April 2022: Field Report

April's schedule was a dense one: plant corals, stabilize coral rubble, sleep, eat, and repeat.

Our team planted 600+ corals in less than 10 days, and worked hard to extended our 'coral rubble stabilization' project called 'Developmentasi'. Hereby, 400 corals were attached onto a rubble stabilization device. This extension builds on the success of our pilot project launched in June 2021, and now covers almost 200 square meters of a shallow reef area. Coral cover here is now up to 70-80% from less than 1%, thanks to our planting & stabilization efforts! Check out this video for a sneak-peak:

A quick swim through Project Developmentasi, main section, in April 2022.

After Developmentasi, we continued work at our other restoration sites and planted coral fragments from 7 hard coral species at Karang Nibong & Batu Kucing Reef. It was a smooth process: dive to harvest the coral fragments from our nurseries, jump on the boat and plant half of the fragments at Batu Kucing, get back on the boat, drive over to Karang Nibong, and plant the other half. Et voila!!!

Team Coralku in action! Coral planting is hard work under challenging conditions.

But since coral conservation & restoration is not just planting corals, we did the 'dirty work' too! We removed 4 old mooring lines that collapsed and entangled onto the corals reef, as well as 12 discarded fishing nets (a.k.a Ghost Nets), which were found entangled on various coral reef sites around Pulau Lang Tengah.

A medium-sized fishing net after being removed by Coralku divers from the coral reefs.

Lastly, our team finished setting up new coral frames, some of which will serve as the base for our upcoming search for Malaysia's Super Corals. Now we are anxiously preparing for the warm season and hope that no marine heatwaves will occur - all eyes on our real time temperature loggers!