My name is Nicole and this is my blog about my six weeks’ volunteering at the Marine Discovery Centre (MDC) on the beautiful island of Landaa Giraavaru (Baa Atoll, Maldives). Here we take care of injured turtles, breed anemonefish and have a large coral frame propagation project. This means that guests can sponsor a frame with corals on it and a personalised nametag, to rebuild the reef and help the environment.
- 7:30am: Waking up – I lived on the nearby local island of Kamadhoo. Each morning I caught the local 8:15 ferry boat … much better than the bus in Germany!
- 9:00am – 10:00am: Turtle care. My work in the MDC started with cleaning the rescue turtle pools in the MDC backyard, and then preparing the turtle food. Every turtle has a special diet depending on its bodyweight and size. None of the turtles are able to dive (except Elsa) so we hand feed with leftover fish, lobster and squid.
The MDC takes care of six injured turtles: Ossy, Elsa, Peggy, Zahiya, Kerry and La Petite. They were found injured, floating in ghost fishing nets on the surface of the ocean. Some of them have lost flippers, as you can see in the photos. Another big problem is ‘floating syndrome’, all turtles (except Elsa) have some trapped air between their shell and body, so they are not able to dive below the surface and eat from the pool bottom.
- 10:00am – midday: I helped out with the Reefscapers project, taking “monitoring” photographs of the coral frames, to observe coral growth over time as well as the more recent coral bleaching. Corals have a calcium carbonate skeleton with polyps, living in a symbiotic relationship with algae which give the corals their typical colour. But when the water temperature is too warm for a long time, the algae disappear from the polyp, and the only thing you can see is the white-coloured ‘bleached’ calcium carbonate skeleton. Unfortunately, the ocean temperature has been too warm for too long this year, and as the corals can’t survive in warm waters the Reefscapers project is currently not making any new frames.
- 12:00am – 14:00pm – Lunch break
- 14:00pm – 16:00pm – Guided Adventure Snorkel/ Dolphin Cruise
- 16:30pm – Collecting turtle food from the canteen, for the turtle feeding (and fish feeding, for the kids’ club).
After a presentation about the fish or turtles of the Maldives, we left the resort and went to a nearby reef to snorkel. If we encountered any turtles during the trip we would take photographs for the Turtle-ID project. Turtles have a unique pattern of scales (scutes) on their head, so we take identification photos to add to the national database (guests and fellow marine biologists from around the country are invited to send us their photos).
After a few weeks, I started to make the marine presentations myself and then lead the guests out on excursion. A colleague from the recreation team would check the ocean currents before giving the all clear for everyone to jump into the water.
The MDC also has lots of fish-breeding tanks, to breed two types of Anemonefish – the Clarks Clownfish and the Blackfoot Anemonefish (a species only seen around Maldives and Sri Lanka). The Fish Lab also produces algae to feed and grow rotifers, which are the main food of the Anemonefish larvae.
One day we went to a nearby uninhabited agricultural island, to collect some turtle hatchlings and release them out in the open water. Turtles have a lot of predators during their early years. The adult female turtles leave the water to crawl up the sandy beach, dig a hole and lay their ping-pong ball shaped eggs. When the little turtles hatch and try to find their way from the beach into the water, they have to face a huge predation risk – for example birds, fish, sharks or other animals that live in the shallow water.
Another great experience was the manta boat-trip. Annie, one of the Manta Trust marine biologists, invited me on a dhoni excursion (a traditional Maldivian boat) and for one whole day we searched for mantas in different sites around Baa Atoll. There are some feeding stations (places with a lot of plankton) and cleaning stations (where wrasses clean parasites from the mantas’ bodies). The manta season in the Maldives is from May to November, and during this time the Manta Trust go out every day to search for these huge, fantastic animals.
All in all I can say that my 6 weeks’ volunteering at the MDC was a great experience, I met a lot of nice and very friendly people and I learned a lot about turtles, fish species and corals in the beautiful tropical waters around the Maldives.
Auf Wiedersehen
Nicole
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