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 19 new coral frames, kindly sponsored by guests (9) and the Resort (10), adding ~+1000 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) ~350 coral frames, mainly at the House Reef.
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.
Small Wins For Corals
A huge milestone for coral frames around the Voavah Private Island this month, as we reached 100 large frames around the property. This is a huge achievement that will increase the biodiversity tremendously on Voavah’s Reef.
The coral trail patch is becoming more populated with reef fish as we continue adding more frames to this area. This site is frequently visited by snorkelling guests, so it is great to see fish returning to the area following the addition of new frames!
Kuda Huraa
At Kuda Huraa this month, our coral experts transplanted 3 new frames, and monitored and repopulated 84 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 at all four of our restoration sites, with monitoring conducted at each location with emphasis on the House Reef and Blue Hole reef restoration sites. To welcome in the New Year, we built a medium-sized coral frame with the Kids Club, and recycled another frame for the Junior Marine Savers.
Maw’s Rock Maintenance – This site is now completely repopulated, monitored, tagged, and correctly mapped – a great team effort! We have arranged the frames into lines, which will improve the efficiency of future monitoring and spawning checks, with 115+ active frames at this site. Although sponge and algae growth remains an ongoing challenge, the site is looking promising, and we’re hopeful that the newly established fragments will thrive. We will continue diving regularly at this site to clean frames and manage sponge and algae outbreaks..
Pyramid Frames – Building on from last month’s efforts, we continued lifting, maintaining and monitoring the frames at the Pyramid site. This site attracts a diversity of marine life with a large school of batfish choosing to call this restoration site home! Next month, we’ll continue progressing the Pyramid site and expand our efforts to the Deep House Reef and Reef Crest.
Blue Hole – we conducted maintenance and monitoring tasks for many of the frames at this site, with some impressive coral growth in the past 6 months. The Blue Hole remains an exceptional nursery for Acropora corals due to the strong water flow and shallow depth, promoting efficient photosynthesis, nutrient uptake and feeding, creating ideal conditions for rapid growth.
Coral Predators
During January, our coral predator monitoring and removal efforts resulted in the collection of 74 corallivorous organisms. These included 69 predatory gastropods and five predatory starfish recorded from multiple sites around the island. The gastropod assemblage was dominated by Drupella spp. (59 individuals), with additional records of three Drupella cornus, three Coralliophila erosa, and four Coralliophila costularis, indicating a continued but comparatively lower level of predation-pressure on restored corals during the month.
Starfish removals comprised of two Acanthaster planci (crown-of-thorns starfish) collected from the House Reef and Channel sites, as well as three cushion stars (Culcita spp.) from three different sites, at depths ranging from 4 to 19 m. Interestingly, one crown-of-thorns starfish observed at the House Reef was partially predated upon by a fish, suggesting the presence of natural biological controls in action contributing to population regulation.
Coral Spawning
Across both the January full-moon and new-moon periods, we clocked up 8hrs of coral spawning monitoring. Our team completed 8 night-dives, with spawning recorded in 26 coral colonies of a single species of Acropora species over five different nights. Some colonies were seen to split-spawn over two nights. No pigmented eggs were found before the new moon period, and predictably no spawning was observed.
