St. Regis Vommuli
This month, we created 3 new coral frames of various sizes, kindly sponsored by guests, the resort, and online. A total of 25 coral frames were checked as part of our 6-monthly monitoring, involving cleaning and repairing, and uploading new photographs to our website for our kind sponsors 🙏.
In total, we conducted 6 maintenance snorkels/dives, and inspected all of our coral frames around Vommuli island.
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.
🪸 Dive Centre and Whale Bar Sites – In preparation for the renovation works, we have relocated more than 100 of our Reefscapers coral frames to the refuge Whale Bar area. Sedimentation levels have increased, so we focused efforts on unburying some frames to ensure proper water flow and light availability for the corals. Unfortunately, construction activities also directly damaged some of the frames. Combined with last year’s mass bleaching event, this month’s mechanical damage has resulted in significant losses to these shallow reef zones. This is a major setback for both the natural reef resilience and our coral restoration efforts in the area.
🤿 Marine Biology Excursions – In July, one Dolphin Cruise and one Turtle Quest excursion were attended, with a total of 10 guests participating. Megafauna sightings were recorded during routine maintenance visits across various sites around the island, but numbers were reduced due to the ongoing renovation works. Sightings this month included eagle rays, blacktip reef sharks, and whitetip reef sharks.
🎙️ Marine Talks – Two evening talk sessions were held, with four guests participating. At the Kids Club, two sessions were conducted, featuring “Shark Yoga” and “Whales and Dolphins Yoga,” with a total of four children attending.
📱 Socials – One video was created for the resort’s Sales and Marketing Department. An interview was also conducted for Porthole Cruise Magazine, which is available online.
Sheraton Full Moon
This month, we built 10 new coral frames (adding ~425 coral fragments to the reef), plus we also monitored (cleaned, repaired, photographed) a total of 59 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 ~1300 new fragments to our existing 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
Scuba dives continued this month at our Dive Centre site to perform maintenance. Unfortunately, our rope nursery broke, so we rescued the healthy corals from the sand and raised the structure again. We are currently relocating the coral on the rope nursery to another nearby structure.
Many frames at our Water Villas site were repopulated this month. The older repopulated frames are showing good rates of attachment and growth. We are delighted to see this site starting to get back to where it was prior the coral bleaching in 2024. We also continue to re-tag frames which are missing frame numbers.
Six scuba dives were carried out at our Boat Garden site this month. Frames were lifted out of the sand and repopulated if necessary. Across all sites, we always look out for and remove any coral-predators that we spot, that includes around 40 Drupella snails this month.
Marine Life
🤿 Snorkelling Excursions – this month, we joined 6 Snorkelling Safaris plus 1 Reef Snorkelling trip. We recorded 67 megafauna sightings, mainly blacktip reef sharks and spinner dolphins. Excitingly, we had reports of manta ray sightings around the island, plus increased turtle sightings at the dive centre around our coral frames and pyramids. Additionally, we spotted a pod of 16 dolphins right here in the Sheraton lagoon!
🐬 Dolphin Cruises – this month, we recorded sightings of pods of Spinner dolphins on all six of the dolphin cruises were attended in July.
🎙️ Marine Talks – A total of 68 guests attended marine talks this month over 12 talks, representing a large increase in participation over last month. A special talk was conducted on Shark Awareness Day at Anchorage, followed by a shark-themed trivia night. Starting in July, we have reduced our talks from five to four times a week to accommodate the resorts new activity calendar. However, we have combined our Sea Turtles and Tropical Fish talk together so we are still presenting the same amount of information for guests.
Marine Education & Awareness Activities
♻️ EcoSort Challenge – Four challenges this month, for a total of 6 guests.
👨👩👧👦 Kids Club – We hosted four Marine Field trips for kids club, attended by 19 people in total, averaging 33 minutes.
📱 Social Media – Content shared during July included 1 post, 4 stories and 1 reel. The post with the greatest reach was one of our job vacancies, with 31k views.
👋 Team Updates – After saying a fond farewell to Katie last month, who left to work with our Reefscapers colleagues at Four Seasons Kuda Huraa, we are delighted to welcome our new Assistant Marine Biologist this month, Cailin. Thank you to everyone at Reefscapers and Sheraton for welcoming her over the last three weeks; she is a great addition to the team and we look forward to sharing many marine adventures together!
