Coral reefs produce much of the food for coastal people all around the tropics. Unfortunately other human activities have damaged the reefs. In SE Asia the impacts of blast fishing have been severe. Around the world, coral reefs have drastically declined due to coastal development, increased water temperatures and storm frequency, global climate change, disease, [...]
TRACC and members of JCI Luyang went on a coral planting trip in Kota Kinabalu Bay. A disaster trip, we all learnt firsthand the pollution problems from plastic bags. We set off over a beautiful calm sea and after 20min of driving the boat motor just stops. A plastic bag has wrapped itself around the [...]
The dive volunteers on Pom Pom Island haven’t yet found a recent blasted reef although we have seen many pictures of fractured fragmented corals. The reefs that we are repairing are mostly coral rubble, originally acropora fragments which has been broken to pieces for 5 to 10 cm long. The amount of acropora rubble is [...]
One of the personal projects that vols on pom pom are given is to replant a small section of a reef as their own masterpiece. This is a 3 dimentional gardening challenge. The rules are simple – choose a barren part of the reef and make it beautiful. Size is not important but from the [...]
I thought Coral planting was a slow process, well for hard corals it is BUT for soft corals it is amazingly rapid. We have just learnt a technique for splitting coralimorphs ( mushroom corals) that is simple and non invasive. We went for a pleasure dive on a reef near another island. Cruised along the [...]
Snorkelling is no fun in the UK! I know it is a personal opinion but this is my blog post and I just died and arrived in heaven. We went snorkelling for 2h and nobody wanted to get out of the water. Floating over the blue looking down as massive schools of fish go about [...]
Coral planting using the non toxic cement mixture we use is very successful. However, we felt it could be improved by speeding up the process. Hazel and Manuel set up a series of experiments to see if we could keep the random rough looking blocks and yet make the planting process faster. A number of [...]
Coralimorphs are very aggressive soft corals, they spread quickly over the available substrate. They frequently out compete other reef organisms by simply growing over the top of them. On the reef, it is common to find corralimorph colonies that are completely dome shaped, they grew over and killed the original brain coral. This post [...]
The TRACC team of Volunteer divers went to Mabul to find reefs suitable for coral planting. Mabul is a mess above water with huge piles of decomposing litter on the shoreline and in every possible corner. Underwater the story was different – the reefs are overcrowded with divers but the coral is starting to regrow.
Two staff from IBM came to the Green connection to assist with marketing efforts. During their visit they went out to Mantanai to assist with the coral planting project. All planting was done on the beach in our blue trays. The finished blocks with the planted corals were placed on the reef by snorkelling.