St. Regis Vommuli
This month, we created 5 new coral frames of various sizes, kindly sponsored by guests, the resort, and online. We conducted 9 maintenance snorkels/dives, focusing on repairing our coral frames at the Whale Bar site. Our 6-monthly monitoring involves cleaning and repairing frames, and uploading new photographs to our website for our kind sponsors 🙏
To check the progress of your frame, please visit our dedicated St Regis monitoring page where we upload new photos every 6 months or so.
🪸 Coral Maintenance & Monitoring
Festive Season at the St Regis Maldives
In addition to supporting the festive season activities with the Kids Club, we hosted a coral-adoption experience during the Tree Lighting event. Guests built a coral frame in the shape of a Christmas tree, with 17 participants planting coral fragments while learning about the resort’s sustainability and reef-restoration programme.
With ocean currents changing directions with the monsoon season, and also increasing in intensity, some of our frames are vulnerable. To mitigate this, we are planning to relocate some small-sized frames to expand our coral frame path from the beach to the ‘Adopt a Coral’ sign. Other planned maintenance work includes the removal of macroalgae growing on our frames and lifting any frames that have become buried under sediment.
New recruits of table-forming corals have increased along the house reef, with more than 50 juveniles recorded at the Whale Bar site. This is a particularly encouraging sign following the severe loss of adult table corals during the 2024 mass-bleaching event.
To enhance guest experience upon arrival and bring further attention to the sustainable nature of the St Regis Vommuli, special frames that spell out ‘ST REGIS’ have been installed outside the guest viewing area of the arrival jetty.
Marine Education & Awareness
📱 Socials – A total of 10 posts were published this month, including Phebe’s “Meet the Team” and “Day in the Life” features. We also launched our festive-season “Fishmas” series, highlighting our work and the marine biodiversity of our island. These posts clocked up almost 60k views and 1.3k likes.
🤿 Marine Biology Excursions – Two Dolphin Cruises and one turtle quest excursion were attended, in addition to a scuba diving excursion, with a total of 16 guests participating. The most common megafauna sightings were blacktip reef sharks and eagle rays, along with whitetips and hawksbills.
Sheraton Full Moon
This month, we built 15 new coral frames (adding ~650 coral fragments to the reef), and ending the month by planting frame number SH887. We monitored (cleaned, repaired, photographed) an impressive total of 169 (up 20!) existing coral frames across all our sites, uploading the photos to our website for our kind sponsors. We actively replace any dead corals, adding a further total of ~1725 new fragments to our existing frames. We continue to spot any corallivorous species, removing 78 Drupella snails this month.
To see the progress of your own frame, please visit our dedicated Sheraton monitoring page where we upload new photos every 6 months or so.
🗓️ 2025 Highlights
– 158 new coral frames were built, adding ~7,100 coral fragments to the reef, plus ~15,800 fragments during maintenance work.
– 1,055 frames were monitored, with huge maintenance efforts at the water villas site following 2024’s global coral bleaching event.
– we relaunched our 6-month internship programme for marine graduates looking for experience in coral science. In October, we welcomed recent UK graduate, Harry, who proved to be a great addition to the team.
Coral Propagation Sites
Blue Hole & Water Villas – The Water Villas site has nearly completed repopulation however some maintenance was slowed down due to titan triggerfish nesting. Repopulation at the Blue Hole also started properly this month. We will continue to work on this site heavily in the new year as we work towards getting this site maintained.
Boat Garden – Frames at this site are showing great progress and we are very happy with their growth. We still encounter some sponge growth on frames however this was reduced throughout the year. We worked hard to get to this site more this month to catch up on monitoring.
Dive Centre & Eagle Ray Rock – Another line of coral frames was started on the left side of the pyramids towards Eagle Ray Rock. Frames on both sides of the pyramids were lifted and maintained. The frames at Eagle Ray Rock are also growing at a fast rate. Similar to the Boat Garden, this site used to have much more red sponge however this has also reduced which we noticed this month. We will try plant more frames here in the new year.
Gilis – This site has progressed greatly this year, the corals are growing very well here as usual. With the help from FS Kuda Huraa we have got new frame tags for this site. This will streamline our monitoring process in the future. We had to rearrange this site once this year due to strong weather conditions which flipped many frames.
Coral Spawning
Full Moon (4 December): We conducted night diving sessions around this period, to look for evidence of coral spawning at the Dive Centre. We successfully recorded spawning in 58 colonies representing a variety of Acropora species.
New Moon (20 December): While night diving at the Dive Centre, we soon became confident that all the gravid coral colonies with eggs had already completed their spawning over earlier Full Moon period.
Marine Education & Awareness Activities
♻️ EcoSort Challenge – 3 challenges were carried out this month, averaging 30 minutes duration.
👨👩👧👦 Kids Club – we hosted 26 children for our Kids’ Club marine activities during the festive period. On 23 December, we hosted a hugely popular “Marine Life Ornament” crafting session, enjoyed by 35 guests young and old, who painted their own wooden marine animal to take home. [Many thanks to our colleagues in Engineering who carved out these ornaments!]
📱 Instagram – this month we shared 7 posts, 14 reels, and 20 stories. Our St Regis internship post was our top performer, totalling 17,000+ views.
Marine Life
🤿 Snorkelling Excursions – a total of 11 snorkelling safaris were joined this month, along with 40 guest snorkels and six associate snorkels.
🐬 Dolphin Cruises – 8 dolphin cruises were attended this month, and we successfully sighted Spinner dolphins on all trips.
🎙️ Marine Talks – A total of 35 guests attended marine talks this month over 7 sessions, averaging 43 minutes. On 30 December, we hosted a new “Our Pledge to the Ocean” activity, encouraging guests to write their personal pledge to the ocean as we enter 2026. Overall, our festive activities were successful and we received great feedback from the guests.
