Thanks to a friend of Sea Communities sharing a link with us, there is an excellent one hour Australian ABC doco on ABC iView. It is also now showing on ABC
http://iview.abc.net.au/programs/war-on-waste/DO1624H002S00
ABC copyright may prevent the entire doco from being viewed by your friends overseas. There is an ABC channel on Youtube with snippets of the most relevant bits: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsPVOdZ3LN6eoCyb_TvRjx13CWhZwIWYn
At Les last week on surveys, we saw bleached corals on the rope nurseries installed last September (after STARR 2016). It wasn’t ocean warming that did it. It was plastic wrapped around coral. The suspended rope nurseries acted like washing lines catching plastic on the coral. We unwrapped a plastic sack wrapped around an otherwise healthy coral in the reef. The branch that was covered by the plastic was bleached, with the zooxanthellae unable to access light for photosynthesis. Floods and mudslides from March washed a lot of debris and sediment into the sea, taking a toll on our coral nurseries set up last year.
Sea Communities is now doing weekly maintenance diving, paying three fishermen divers to dive twice a week to maintain the coral. We are also moving Les villagers towards a Plastic for Profit small scale recycling initiative using free blueprints from www.preciousplastic.com. When you are at with us, we can share some results of marine debris studies conducted by Professor Steve Smith's team of Colombo Plan scholars from University of Southern Cross National Marine Science Centre’s who came over the year.
Please share this post with your Facebook friends, thank you.