Eco Koh Tao and Crystal Dive joined together with local volunteer organization Secret Garden hosting a two-day introduction to Marine Conservation. The students, mostly from the USA were led by IDCS Nathan Cook who introduced them to the basics of marine ecosystems and their workings before some in water observations.

The kids were informed about what makes coral reefs healthy and what some of the threats to Koh Tao’s reefs are. Having already been involved in some land conservation activities over the past weeks it was a fantastic way to link the land conservation issues with the marine highlighting the fact that a lot of what we do on land has an enormous impact on our reefs.

Volunteers were introduced to a number of projects including the ecological monitoring programs, marine life sighting database, turtle head-starter program, mooring buoy project, recycling and 2008’s big island wide project the Koh Tao Biorock.

We spent our first morning making posters about marine conservation to help raise awareness with visitors to Koh Tao.

It was a great success and everyone thoroughly enjoyed themselves. Thank you to all participants.

Enrico Soliven, Allison Ford, Samantha Corrado, Gareth Aitkin, Stefan Munier, Sarah Holaner, Greg Kendall, Megan Meder, Kevin Power, Carlye Bellavia, Claire Leerkes, Kriangsak Takham, Elizabeth Medina, Hong Quan.

Thank you also to instructors Debbie Gottdenker and Tina Major and Divemaster Kati Pulli for all of their help over the two days.

On our second day out participants took to the waters of Mae Haad for some coral research undertaking some Project Aware Coralwatch Coral Health Monitoring surveys and also some Green Fins Reef Watch surveys.

Coral on the Biorock project showing a
healthy colony of branching coral