Righting wrongs on the reef
It may not be how Ibn Battuta arrived, but as your plane descends through the banks of equatorial cloud, you can see why the legendary 14th-century geographer was moved to call the Maldives ‘one of the wonders of the world’. Not to be outdone, Marco Polo called this equatorial archipelago the ‘flower of the Indies’. And he was right: seemingly countless tiny emerald-green islands with aquamarine lagoons festoon an indigo sea. It’s a sight of such incredible natural beauty that the early Indian traders in the region didn’t have much choice but to name the country Maladiv, from the Sanskrit meaning ‘garland of islands’.
The Republic of the Maldives is made up of almost 1,200 islets, extending from 7°N to just south of the equator. They are, in fact, the summits of a vast submarine mountain range grouped into 26 atolls, each encircled by a coral reef and covered with lush vegetation that includes coconut palm, heliotrope, hibiscus and banyans. About 200 are home to indigenous people, while the remainder are uninhabited, or increasingly given over to luxury tourism, where operators provide desert island getaways for wealthy Westerners.
What little land there is barely rises above the sea. The maximum natural elevation of these islands is 2.3 metres and, with a rise in sea level in the past century of 20 centimetres, it’s clear that climate change could have tragic consequences for the world’s flattest country. Coral is the archipelago’s only line of defence against surges of wind and tide, and although it’s highly effective at diffusing the sea’s energy, it can’t stop islands being simply washed away when there are exceptional weather events.
And the islands have certainly weathered their fair share. In 1812 and 1955, storms devastated many of the northern islands. In 1964, the island of Hagngnaameedhoo was inundated by high seas, while in 1987, the capital, Male, was flooded. In 1998, a global bleaching event caused by El Niño wiped out 16 per cent of the world’s coral, wreaking disaster among the reefs of the Maldives, while in December 2004, the tsunami caused by the Indian Ocean earthquake killed more than 100 people and caused widespread damage with an estimated repair bill of more than US$400million.
Funding projects
Protection of the marine environment is one of the key challenges facing the islands today. A recent UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report has called for the creation of a ‘green state’ in which sound environmental management practices would benefit local communities while helping to market tourism in the Maldives.
Tourism on any scale is relatively new to the region, and while it’s often thought that increased activity puts more pressure on fragile marine ecosystems, the Maldives tourism boom is, in certain areas, making a positive contribution. Several local hotel chains currently fund environmental and community development programmes through their corporate social responsibility (CSR) portfolios.
Alexandra Barron is manager of the marine laboratory at Vabbinfaru Island, owned by Banyan Tree, an eco-resort business that funds research on green sea turtles, blacktip reef sharks and coral, as well as conservation initiatives, in the Maldives via its Green Imperative Fund. She explains: ‘The fund provides financial support for environmental projects in places where Banyan Tree has a presence.’ Guests make their financial contribution under an ‘opt-out’ arrangement for each night they spend at the resort, and their donations are matched, dollar for dollar, by Banyan Tree to develop the fund.
Barron, a shark specialist, is nothing if not passionate about marine conservation. In 2004, prior to taking up her position at the Banyan Tree marine laboratory, she won the Earthwatch Institute/Amerada Hess award for educators and has worked with the Marine Conservation Society and the Wildlife Trust. For all this, she is incredibly down to earth as she shows me around the new wet lab, paid for with Green Imperative Fund money.
The green sea turtle hatchlings’ water needs to be changed. ‘Not the most complex of duties,’ she explains, as she and her colleague, Chris Milne, pick up a couple of plastic bins, before dragging them half-full back from the shoreline.
The turtle programme at Banyan Tree, dubbed Headstart, involves nest protection and the fostering of hatchlings. According to Barron, green sea turtles are a distillation of wider marine conservation issues. ‘Nearly everything conservationists are up against affects sea turtles,’ she says, ‘and because their population numbers are so sensitive to human impact, they tell us a lot about the state of the oceans.’
The first step of the lab’s work is to protect nesting activities. During the nesting season, the team monitors females coming ashore, tagging them in order to study their movements and reproductive cycles. If a nest has been dug too close to the tide line or in an area where there is a lot of human traffic, the team moves the eggs to a more suitable location, a process that requires the utmost care. ‘It’s a painstaking procedure relocating a nest,’ Barron explains. ‘Everything is done so slowly, we look more like bomb disposal technicians.’
After the eggs hatch, the team goes on standby. Ninety per cent of the hatchlings are escorted down the beach to the sea, where ‘we wish them luck’. The remaining ten per cent join Headstart, from which 40 will ‘graduate’. These turtles are placed in a semi-natural lagoon pen, where they are fed twice a day, occasionally cleaned with a toothbrush, and are protected from predators. ‘When a turtle hatches in the wild, the chances of it reaching maturity are significantly less than one per cent – more like one in 600–1,000,’ Barron says. ‘By the time we release our two-year-olds, the odds of survival are nearer one in 20.’
