How we start
FIRST STEPS
In March 2022 our team helped our Maldivian partner NGO "Save the Beach" to relocate more than 1500 coral colonies from a place, highly threatened by a big bridge building project. Those corals were used to restore a part of the Villingili (a local island next to the capital Malé) house reef.
In July 2022 our marine biologist Pablo flew over to Maldives again to cartograph the whole relocation side in Villingili, to tag and photograph every single colony and to start collecting necessary data.
With these data we will find out, what conditions each and every species need to develop mature eggs and get ready to spawn. Those data will form the basis for our future work, where we will mimic these conditions in labs in order to make corals spawn in a safe, close environment and to achieve a higher survival rate of juvenile corals than in the ocean.
In the next step we will grow them to a certain size, before planting them out into the reef.
In March 2023 Nicole our head of science was back in Villingili. The Malé bridge project is progressing and the corals relocated last year have grown very well.
Nicole has been working side by side with Sama, our new on-site team leader, photographing the frames for comparison with last year, cleaning labels and checking on the corals for spawning maturity.
Why we have to clean our coral farm...
Our dedicated volunteers work diligently to maintain and care for the coral farm. This includes regular cleaning of the coral frames and markers as they become overgrown with algae over time.
Cleaning the coral farm is important to maintain its health and functionality. It also ensures that the markings used for identification remain readable so that our team can accurately monitor the corals.
At the same time, we have entered the research phase. This means that Sama and Rua are collecting data to document the spawning behaviour of the different coral species.
This is crucial in order to be able to accurately determine their spawning times in the future.