St. Regis Vommuli
This month, Hazel, our resident coral biologist, has been on her well-deserved annual vacation … See you next month !
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.
Sheraton Full Moon
This month, we built 11 new coral frames (adding ~410 coral fragments to Dive Centre site), plus we also monitored (cleaned, repaired, photographed) a total of 58 existing coral frames across all our sites, uploading the photos to our website for our kind sponsors. We continue to remove any corallivorous Drupella snails we encounter, and have been actively replacing dead corals, adding a total of ~850 new fragments to our old recycled frames.
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.
Coral Propagation Sites
We had many guests very interested in our Adopt-a-Coral project, with frame sales generated from excursions, marine talks and the resort website promotion. Next month, we plan to revamp the activity and improve the overall guest experience.
- Boat Garden – The older frames at this site are growing well, but our newer frames need extra maintenance to clear algal buildup on the corals and some sand accretion affecting the lower bars. The fragmented Acropora muricata from the dive centre pyramids is less healthy overall than fragments of Pocillopora verrucosa and A. tenuis.
- Dive Centre – Six scuba dives were completed this month to carry out maintenance here, with most relocated corals attached to our pyramid structures. We have encountered some issues with aggressive, territorial titan triggerfish at this site (noraql behaviour when nesting) which has slowed things down, but these new colonies are adapting very well.
- Gili’s – After some bad weather, we had five frames at this site flip from their original location. We moved the frames back and they were cleaned up as needed. Overall, the frames here continue to do very well.
Research: Coral Spawning in the Maldives
During March, we conducted night dive surveys around the periods of both the Full Moon and New Moon, looking for signs of coral spawning. Despite diving across 11 different nights at our Dive Centre site, we did not observe any signs of spawning this month.
Marine Life
🤿 Snorkelling Excursions – Ten ‘Snorkelling Safari’ excursions were joined this month. A total of 188 megafauna sightings were mainly dolphins and blacktip reef sharks.
🐬 Dolphin Cruises – Four dolphin cruises were attended, sighting mainly spinners plus one pod of bottlenose dolphins.
🎙️ Marine Talks – We conducted 18 talks, averaging 41 minutes duration, and attended by a total of 127 guest seats.
Marine Education & Awareness Activities
♻️ EcoSort Challenge – a total of 4 sessions were held, enjoyed by 21 guests over the month. Our new signage has also attracted more people to stop by and engage with our activity.
👨👩👧👦 Kids Club Field Trip – March was another busy month at the resort, with many kids in-house. We held 4 marine field trips, attended by 30 enthusiastic children, each lasting 39 minutes on average.
📺 Promotion – we hosted 5 FAM trips, and attended 2 management cocktail events. Our resort colleagues hosted the Marriott Area Team for Asia Pacific excluding China (APEC). We had the privilege to speak with Mr Neeraj Govil, Chief Operations Officer, who planted a coral frame with us last year. I informed him of our coral restoration project’s progress, along with updates of his coral frame.
📱 Social Media – on Instagram (and Facebook) we helped with 7 posts, 13 stories, and 8 reels. Top-performing posts reached 27k people, with overall reach up by 30% to 77k accounts.
