We had the great opportunity to take part in a coral workshop from Corals for Conservation with Dr. Austin Bowden-Kerby. He is managing a lot of projects in Fiji and surrounding countries like Tuvalu or the Solomon Islands. Well known in the scientific world he dedicates his work and research to helping coral reefs to survive and rebuild after bleaching events.
It was fantastic to learn about his work building the famous BULA coral nursery as well as learning about tactics and methods how to help reef recovery and how and where to find supercorals, as he calls them. The workshop was divided in lectures and field work, including collecting lots of crown of thorns starfish (COTS) who tend to occur in large numbers after bleaching events.
We learned how and where best to build nurseries, how to collect corals, how to find the most heat resistant ones to collect, what materials to use and how to make coral regeneration patches on dead or damaged reefs.
Since the workshop was timed for the beginning of November we were also lucky enough to observe the annual coral spawning of mainly Porites rus.
>>planned route - join us ...