Education & Awareness

Marine conservation for children as part of our Junior Marine Savers activities

Our 6 students from the Four Seasons Apprenticeship program have successfully completed their placement with us, amounting to a total of 60 hours of lectures and practical work covering our marine conservation programs. This culminated during December with the second semester exam and final presentations.

The students were assigned a selection of scientific articles to review, prior to presenting their findings to our panel. Their articles were focused on studies made in the Maldives on areas such as sea turtle by-catch, manta ray seasonal distribution, coral reef restoration, reef fish and shark conservation. All the students did a great job in answering all the tricky questions posed by our panel of marine experts!

In December, we were pleased to welcome students on their annual visit from Flinders University (Adelaide, South Australia). The 22 students spent an afternoon with Marine Savers at Landaa Giraavaru, learning about marine conservation and our post-graduate internship program. Professor Karen Burke Da Silva has been following our clownfish breeding program for several years; she is Director of the ‘Saving Nemo’ program in Australia, and we welcome her advice and support for our own clownfish hatchery.

REEFSCAPERS Coral Propagation Program

At Kuda Huraa, the Reefscapers coral propagation program experienced both highs and lows throughout 2019. Prior to April, the program was meeting its sustainability goal, with most coral fragments being successfully harvested directly from our frames (rather than the natural reef). Then in April, the seasonally elevated ocean temperatures combined with problems of sedimentation and disease proceeded to wipe out 60-70% of the corals at every site (except for the House Reef).

Following this bleaching event, the rest of the year has largely been spent recycling, remapping, cleaning, and re-transplanting frames.

• The Water Villas site is now completely re-transplanted and monitored.
• The Starfish is 70% complete and the Channel is 60% complete.
• The House Reef has been re-transplanted but requires monitoring.
• The Channel remains the most challenging site; many of the frames are buried or missing tags, with sedimentation and algae accumulation impacting our efforts to restore the frames there.
• Metal wire is now the preferred method to attach the frame ID tags.
• Polyester resin was found to be better than epoxy resin for recoating frames with sand.

ICRS 2020 is the primary international conference on coral reef science, conservation and management, bringing together leading scientists, early career researchers, conservationists, ocean experts, policy makers, managers and the public.

This symposium will be the key event to develop science-based solutions addressing the present and future challenges of coral reefs. The five-day program will present the latest scientific findings and ideas, and provide a platform to build the essential bridges between coral reef science, conservation, politics, management and the public.

We hope to attend the symposium with our submissions “Using deep-learning models to monitor coral colonies on a large scale”, and “Scaling up: what lessons can we learn across larger scales for understanding coral reefs?”

• Louise Sabadel (January to April) conducted photo-analysis on our coral frame database, to compare two methods for protecting corals against bleaching events: (1) providing shade, and (2) relocating to greater depths. Louise showed that both these techniques can be effective in providing greater resilience to future bleaching events.
• Olivia Beatty (June to August) studied the effects that fragment size has on coral health, with a practical experiment using 6 coral frames. Subsequent analysis revealed a statistically significant difference, and Olivia was able to conclude that larger fragments have more resilience to negative environmental factors. Follow-up studies are required, to increase the sample size and include extra species.
• Iris Van Djik (October to January 2020) worked on a coral sexual-reproduction pilot study, looking at spawning in an aquarium environment. Coral planulae were observed to successfully settle on substrate, and primary polyps started feeding on rotifers after 7 days, followed by some budding.

Work is continuing on our autonomous reef-monitoring catamaran. In order to diversify the AI training photographs, we have been providing the AI software model with new monitoring sets from different environmental conditions. The current version of the artificial neural network is now trained on 605 monitoring pictures, a total of 9,442 individual fragments. To obtain these results, we had to train the model for more than 3 million seconds… which equates to approximately 35 days!

We are also developing a deep-learning AI method (similar to fragment detection) to recognise the bars on our frames, which will be essential in visually complex environments, for instance when the ground is covered with rubble.

Sea Turtle Conservation

At Kuda Huraa, we are closing the year with 6 Green turtles (Chelonia mydas) and 6 Hawksbills (Eretmochelys imbricata) in our hatchling rehabilitation program (see the corkboard, below).

• During 2018, we received 3 full clutches of turtle eggs and several single hatchlings.
• During 2019, we had fewer hatchling admissions, and fewer nests were reported to us. This could be related to nesting behaviours, as sea turtles nest every 2-3 years (with 1 to 9 clutches per season). The mortality with our hatchlings was higher this year, as we now only accept sick hatchlings into the program.

A third overseas aquarium has shown interest in adopting one of our unreleasable sea turtles, as part of our ‘Flying Turtle’ program, and we are preparing the preliminary documentation. The process for rehoming a sea turtle is a long administrative process, filling in official forms and seeking approval from various governmental agencies.

Currently, we are awaiting approval from the Maldives Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to send blood samples overseas for analysis. We hope to be able to send two of our turtles overseas later this year.

Olive Ridley turtle ‘Luchi‘ rescued from ghost netting (January 2020)

At the end of December, we have 7 Olive Ridley turtles (Lepidochelys olivacea) plus 1 Hawksbill (Eretmochelys imbricata) in our care at Kuda Huraa (see the corkboard, below). Throughout 2019, we recorded a total of 42 turtle strandings.

• 3 turtles were released immediately, after being freed from ghost nets;
• 6 turtles were found dead, entangled in ghost netting and marine debris;
• 33 turtles arrived at our Centre for rehabilitation, many suffering from buoyancy syndrome, with lacerations and amputated flippers.

At Landaa Giraavaru, we admitted 21 sea turtles to our Rehabilitation Centre in 2019, with 6 successful releases, 6 mortalities and 6 transfers (to either Kuda Huraa or the Olive Ridley Project).

We currently have 8 sea turtles in our care (see the corkboard, below), following the successful release of Nadia on 28 December.

In early 2020, we hope to employ a marine veterinarian (vacancies), to perform emergency surgical procedures and expand our facilities.

Turtle photographs are kindly sent to us from members of the public, fellow marine biologists and dive centres stationed at other resorts around the Maldives. Submissions consist of close-up photographs of the turtle facial profile, enabling us to outline the unique pattern of scales (scutes) that act like a human fingerprint.

During December, we received a total of 46 sets of photo submissions (THANK YOU!)

Our national turtle ID database of uniquely identified individuals now stands at: 1207 Hawksbills, 210 Greens and 56 Olive Ridleys.

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