St. Regis Vommuli
This month, we created 13 new coral frames of various sizes, kindly sponsored by guests, the resort, and online. A total of 16 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 10 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.
🪸 Maintenance & Monitoring
This month, we’ve reached an important milestone: our 300th coral frame! This particular frame was built for a UK media event, where, in addition to having the coral adoption experience, we also did a snorkelling trip visit for the guests to the Adopt-a-Coral restoration site.
Another milestone: we have started to harvest coral fragments from our coral frames for the very first time! Our oldest frames are now almost three years old, so we have started collecting fragments from these mature coral colonies. This marks an important step forward, as it allows us to source coral fragments more easily while also providing stronger, more resilient colonies to continue our restoration efforts.
We have been busy relocating a total of 21 coral frames from the east side of the Whale Bar site, to avoid possible sediment plumes from the planned coastal protection work. Protective buoys have been fixed to demarcate our coral restoration areas.
🤿 Marine Biology Excursions – we attended a Dolphin Cruise and a Turtle excursion, enjoyed by 11 guests. Megafauna sightings included eagle rays, hawksbill turtles, whitetip reef sharks and blacktip reef sharks. Interestingly, we have recently started spotting octopuses at our coral restoration sites.
📱 Socials – Two reels were created and posted this month for the Reefscapers social media with so far 53.5K views.
Sheraton Full Moon
This month, we built 22 new coral frames (adding ~900 coral fragments to the reef), and ending the month by planting frame number SH844. We monitored (cleaned, repaired, photographed) a total of 102 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 ~1200 new fragments to our existing frames. We continue to spot any corallivorous species, removing 76 Drupella snails and one cushion star 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.
Coral Propagation Sites
At our Dive Centre site, we have created a seventh line of coral frames to the left side of the pyramids. Many scuba dives were conducted for coral frame monitoring and pyramid maintenance. We also marked International Coastal Cleanup Day on 20 September with a scuba cleanup. We have been continuing our observations on the coral relocated in February – they are healthy, showing good rates of attachment and growth.
We have completed our frame re-tagging at the Blue Hole site, and relocated some frames further inside the hole to avoid shifting sands on the seabed. Frames in the first line at the Water Villas site (established before 2024’s bleaching event) take a lot of time to clean and maintain.
Marine Life
🤿 Snorkelling Excursions – Six snorkelling excursions were joined this month, comprising five Snorkelling Safaris and one Reef Snorkel. We also hosted five FAM trips who all planted coral frames, and some had guided snorkelling to the coral restoration site. Two additional guided guest snorkels were carried out on request at the Dive Centre.
Megafauna sightings included blacktip reef sharks, spotted eagle rays, and bottlenose dolphins.
🐬 Dolphin Cruises – Eight dolphin cruises were attended during September, and we successfully sighted Spinner dolphins on every cruise.
🎙️ Marine Talks – we held talks for 6 audiences this month, followed by interesting and engaging Q&As.
Marine Education & Awareness Activities
♻️ EcoSort Challenge – Four challenges were carried out this month.
👨👩👧👦 Kids Club – We hosted four Marine Field trips for kids’ club, for a total of 6 people, each averaging around 30 minutes duration.
📱 Social Media – during September we shared 3 posts, 23 stories, and 6 reels. Our top performer with 19k views featured our latest scientific research publication.
🧹 Housekeeping Week was marked on 17 September with our resort colleagues by planting 82 corals! We were delighted to work with the whole housekeeping team (photo below), who were interested to learn about our coral project and help expand our coral garden.
🪸 Lysterra Annual Company Meeting
We hosted Lysterra on their Annual Company Meeting on 25 September. This was a full-day event attended by 124 people, featuring Reefscapers coral restoration activities. We kicked things off with an educational presentation about coral reefs, followed by a hands-on coral transplanting session for everyone, and a guided snorkel to our Dive Centre coral site.
Overall, we planted 12 new coral frames planted, adding ~500 coral fragments to the reef. A big THANK YOU to the combined teamwork and support from all our resort colleagues. We were also ably assisted by Reefscapers directors, Thomas and Marie, along with Kuda Huraa interns, Sydney and James. Thank you everyone for all your help in organising and implementing this fun event!