It will be 15–20 years before a future Banyan Tree team will be able to tell how successful Headstart has been, says Barran: ‘We suspect that will be when our graduate turtles will return here to breed – that will be the first real indicator of the success of the project.’
Reef research
Another role of the laboratory is to ensure the basic management of Vabbinfaru’s house reef. This includes reef cleaning, managing sustainable use (that is, ‘lecturing tourists’) and conducting bleaching surveys. The team is establishing transects on the house reef and on an offshore reef that can be used for reference. This will ensure that quantitative data for long-term studies of reef health can be collected from exactly the same location every time the team goes into the field. According to Barron, one of the big problems when studying a reef is the temptation to work on areas where there is more going on, which will bias the survey.
While the lab is responsible for some straightforward coral transplantation and gardening in the lagoon, there is a more experimental research project running alongside. Labelled the Lotus Project and described by Barron as ‘electric reef work’, it aims to determine whether a low-voltage electrical current can assist in coral growth. The team has created large cage-like structures out of construction steel, which are then submerged and connected to an energy source such as solar panels or a battery.
Running a three-volt DC current across the steel frame causes it to become negatively charged, which should attract positively charged ions in the water, which will accrete on the frame. According to Barron, this procedure produces a substrate that is ideal for planting coral in mineral-rich water. ‘One of the potentials of the technology is to rebuild damaged reefs, but we are currently testing to see if the technology helps to speed up coral growth,’ she says.
At Velavaru, there is also a small population of 11 captive blacktip reef sharks, kept in a pen in the lagoon to monitor development and other key life history variables. ‘One of the biggest problems with sharks is that we just don’t know enough about them,’ says Barron. ‘And because we don’t know a lot about them, we can’t protect them.’
The study of blacktips is important because, as with many sharks, they are apex predators, so in ecological terms, they’re vital. To lose this shark species, Barron warns, would mean that ‘everything underneath them in the food chain will go into disarray, and chaos will ensue on the reef; sharks are the guardians of the reef.’
For years, marine biologists have thought that blacktips have an extremely small range, creating localised populations with very little migration. ‘The interesting finding from our tagging work is that our two prototype sharks promptly disappeared,’ says Barron. ‘The first disappeared for about eight months before popping up on another island, while the second disappeared completely. If we can establish whether or not this behaviour is widespread, then we could start to question long-held assumptions about blacktips. It requires further study, but it could be that their range is much wider than we thought.’
In practical conservation terms, this would mean that it would no longer be possible to protect the species simply by protecting its reef habitat. It will have a huge implication for the conservation strategy as a whole, as the lab would ‘have to go from protecting them locally to protecting them full stop.’
Profitable partnership
In the grand scheme of things, a couple of tourism-funded laboratories contributing small amounts of data on local ecological issues may not have a great deal of scientific significance. But CSR initiatives such as Banyan Tree’s Green Imperative Fund could provide a model that, if replicated over time, might make a real contribution to the protection of fragile ecosystems.
As the Western world becomes richer – and economists assure us that in the 21st century, we will have more disposable income than ever before – tourism in sensitive locations is unlikely to diminish. There are now more than 100 luxury island getaways in the Maldives, which, while providing primary and secondary employment and other economic benefits, inevitably increases the pressure on infrastructure and local ecology.
If every one of these were to run a CSR programme similar to Banyan Tree’s, and if each island were to host a small marine ecology lab, it could lead to a very profitable relationship between tourism and environmental research. So why not impose a voluntary tax upon tourists who are able to pay it, and let the money work for the environment?
Barron says: ‘I’ve worked in the academic and voluntary sectors, where to raise funding for so much as a new pencil takes months of paperwork, process and waiting. Working in the corporate sector, if I need some new telemetry instrumentation, I simply fill in a requisition form and it’s just a rubber-stamp job, providing what I ask for makes sense – and there is enough money in the coffers.’
Co-ordinates
When to go
The Maldives has a tropical climate with year-round temperatures of 23–31°C. The hottest month is April and the coolest December. While the humidity is relatively high, the sea breezes keep the air moving.
The weather is generally determined by two monsoons: the northeast monsoon (November–April) and the southwest monsoon (May–October). The former is the busiest tourist season, with fine weather and low humidity. The latter is often wet and rainy, with rough seas and strong winds.
How to get there
Sri Lankan Airways (www.srilankan.aero) offers return flights from London Heathrow to Male via Colombo from £625. Emirates (www.emirates.com) flies from London Gatwick to Male via Dubai, with return flights starting at £691.20. Several low-cost charter airlines also offer flights from UK airports.
