Be sure to read our monthly updates from Marine Savers – direct from our resident teams at
the Marine Discovery Centres at Landaa & Kuda Huraa – our long-term partnership with Four Seasons Resorts Maldives.
Landaa Giraavaru
At Landaa this month, we transplanted an amazing 64 new coral frames, sited around Voavah (37 large guest frames) Landaa itself (27 frames). Landaa’s frames were kindly sponsored by guests (5), the Resort (19), and online (3), adding ~1300 new coral fragments to the reef. New guest frames were outplanted mainly at our “Coral Trail” site for guest snorkelling. We also monitored (cleaned, repaired, photographed) ~137 coral frames, mainly at the House Reef Dive Site and Al Barakat Deep Site.
The removal of corallivores from our House Reef site is ongoing, with 10 cushion stars and 66 drupella snails removed this month. The rate of reproduction seems to have increased with the seasonally warmer waters, so manual removal of these species is essential to protect Landaa’s Reef. We will be keeping the snail shells to use as coral settlement plugs during the April spawning season, as coral recruits loved them when we used them during the November spawning cycling.
To see the progress of your own frame, please visit our dedicated Four Seasons monitoring page where we upload new photos every 6 months or so.
Bissie’s Reef Project
This year, two more large frames were added to Bissie’s Reef, making a patch of 57 frames located at 8m in the Deep Blu Beach area dedicated to Bissie. Together with our James Cook University interns, we started a maintenance project on the existing frames – lifting them from the shifting sands and using rubble substrate to reduce the rate of sinking.
Some maintenance was required to replace dead and missing corals, but most frames are healthy and growing well, adding significant biodiversity to the area (2 photos, below). After a short training period, our interns were able to perform much of the work themselves, with our coral biologists occasionally joining them to check on progress and provide mentoring. Healthy mature coral colonies were minimally fragmented and added to the same frame so the colonies will eventually join together as they grow around the frame.
Coral Spawning
During the February New Moon period, we observed the bundling of gametes in a species of Acropora on the House Reef. The occurrence of coral’s natural spawning cycles gives hope for the future generations of corals, increased coral growth and resilience against climate change and coral bleaching.
Staff Reef & Education
This month, we started the Staff Reef Garden located underneath the Wedding Pavilion on Staff Beach. This project was initiated to give staff members a beautiful reef to snorkel around and to get them involved in making the coral frames. On 2 February, we held a Build-A-Reef session, populating the frame with Acropora aspera fragments from a wild patch near the water villas. We used this species because the environmental conditions are very harsh for coral growth in the outplanted area; therefore, using fragments of A. aspera from an area with similar environmental conditions will increase the survival rate.
We were joined by around 15 members of staff for the frame building, along with a Marine Talk where staff members were educated on the importance of coral reefs and reef restoration projects. Our team members and Resort colleagues then outplanted the frame to the Wedding Pavilion. The event was a huge success, with the next frame already planned to be added to the reef garden in the next month. Once the coral fragments start growing successfully and start populating the area, we will add some giant clams and Clark’s Anemone fish from our seapond and Fish Lab to increase the biodiversity of the Staff Reef Garden.
Four Seasons love the new Staff Reef Garden Project and will be sponsoring more frames to add to the reef, along with more Build-A-Reef sessions in future. This will allow every staff member to contribute to making one of the frames and be a part of our Reefscapers reef restoration project, aiming to populate Staff Beach and increase the biodiversity of the area.
Kuda Huraa
At Kuda Huraa this month, our coral experts transplanted 5 new frames, and monitored and repopulated 130 growing coral frames.
To see the progress of your frame, please visit our dedicated Four Seasons monitoring page where we upload new photos every 6 months or so.
Reef Maintenance
This month, we completed maintenance and monitoring across all four restoration sites around Kuda Huraa. As calm weather conditions continued, much of our effort focused on the House Reef, where we enjoyed the improved in-water visibility and made significant maintenance progress across multiple sites.
House Reef Pyramids – we completed the maintenance tasks started last month, tagging, up-dating monitoring photographs, and accurately mapping. The site currently comprises three large pyramids and just under 50 coral frames. Overall, the site is performing well, although some frames have a tendency to become buried in drifting sands, so we need to perform regular maintenance dives at this site to lift and affected frames.
Shallow House Reef – consists largely of dead and damaged Resort frames, which we have started clearing and moving to the frame collection point for recycling. To date, over 25 frames have been cleared and relocated. We have also started work to complete retagging, remapping, rearranging, and monitoring of all guest frames at the site.
Deep House Reef – we have started repopulating and retagging coral frames, as well as rearranging, remapping, and monitoring. There are over 50 active frames at this site, and we have made great headway. The coral at this site continues to be threatened by sponges, so it is likely that the greater depth provides more favourable conditions than our shallower sites. We will monitor the progression of the sponge and take regular photos to assess growth.
Reef Crest – towards the end of the month we began maintenance and monitoring. This is a large site with substantial work required, including clearing and repopulating many dead frames from the 2024 mass bleaching event. We will continue work at this site over the coming months.
Deep Anemone Rock – we completed maintenance, remapping and monitoring on all 23 frames, repopulating any that had become infected with corallivorous sponge (newly arrived at this site). Overall, the coral is in good condition, with several beautiful frames showing no signs of sponge impact. We will continue to monitor for sponge proliferation.
Blue Hole and Water Villas – we continued monitoring frames here. With sea temperatures typically beginning to rise in March, and bleaching season potentially approaching, we will ensure regular visits to these shallow sites.
Channel – frames at the northern end populated with Pocillopora damicornis and P. verrucosa are doing well, whereas frames of Porites cylindrica, mainly at the southern end, continue to be affected by sedimentation and algal overgrowth. Since repopulation and monitoring six months ago, many fragments have died and needed replacing, despite Porites cylindrica naturally occurring at this site and being a species thought to be more tolerant of sediment. Compared to Acropora and Pocillopora, Porites cylindrica is slower growing and performs better at this site.
Coral Predators
During February, two dedicated cull dives were conducted to target coral predators, in addition to our opportunistic collections during routine monitoring and maintenance activities across multiple restoration sites around the island. A total of 486 corallivores were collected during this month alone, including crown-of-thorns starfish (2) and cushion starfish (2). Predatory gastropods were observed in considerably higher numbers, with hundreds of individuals collected in total (475 Drupella species, along with several Coralliophila species) – see photo, above, with snails highlighted as they are tricky to spot!
Coral Reproduction Programme
We carried out gamete checks at the end of February in preparation for the spawning season, which is expected to begin in early March. Following our dedicated gamete-checking dives and routine coral fragmentation tasks, we identified gametes in nine species of Acropora (mainly white immature eggs, see photos below). We will continue checking corals for the presence and development of gametes over the coming weeks to help provide insight into what we may expect in the upcoming spawning season.
