Last week's events......


Rain brings studying and sun means snorkel........


Lisanne, Sheril and Marie practicing coral ID
Last week we stayed in the office a lot due to the bad weather caused by a big cyclone around Madagascar. Ideal weather to stay inside and study the most common fishes and corals, as well as developing a reef impact and substrate data collection sheet. This to assess the bleaching rate and the diversity of corals on the reef of Fishermen’s Cove. The monitoring is going to start in two weeks and that is to give us time to learn more about the corals for when we start the transects. In the process we have started to do coral ID to better identify them once we start the monitoring.


fluorescent coral 
On Friday the sun came back again, so we decided to test our coral and fish knowledge in the field during a snorkeling trip at Sunset Beach. Butterflyfish, Batfish, Moorish Idol and brain coral, we recognized a lot already! The water was surprisingly warm and the corals looked beautiful. But more and more white corals appeared as we swam further.


Lisanne and Marie having a blast!


This is due to a huge bleaching event that is going on the past couple of weeks. Corals suffer from the warm temperatures and lose their symbiotic zooxanthellae which give them their nice colours. The white coral carpets underneath us were not a pleasant appearance. Hopefully the water temperature will drop soon, so the corals get time to recover. Looking forward to practice the enhanced skills in the water. We hope that we have sunny days ahead to start identifying the transect area where we can do our reef check. 

Mass of bleached coral


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