Vabbinfaru Island is part of the North Male Atoll and is just 25 minutes by speedboat from the airport and Male.
Further information
As the Maldives is a popular tourist spot, visitors can stay for 30 days with no visa.
To find out more about Banyan Tree’s corporate social responsibility programme or to visit its eco-resorts, go to www.banyantree.com
The Republic of the Maldives is made up of almost 1,200 islets, extending from 7°N to just south of the equator. They are, in fact, the summits of a vast submarine mountain range grouped into 26 atolls, each encircled by a coral reef and covered with lush vegetation that includes coconut palm, heliotrope, hibiscus and banyans. About 200 are home to indigenous people, while the remainder are uninhabited, or increasingly given over to luxury tourism, where operators provide desert island getaways for wealthy Westerners.
What little land there is barely rises above the sea. The maximum natural elevation of these islands is 2.3 metres and, with a rise in sea level in the past century of 20 centimetres, it’s clear that climate change could have tragic consequences for the world’s flattest country. Coral is the archipelago’s only line of defence against surges of wind and tide, and although it’s highly effective at diffusing the sea’s energy, it can’t stop islands being simply washed away when there are exceptional weather events.
And the islands have certainly weathered their fair share. In 1812 and 1955, storms devastated many of the northern islands. In 1964, the island of Hagngnaameedhoo was inundated by high seas, while in 1987, the capital, Male, was flooded. In 1998, a global bleaching event caused by El Niño wiped out 16 per cent of the world’s coral, wreaking disaster among the reefs of the Maldives, while in December 2004, the tsunami caused by the Indian Ocean earthquake killed more than 100 people and caused widespread damage with an estimated repair bill of more than US$400million.
Funding projects
Protection of the marine environment is one of the key challenges facing the islands today. A recent UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report has called for the creation of a ‘green state’ in which sound environmental management practices would benefit local communities while helping to market tourism in the Maldives.
Tourism on any scale is relatively new to the region, and while it’s often thought that increased activity puts more pressure on fragile marine ecosystems, the Maldives tourism boom is, in certain areas, making a positive contribution. Several local hotel chains currently fund environmental and community development programmes through their corporate social responsibility (CSR) portfolios.
Alexandra Barron is manager of the marine laboratory at Vabbinfaru Island, owned by Banyan Tree, an eco-resort business that funds research on green sea turtles, blacktip reef sharks and coral, as well as conservation initiatives, in the Maldives via its Green Imperative Fund. She explains: ‘The fund provides financial support for environmental projects in places where Banyan Tree has a presence.’ Guests make their financial contribution under an ‘opt-out’ arrangement for each night they spend at the resort, and their donations are matched, dollar for dollar, by Banyan Tree to develop the fund.
Barron, a shark specialist, is nothing if not passionate about marine conservation. In 2004, prior to taking up her position at the Banyan Tree marine laboratory, she won the Earthwatch Institute/Amerada Hess award for educators and has worked with the Marine Conservation Society and the Wildlife Trust. For all this, she is incredibly down to earth as she shows me around the new wet lab, paid for with Green Imperative Fund money.
The green sea turtle hatchlings’ water needs to be changed. ‘Not the most complex of duties,’ she explains, as she and her colleague, Chris Milne, pick up a couple of plastic bins, before dragging them half-full back from the shoreline.
The turtle programme at Banyan Tree, dubbed Headstart, involves nest protection and the fostering of hatchlings. According to Barron, green sea turtles are a distillation of wider marine conservation issues. ‘Nearly everything conservationists are up against affects sea turtles,’ she says, ‘and because their population numbers are so sensitive to human impact, they tell us a lot about the state of the oceans.’
The first step of the lab’s work is to protect nesting activities. During the nesting season, the team monitors females coming ashore, tagging them in order to study their movements and reproductive cycles. If a nest has been dug too close to the tide line or in an area where there is a lot of human traffic, the team moves the eggs to a more suitable location, a process that requires the utmost care. ‘It’s a painstaking procedure relocating a nest,’ Barron explains. ‘Everything is done so slowly, we look more like bomb disposal technicians.’
After the eggs hatch, the team goes on standby. Ninety per cent of the hatchlings are escorted down the beach to the sea, where ‘we wish them luck’. The remaining ten per cent join Headstart, from which 40 will ‘graduate’. These turtles are placed in a semi-natural lagoon pen, where they are fed twice a day, occasionally cleaned with a toothbrush, and are protected from predators. ‘When a turtle hatches in the wild, the chances of it reaching maturity are significantly less than one per cent – more like one in 600–1,000,’ Barron says. ‘By the time we release our two-year-olds, the odds of survival are nearer one in 20.’
It will be 15–20 years before a future Banyan Tree team will be able to tell how successful Headstart has been, says Barran: ‘We suspect that will be when our graduate turtles will return here to breed – that will be the first real indicator of the success of the project.’
