Protect Coral Reefs in Malaysia

Our colleague, Nadhirah was speaking in a workshop in Shangri-La Tanjung Aru, Sabah a few weeks ago. She shared on the challenges that Reef Check Malaysia face in battling plastic pollution, and our efforts, especially on Mantanani Island.

This is the first step in a project by the resort and University Malaya Sabah (UMS) Faculty of Engineering, to come up with a mechanism to clean up our oceans. Let's hope for an amazing, useful, and innovative design that can contribute towards solving this issue of plastic pollution!

Throughout the year, Reef Check Malaysia will conduct educational and marine awareness talks to students and local communities all around Malaysia.

In the month of February 2020, our team on Tioman Island along with the trained locals in Tioman Marine Conservation Group (TMCG) conducted the following marine conservation activities:

1. We removed 4 ghost nets
2. We removed one illegal and discarded Fish Aggregating Device
3. We cleaned up oil spill on one beach. The oil spill was relatively minor and the clean-up involved the local government.
4. We eliminated 80 Crown-of-Thorns starfish (coral predator) from two dive sites. Currently, there seems to be an outbreak of these coral predators. We will have to revisit these sites and a couple more sites in the next couple of weeks to monitor the progress of the Crown-of-Thorns starfish. Local villagers and dive centres were involved in this activity. 
5. We installed 9 new mooring lines at dive and snorkel sites to prevent boat anchoring on coral reefs. 

Furthermore, there was bad, stormy and rainy weather (tail end of the monsoon season), hence limiting what we could do.