WHEN scientists turn up to Ningaloo reef, plug their laptops in, fill their dive tanks and start collecting samples, they have Shawn Smith to thank.

Shawn is the AIMS project manager for the CReefs trips and it’s his job to do all the organising and setting up before everyone gets here.

First of all he organises the location.

"Heron Island and Lizard Island are pretty easy because they’ve got research stations. Here [at Ningaloo] it’s a bit more difficult," he said.

Then he books dates and makes sure they don’t clash with school holidays – or the shearing season, in the case of Ningaloo.

Some scientists have dive qualifications or employer regulations that restrict who they can dive with.

"The dive stuff is half the job," Shawn said.

Flights and accommodation are booked, and contracts are sent out to those employed for the trip, such as the cook and journalist.

This site has presented extra challenges due to its remote location, so Shawn had to schedule flights to limit the amount of long drives to the airport and back.

Equipment also needed to be organised, and some of the bookings had to be made up to 12 months in advance.

Boats, compressors, generators and people to drive the boats all had to be procured, as well as the necessary communications equipment.

Shawn arrived a week before everyone else got here to set up, and while the expedition is running he oversees the daily dive schedule and paying of invoices, among many other things.

Once everything is wrapped up, Shawn has to pack up and send off the cases of marine samples collected during the trip.

"A lot of  [the equipment here] will be stored in Exmouth until next year," he said.

SOFT corals have been comparatively under-studied in Australia, but hopefully that is about to change.

Dr Monika Schlacher-Hoenlinger, a research fellow at the Queensland Museum (QM), will study soft corals for three years as part of an Australian Biological Resources Study grant awarded to the QM’s Professor John Hooper. It will allow her to collect and study soft corals from the east and west coasts of Australia.

On previous CReefs trips, Monika and her colleagues from QM and AIMS have collected specimens and identified them to genus, but that was as far as they could take it.

"We collected the soft corals but then we had no funding [to follow it up]," she said.

"I think the main difference is that the biodiversity seems to be much lower," she said.

"It’s a fringing reef here, and it’s much more high energy."

Monika said there were so many species to look at that getting complete information on all of them would be impossible.

"We will pick certain groups of soft corals and try to work them up in more detail," she said.

"In the long term, it’s definitely the goal to compare both coasts."

So far Monika and Merrick have collected about 100 specimens to go with the specimens they’ve collected from the Great Barrier Reef.

Monika said she was keeping the two collections separate so she could identify them and then see if there were any species that were present on both sides of the continent.

NOW into his fourth expedition with CReefs, Phil Bock has got a good understanding of the biodiversity of bryozoans at Lizard Island, Heron Island and here at Ningaloo.

For the uninitiated, bryozoans are tiny invertebrate organisms, also known as lace corals or moss animals, that settle on various parts of the reef and form small colonies.

They usually settle on dead coral or the underside of rocks or, in one case that Phil found washed up on the beach here, a piece of plastic.

Phil is retired but is still an honorary associate at Museum Victoria.

"Definitely the places we go to on the Great Barrier Reef have much greater diversity than here," he said.

Despite that, Phil has found about 100 species so far and is still turning up more every day.

"You pick up a slab of coral and there are 20 different species all over it," he said.

Bryozoans are fed on by some animals, but generally compete for space alongside coral and sponges.

A number of bryozoans were collected here last year when Phil couldn’t attend and he said his collection this year was already showing differences to last year’s.

"The common ones from last year aren’t showing up anywhere nearly as often this year," he said.

Clay is senior project manager of the mollusc section at the WA Museum and is back at Ningaloo after also making the trip last year.

So far he and Corey Whisson have found a large number of mollusc specimens in the few days they’ve been on site.

Another unusual visitor to these shores is the Chromodoris lochi, which Clay found in 30m of water.

Named after Ian Loch from the Australian Museum, it had not been found off this coast before.

The Platydoris formosa, in contrast, has only been found once off Western Australia before.

Those are just three of the many, many mollusc samples Clay and Corey have found.

"There’s just so much to identify and we’re only looking at molluscs that are greater than half a centimetre," he said.

"What I’d like to have a look at is some of the more cryptic forms, like the ones that live on soft coral."

As well as finding new or previously unseen species, Clay is also building a picture of the biodiversity of this part of Ningaloo reef.

He has been checking different habitats on the reef to learn where molluscs are living.

Eventually he will be able to use the information from these expeditions to compare this section of the reef to other marine areas, and gain a better insight into which organisms are living here and how they travel.