Start the slideshow (6 pictures)
Reef research
Another role of the laboratory is to ensure the basic management of Vabbinfaru’s house reef. This includes reef cleaning, managing sustainable use (that is, ‘lecturing tourists’) and conducting bleaching surveys. The team is establishing transects on the house reef and on an offshore reef that can be used for reference. This will ensure that quantitative data for long-term studies of reef health can be collected from exactly the same location every time the team goes into the field. According to Barron, one of the big problems when studying a reef is the temptation to work on areas where there is more going on, which will bias the survey.
While the lab is responsible for some straightforward coral transplantation and gardening in the lagoon, there is a more experimental research project running alongside. Labelled the Lotus Project and described by Barron as ‘electric reef work’, it aims to determine whether a low-voltage electrical current can assist in coral growth. The team has created large cage-like structures out of construction steel, which are then submerged and connected to an energy source such as solar panels or a battery.
Running a three-volt DC current across the steel frame causes it to become negatively charged, which should attract positively charged ions in the water, which will accrete on the frame. According to Barron, this procedure produces a substrate that is ideal for planting coral in mineral-rich water. ‘One of the potentials of the technology is to rebuild damaged reefs, but we are currently testing to see if the technology helps to speed up coral growth,’ she says.
At Velavaru, there is also a small population of 11 captive blacktip reef sharks, kept in a pen in the lagoon to monitor development and other key life history variables. ‘One of the biggest problems with sharks is that we just don’t know enough about them,’ says Barron. ‘And because we don’t know a lot about them, we can’t protect them.’
The study of blacktips is important because, as with many sharks, they are apex predators, so in ecological terms, they’re vital. To lose this shark species, Barron warns, would mean that ‘everything underneath them in the food chain will go into disarray, and chaos will ensue on the reef; sharks are the guardians of the reef.’
For years, marine biologists have thought that blacktips have an extremely small range, creating localised populations with very little migration. ‘The interesting finding from our tagging work is that our two prototype sharks promptly disappeared,’ says Barron. ‘The first disappeared for about eight months before popping up on another island, while the second disappeared completely. If we can establish whether or not this behaviour is widespread, then we could start to question long-held assumptions about blacktips. It requires further study, but it could be that their range is much wider than we thought.’
In practical conservation terms, this would mean that it would no longer be possible to protect the species simply by protecting its reef habitat. It will have a huge implication for the conservation strategy as a whole, as the lab would ‘have to go from protecting them locally to protecting them full stop.’
Profitable partnership
In the grand scheme of things, a couple of tourism-funded laboratories contributing small amounts of data on local ecological issues may not have a great deal of scientific significance. But CSR initiatives such as Banyan Tree’s Green Imperative Fund could provide a model that, if replicated over time, might make a real contribution to the protection of fragile ecosystems.
As the Western world becomes richer – and economists assure us that in the 21st century, we will have more disposable income than ever before – tourism in sensitive locations is unlikely to diminish. There are now more than 100 luxury island getaways in the Maldives, which, while providing primary and secondary employment and other economic benefits, inevitably increases the pressure on infrastructure and local ecology.
If every one of these were to run a CSR programme similar to Banyan Tree’s, and if each island were to host a small marine ecology lab, it could lead to a very profitable relationship between tourism and environmental research. So why not impose a voluntary tax upon tourists who are able to pay it, and let the money work for the environment?
Barron says: ‘I’ve worked in the academic and voluntary sectors, where to raise funding for so much as a new pencil takes months of paperwork, process and waiting. Working in the corporate sector, if I need some new telemetry instrumentation, I simply fill in a requisition form and it’s just a rubber-stamp job, providing what I ask for makes sense – and there is enough money in the coffers.’
Co-ordinates
When to go
The Maldives has a tropical climate with year-round temperatures of 23–31°C. The hottest month is April and the coolest December. While the humidity is relatively high, the sea breezes keep the air moving.
The weather is generally determined by two monsoons: the northeast monsoon (November–April) and the southwest monsoon (May–October). The former is the busiest tourist season, with fine weather and low humidity. The latter is often wet and rainy, with rough seas and strong winds.
How to get there
Sri Lankan Airways (www.srilankan.aero) offers return flights from London Heathrow to Male via Colombo from £625. Emirates (www.emirates.com) flies from London Gatwick to Male via Dubai, with return flights starting at £691.20. Several low-cost charter airlines also offer flights from UK airports.
Vabbinfaru Island is part of the North Male Atoll and is just 25 minutes by speedboat from the airport and Male.
Further information
As the Maldives is a popular tourist spot, visitors can stay for 30 days with no visa.
To find out more about Banyan Tree’s corporate social responsibility programme or to visit its eco-resorts, go to www.banyantree.com
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