Restoring corals into its former glory in the Mamanuca Island Group waters for the past two years has been a real challenge.
At Malolo Island Resort, planting coral is now an ongoing monthly project since it started in January this year.
On Friday last week, the resort’s activities staff were at it again.
Not soon after the beating of the ‘lali’, the usually quiet beach was full of motion as guests gathered in numbers to witness the process.
Some curious mind, especially young ones were given chance to plant corals.
For Soropepeli Soro, a field officer for Mamanuca Environment Society (MES), coral restoration in Malolo is now more like a personal endeavor- to improve the state of the habitat and resilience of the ecosystem surrounding the intimate, rustic resort.
The Ravitaki, Kadavu native didn’t mince a word when he said-the population of healthy corals at Malolo is slowly decreasing.
“The reef is not healthy and there is very less live and healthy corals. This coral planting is just a way to help restore corals on the reef,” he said.
Soro who looks after the Malolo and Likuliku region said out of all the corals planted during a coral planting session, only about 80per will survive.
“There is not guarantee that all the corals that were planted would be alive and growing healthy. So far, only heavy rainfall that causes runoff from the land destroys corals in Malolo.
“Malolo do have mangrove but very small sea-grass cover, so there is a lot of chance of sediments and litters from land would end up on the reef. Sediment is really bad for the reef because they do cover the corals and stop it from growing.”
The 25 year old said monitoring of the transplanted corals is necessary for adaptive management as well as for assessing progress towards the goals of the rehabilitation project.
MES Project Manager, Betani Salusalu said reefs surrounding Malolo used to be pristine five years back.
“Due to the human activities and impacts, it has degraded respective fully and there is always a need for more attention to attend to in saving these coral reefs. Even though there is no guarantee that all the coral planted will survive but basically a few will do and will be transplanted to other patches for regeneration process.”
Mr Salusalu said the onus is on the resort operators.
“They need to commit a lot to activities that are environment friendly. Also they need to have system in place like when barge comes into the island to offload materials or supplies and the boating from various boats that comes in often to drop off tourist to Malolo.
“All these have its impact to the surrounding environment. The primary aim of restoration for all MES members was to improve a degraded reef in terms of ecosystem structure and function,” he adds.
