Here at Katembe we started our first experiment of
Coral restoration in April 2020.
We started the project after facing a big pandemic of Crown-of-thorns starfish.
COTs eats coral tissues and in early 2020, we and our neighbouring islands have had a big problem with that.
We removed all COTS from the house reef and slowly started our first experiment to see if we could actually
re-plant corals and help our house reef to repair itself.

After a month, we decided to make another experiment and expand our restoration site little by little.
After one year, the average growth of one coral was around 10cm and that's when we knew that we could try restoring
the whole house reef back to its glory.

CORAL RESTORATION

During 2022 we have also involved resorts guests to join in our restoration efforts. Totally during year 2022
we transplanted 39 frames in our house reef with our amazing guests.

First our dive team goes down to the ocean to collect coral pieces for our frames. Those corals are called 'Corals of opportunities' which means that we collect only corals that are broken naturally from the reef. Sometimes corals got broken by turtles, other fishes, divers, diseases or storms.

After we've collected enough suitable and alive corals, we bring those pieces into the surface. We place them to sea water baskets and start to fragment them. After fragmenting we attach pieces of corals to the frames and once all the work is done, we dive the frame to the reef.

Our goal for 2021 - 2022 was to expand and connect our current restoration
area to a new area.
Our goal for 2023 is to stop the destroyed area from expanding and make substrate on the sea floor stable.
Slowly we have started to add frames to the rubble area and it will eventually connect to our
old & new restoration site projects.