St. Regis Vommuli
This month, we created 3 new coral frames of various sizes, kindly sponsored by guests, the resort, and online. We conducted 13 maintenance snorkels/dives, focusing on repairing our coral frames at the Adopt-A-Coral 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
During the coral adoption activity with guests, we provided a snorkelling guided tour to the coral frames for the guests to visit and learn more about our restoration programme. At the beginning of the month, 23 small coral frames were relocated from the Whale Bar site to our Adopt-A-Coral site. This was done to expand the coral path at AAC, as well as to reduce the number of coral frames at the Whale Bar site during the coral bleaching alert period in the coming months.
We installed a new buoy at the AAC site to help guests easily locate our restoration site. Frame maintenance requirements were generally minor throughout the month, although macroalgae cover increased slightly. With the coral frame path almost complete, it is expected that the location of all frames at the AAC site will be remapped next month.
Wild colonies of table coral species continue to increase on the house reef at the AAC site. More than 40 new recruits have been recorded in this area, contributing to the natural recovery of sections of reef that were damaged during the 2024 coral bleaching event that hit Maldives corals and reefs worldwide.
Marine Education & Awareness
📱 Socials – Phebe, our intern, created one reel and a marine awareness session for the UK media this month.
🤿 Marine Biology Excursions – In January, one Dolphin Cruise and one turtle quest were attended, with a total of 12 guests participating. Octopuses continue to be found in the Whale Bar site, and the most common megafauna sightings included blacktip reef sharks and eagle rays. We added two new turtles to our island ID database, and held a meeting with our wider Reefscapers team to standardise the dolphin cruise data collection.
This month, we conducted coral awareness sessions with the Kids Club, with a total of 16 children participating. Together, we built a coral frame, and the children learned about different coral species found in the Maldives, their ecological importance, and the impacts of coral bleaching.
Sheraton Full Moon
This month, we built 7 new coral frames (adding ~300 coral fragments to the reef), kindly sponsored by guests and the resort, and we ended the month by planting frame number SH894. We monitored (cleaned, repaired, photographed) a total of 92 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 ~1500 new fragments to our existing frames. We continue to spot any corallivorous species, removing 6 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.
Coral Propagation Sites
Water Villas and Blue Hole – frames are showing great progress since repopulation. We have started repopulating the Blue Hole, cleaning and retagging frames, and performing some heavy maintenance. There is a lot of work which will continue for much of the year. We have moved some frames that were vulnerable to the seasonally shifting sands.
Boat Garden – six scuba monitoring dives were completed here. Many frames originally planted with Acropora muricata have died or are not growing well, so we are not repopulating using this species at this site.
Marine Education & Awareness Activities
♻️ EcoSort Challenge – 4 challenges were carried out this month, enjoyed by a total of 30 guests, averaging 34 minutes duration.
👨👩👧👦 Kids Club – we hosted four Marine Field Trips for kids’ club, averaging 18 minutes, for a total of ten guests. We are very close to launching our new Junior Marine Biologist activity which has already had great feedback from Marriott resort management.
📱 Instagram – our combined team shared: 8 posts, 10 reels, 16 stories. Engagement and reach were up 55-66% on last month, with our top-performer being the Sheraton internship ad, receiving 62k views.
Marine Life
🤿 Snorkelling Excursions – a total of 12 snorkelling safari excursions were joined this month, along with 40 guest snorkels and six associate snorkels. We also conducted an additional three guided private guest snorkels on request of the dive centre. We recorded 179 megafauna sightings, mostly blacktip reef sharks, spinner dolphins, and mobula rays.
🐬 Dolphin Cruises – 7 dolphin cruises were attended this month, and we successfully sighted Spinner dolphins on all trips, along with 1 exciting encounter with a small pod of pilot whales.
🎙️ Marine Talks – A total of 40 guests attended marine talks this month over 9 sessions, averaging 44 minutes. We hosted an extra talk for ‘Penguin Awareness Day’ which went down very well with the kids.
