I thought I'd pass on a little info from another list. You can watch coral
spawning from a live web cam, if that intrests you. Then again, it may put
some of you right to sleep. :-)

Brad  ><((((º>`·.¸¸.·´¯`·.¸.·´¯`·.¸¸><((((º>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Forward.....

 As you can see from Dr. Alina Szmant's message below ("Alina Says"),  dated
February 21, 2003, spawning is anticipated for several species throughout
Florida and the Caribbean during selected days in August.  As  you may
recall,
part of our Coral Reef Watch program at NOAA is the installation of
Web-accessible Coral Cameras at selected stations where viewing specific
events
that can be witnessed are of value and interest to researchers and the lay
public, and where funding resources permit.  Thus, we would like to announce
that our colleague Dave Ward of the Caribbean Marine Research Center and
NOAA/AOML has positioned the St. Croix, USVI Coral Camera to point at a
large
colony of /Montastraea faveolata/ in about 40' of water.  The camera has a
light on it that comes on for 10 minutes every thirty minutes beginning at
7:02pm (EST) and ending at 5:32am (last lighting).  Hopefully, we will be
able
to witness the coral colony spawning some time between Aug 18-20, some time
between 9pm and 2am, with a high probability of Aug 19 as the likely date.
Hopefully, the coral will cooperate (it may be that that particular
colony does not spawn).  The URL for the Web Coral Camera is,

    http://www.coral.noaa.gov/

and click on "Live Web Cams" in the left-side list of links, then on
"UnderwaterCam."  You must have Windows Media installed on your computer to
access the images.  You can also open up the data stream directly in Windows
Media (and thus increase the size of the viewing window) using this URL:

    mms://192.111.123.141/uw-stx

The camera is broadcasting at night all this week, and of course also during
all daylight hours.

    This effort is also part of our Coral Literature, Education and Outreach
(CLEO) program (http://www.coral.noaa.gov/cleo, currently under
development),
under which we will also soon be providing educational modules concerning
coral bleaching and spawning.  Please note that we will also be recording a
higher quality video stream (as opposed to that over the Internet) of the
event which  will be downloadable (if they spawn) via the CLEO Web link at
some time after the spawning.

    Cheers,
    Jim Hendee and the CREWS/Camera Team
    (Clarke Jeffris, Louis Florit, Mike Shoemaker,
Jules Craynock, Jeff Judas, Monika Gurnee,
Derek Manzello, Dave Ward and Skeet Perry)