Andros Island, Sept. 18 — "It's a conch fish," shouts Brice Semmens, his scuba-masked head just above the surface of the water. "I've been looking for one of these for years!"

He immediately disappears beneath the water.

"He's never seen one," Brice's wife, Christy, tells me before diving below the surface to join him.

The three-inch conch fish, shy and velvety maroon, has taken up residence in a pen shell — a kind of oyster shell. Queen conchs and their signature shells are so heavily gathered along the Andros reef that this small fish has had to find alternate quarters.

"They don't care where they live, I guess," Brice says when he gets back on the boat.

Despite Brice's excitement at the tiny find, he and his wife — who I've dubbed the "fish couple" — say they've noticed a perplexing lack of larger species in the region.

"We're up to 154 species," Christy announced after about a week of research. "So we're seeing a variety of species, but not many big fish."

That, in a nutshell, is what concerns them most. Christy, science coordinator for the Reef Environmental Education Foundation (REEF), has dived on coral reefs from Bonaire to the Virgin Islands. On those reefs, she says, there are large schools of large fish, as well as plenty of juveniles.

Here at Andros there are also many juvenile and mid-sized fish. But the biggies Christy and Brice would expect to see here — groupers, parrotfish and jewfish, for instance — seem almost absent.

During my dives, I watch parrotfish use their pearly teeth to bite chunks out of the reef, but I don't hear the rasp of vast schools of the chomping checkered or rainbow-colored fish described in books about coral reefs. It's because there are no vast schools of anything, at least in the 26-mile survey zone. Occasionally, I glimpse what looks to me like an enormous grouper — two feet long — trying to hide under an outcropping. But then I find out grouper can reach twice that size.

The question resounds across the disciplines involved in the Andros survey: Where are the animals? Most of the scientists are not finding critters in the numbers they expected, and the fish couple is no exception.

Brice suspects the lack of big fish has to do with overfishing. Scanning the reef crest up and down, I point out that we've seen practically no fishermen around, and we've been on the water all day, every day, for weeks. Andros Island has a human population of only about 9,000; far fewer than Jamaica, where the reef is critically overfished. "It only takes a tiny community to wipe out adult fish populations," says Brice, a doctoral candidate at the University of Washington.

Now that their fish counting is finished, over the next week Brice, Dan Brumbaugh and Josh Drew will track what schools of herbivores they can find. With Global Positioning Systems in tow, the researchers will swim silently above parrotfish and blue tang, among others, to see where they go, where the boundaries of their home ranges are, and how those ranges vary across habitat types.

This research will help determine what sorts of habitats, and in what amount and configurations, need to be included in a fisheries marine reserves.

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