francesca Trotman put it simply: "When we first started using the housing, this was a big moment for the team as it made work so much easier and more efficient underwater. We haven't had any challenges with the housings."
How You Can Support Coral Conservation
Love The Oceans relies on volunteers, partnerships, and community support to keep their projects running. If their work inspires you, here are ways to get involved:
- Follow their journey: @lovetheoceans and @chess_sea_ on Instagram
- Volunteer: Love The Oceans accepts volunteers for field research in Mozambique — visit lovetheoceans.org for details
- Dive with purpose: If you already own an underwater phone housing, consider contributing to citizen science programs like Mission Blue's Hope Spots or local reef monitoring initiatives in your area
- Share the story: Awareness is the first step toward action — share this article with fellow divers and ocean enthusiasts
Every reef survey, every tagged coral, every cleared patch of macroalgae adds to the global body of knowledge that will determine whether our reefs survive the coming decades. Tools like the SeaTouch 4 Max PLUS are not just products — they are instruments of conservation, putting professional-grade capability into the hands of the people doing the hardest work beneath the waves.
Have questions about using DIVEVOLK housings for marine research or conservation projects? Visit our technical support page or contact us directly. And for more stories of how divers around the world are using underwater technology to make a difference, check out our blog.
