The past few months have been very exciting for the RMP Coral Restoration Program. We started off with a brand new RMP Coral Restoration Instructor. There are now three dive operators in West End that offer the RMP Coral Restoration Certification Courses:
Roatan Divers
Sun Divers
Coconut Tree Divers
We have had some illustrious visitors to our coral nursery in SeaQuest Deep; the Costa Rican, British, German and Israeli ambassadors as well as the Honduran Minister of Tourism all came to see how well our corals are doing.
Most exciting of all, we installed ten new trees in our nursery, increasing our total to 40 trees. Members of RMP staff and the Coral Restoration Instructors organized a trip to Cordelia Banks to collect fragments of opportunity to fill these trees, resulting in six brand new genotypes in the nursery, four of which were Staghorn and two were a hybrid species known as Fused Staghorn (Prolifera Cervicornis). New research has suggested that the hybrid species is very successful in coral restoration programs so we are hoping to increase our focus on them. The rest of the trees will be Staghorn corals as in the next few months we are hoping to install new coral tables in our out-plant site, at Chief’s Quarters, and new site in Camp Bay in the east of the Island. These will be for Elkhorn corals, which thrive much more in tables than they do in trees. The coral nursery in the east will be a community-led organization involving local operators and instructors.
We are also organizing an event called Coralmania 2021 which will take place in the beginning of December. Coralmania is a massive coral out-plant event of distinct species of corals, contributing to the conservation, restoration of biodiversity and coastal protection.
This initiative arose in 2016 lead by the Dominican Foundation for Marine Studies (Fundemar), Fundación Grupo Puntacana, Counterpart International, CEBSE and The Nature Conservancy (TNC), with support from the German Development Cooperation, GIZ.
This year it will have a regional impact, taking place in three countries almost simultaneously: Costa Rica, Honduras and the Dominican Republic. This event will pay tribute to various Sustainable Development Goals to improve our planet and marine ecosystems. We recently passed the 500th mark in fragments out-planted since January 2020, let’s see if we can hit 1000 by the end of Coralmania!
If you would like to volunteer please fill out the form here → https://coralmania.org/
Written by: Grace Horberry, RMP Volunteer Coordinator
📸 Credits: Antonio Busiello
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