Marriott Team Diaries: February 2026

St. Regis Vommuli

This month, we created 6 new coral frames of various sizes, kindly sponsored by guests, the resort, and online. We also conducted 13 maintenance snorkels/dives and monitored a total of 63 existing frames – our twice-yearly 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.

This month, we celebrated the third anniversary of the Reefscapers and St Regis coral restoration programme. So far, we have installed 337 coral frames, adding more than 16,000 coral fragments to the reefs around the island. We are proud to mark this milestone alongside a healthy and thriving reef, which we hope will continue to build resilience to the rising global ocean temperatures.

🪸 Coral Maintenance & Monitoring

Maintenance activities were mainly focused on our Adopt-A-Coral site. Macroalgae coverage was low at the beginning of the month and had disappeared by the second week. By the end of the month, we started to remap our coral frames.

The hottest months of the year are approaching, so we have started our coral bleaching monitoring by selecting a total of 10 colonies from six different Acropora species within the coral frames at the AAC site. These colonies were chosen to represent different depths and conditions across the restoration area, allowing for consistent tracking of any visible signs of stress, paling, or bleaching in the coming weeks.

In addition to the new table coral recruits recorded at the Whale Bar site, there has also been an increase in small recruits of Pocillopora sp. in the surrounding area of the large overwater villas (previously known as the JJA house reef). These new settlements indicate ongoing natural recovery processes across different sections of the house reef and suggest favourable local conditions for coral recruitment and early colony survival.

Marine Education & Awareness

📱 Socials – With our new partnership with the Mermaids Club, we created photo and video materials featuring the coral frames they sponsored. We also shared a collaborative reel on Instagram in partnership with their account. We also did one post and two reels this month for the Reefscapers social media reaching so far in total more than 10K views.

🤿 Marine Biology Excursions – during February, we attended two Dolphin Cruises with a total of 8 guests participating. Octopuses continue to be found in the Whale Bar site, while the most common megafauna sightings included blacktip reef shark and eagle rays.

At the beginning of the month, we started sighting white terns around the island across different areas of the resort. On several occasions, individuals were seen actively feeding near the AAC coral restoration site, suggesting that the surrounding reef areas continue to support small fish and other prey species.

White terns have previously been sighted nesting on nearby sandbanks close to Vommuli Island, indicating that the island and its surrounding habitats may serve as an important resting and foraging area for this species. Continued observations will help better understand their seasonal presence and behaviour around the resort.