Dive with the beautiful view of tropical islands in the Indian Ocean. Be part of a team working on an important marine conservation project.
Volunteers will be taking part in conservation related surveys and be part of fun dives with sightings such as sharks,rays, birds and dolphins. On this unique adventure visit hawksbill and green turtle breeding areas and gain new techniques needed to survey coral reefs.
Volunteers will be allocated fish, coral or invertebrates as part of coral reef monitoring. Every volunteer will be expected to be familiar with the study materials before they arrive to speed up the process of getting them to monitoring level.
We monitor all these topics at our 24 sites over the North-West coast of Mahe.
- Fish – volunteers collect data on abundance/biodiversity, which helps to assess overall recovery of fish life on the reef.
- Coral – for the first half of the year we monitor coral cover of our sites, and in the second half of the year we monitor the recruits (juvenile) corals that are growing on our sites, both of which give us a better idea of the health and diversity of the reef.
- Invertebrates – slight variations in our methodologies throughout the year, but both focus on the diversity and abundance of different species found around the Seychelles.
Incidental Sightings is something that everyone gets involved with on a daily basis, we compile a species list and maintain a record of the daily occurrences of different marine creatures at the various dive sites. This data is passed onto OBIS Seamap which is an online database to see populations of different big species around the world.
All volunteers will also get involved with monthly dives to clean up the reef – Dive Against Debris (DAD) which the data goes to Project AWARE who are monitoring the levels of trash that is being found on dive sites around the world.
Everyone will conduct a separate monitoring technique of Coral Watch, this is a worldwide coral monitoring methodology which looks into the levels of bleaching that is occurring on corals.
All participants must be PADI Open Water certified before joining the program and should be able to walk 400m over uneven ground carrying their dive equipment.
