The wind continues to blow from the south making a lot of our local projects off the beach in Mae Haad a bit of a challenge. It has been a couple of weeks since we set up a small coral nursery beside our own ‘Junkyard Reef’ and we have been trying to get out and see how progress is going with our little coral babies. We want to see that there is some progress but also that the weather is not stirring up so much as to make coral nurseries in the area unfeasible. Thankfully things are looking good.

The artificial site itself is looking great as a developing fish nursery with quite a good variety of fish (snappers, banner fish, puffer fish, groupers, damsel fish, fusiliers, parrot fish, just to name a few) and a burgeoning abundance also.

A few invertebrates have moved in which helps the ecosystem develop. So far we have a few sea urchins, plenty of common sea cucumbers and a nice variety of sea shells including three stunning cowry shells.

The most disturbing and pressing emergence of late and the one thing precluding us from expanding our nurseries is the overgrowth of a filamentous algae that has taken over large portions of the substrata.  This macro algae is fast growing and quickly smothers young corals restricting their growth. At present we are waiting to see how this develops before expanding our coral nursery programs. If the algae continues to thrive then our efforts at developing a true artificial reef with natural corals may be thwarted.

Macro alga thrives on nutrients which, in a healthy ecosystem are lacking as the reef is very effective at recycling what nutrients there are in the water. But rising pollution from land based sources lowers the water quality and allows these fast crowing algae to thrive and proliferate.

One of the areas the Save Koh Tao group have been addressing in the past 12 months or so is proper management of wastewater to ensure only treated, clean water is discharged into our bays but sadly progress has been slow. We are continuing to lobby stakeholders to improve this situation and thankfully some of the new resorts are coming to the party with facilities in place to manage waste water, use renewable energies (eg: Solar) and hopefully improve the water quality around Koh Tao.