April 2022 Fieldwork Update

April's agenda was dense: plant corals, stabilize coral rubble, sleep, repeat.

Our team not only planted 600+ corals within 10 days, but also extended our 'coral rubble stabilization' project called 'Developmentasi'. Hereby, 400 corals were fixed onto a rubble stabilization device. This extension builds on the success of our pilot project launched in June 2022 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!

We planted coral fragments from 7 hard coral species and our coral outplanting focused equally on 2 sites: 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!!!

But since coral conservation & restoration is not all fun work, 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.

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!