Earth Day 2015 at Living Colours: Stop killing our corals!

 This week Earth Day celebrated its 45th anniversary! Congratulations, many good things have been achieved but many things yet to be done.

Like we could read this week from news, WWF's recent report is clear: Oceans are world's seventh largest economy worth $24tn BUT are in immediate danger due to overfishing, pollution and climate change. it is obvious how important our oceans are to so many people around the globe. This is what was said:

The report warns that nearly two-thirds of the world’s fisheries are “fully exploited” with most of the rest overexploited. The biological diversity of the oceans slumped by 39% between 1970 and 2010, while half of the world’s corals and nearly a third of its seagrasses have disappeared in this time.

Obviously we as diving resort are as well depending of the sea and healthy coral reefs bursting with fish. Scuba divers are the ambassadors of the underwater world because we love the reefs and we can see the change better than many others. On Earth Day Webnesday 22th of April 2015 we gathered a group from divers and snorkelers from the resort and from Bunaken villages and headed to the reefs to collect poisonous reef eating Crown of thorns sea stars.

Crown of thorns is coral polyp eating carnivore and sometimes large populations can destroy huge portions of reef. It doesn't have many predators, but one of them is beautiful triton's trumpet (also called giant triton), which is often captured and killed by its gorgeous shell.

First we took our boat to Mike's point on north side of Bunaken where's we've seen quite many cots recently. Diver's and snorkelers collected 51 big cots which is less than we expected - which is always good news! Current was getting quite strong so we headed to Living Colours' house reef where we didn't find any! The tide was getting low so we had another try the net day and then snorkelers collected around 30 cots in the shallows. Not a huge catch but like said - just good news. Living Colours has been collecting cots from Bunaken's fragile reefs with NWSA for more than a decade and we really hope it works! :)

Have you been participating any earth day activities? Let's make this planet little better place and do everything we can to save our precious seas!

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Heini