Snorkelling in the Maldives’ new, young coral reefs
Several luxury brands in the islands are making efforts to restore the coral reefs by growing new coral using techniques like mineral accretion technology (MAT) and micro-fragmentation
Those who still call space “the final frontier" have clearly not experienced the sea—vast, deep, mysterious. For humans, the sea is the ultimate other, requiring adaptations that seem intuitive but actually are not. There are three kinds of people in the world—those who feel “at home" in the water, those who don’t, and a large group in the middle (including me) who view open water with a mixture of awe, fear and pleasure.
India with its 8,000 kilometres of coastline is particularly suited to “water babies" you would think, but you would be wrong. Go to the beach in most cities and you will see folks sit gingerly on the sand without venturing into the sea. That seems to be changing—Goa boasts a community of open water swimmers who regularly go into the Arabian Sea to swim as a group. Bengaluru, despite being landlocked, has a community of scuba divers who travel to different parts of the world to dive. Sports shops routinely sell snorkelling gear to city slickers.
All of this crossed my mind as I waded into the turquoise waters of the Maldives with my snorkelling gear—mask and flippers. For Indians who engage with open water on a regular basis, the Maldives are a no-brainer. “The atolls are safe, the currents are gentle, you get to see large marine animals like sharks and manta rays because visibility is great," says Bengaluru-based Nikhil Chengappa, who has trained over 2,000 people in scuba diving through his company, Fleetfoot Adventures.
Sonu Shivdasani, the British founder of Soneva, has set an ambitious goal. “Scientists say 90% of the coral that exists today will have died by 2030—in only six years," he says. “Our goal is to bring our reefs back to the state that Eva (Malmstrom; his Swedish wife) and I remember from our first visit to the Maldives in the 1980s." Born to wealth, Shivdasani and his wife travelled around the world for their honeymoon before choosing the Maldives to start their luxury hotel venture in 1995 by combining their names into a brand— Soneva. Today, Shivdasani has turned his brand-focus to wellness, and speaks and writes often and publicly about being a cancer survivor and of his commitment to coral regeneration.
The good news is that several luxury brands like the Four Seasons, Baglioni, Anantara and Soneva are making efforts to restore the coral reefs by growing new coral. Solène Jonveaux from France is the assistant manager of the Soneva Coral Project. She explained techniques like mineral accretion technology (MAT) and micro-fragmentation to rapidly grow and transplant resilient coral colonies. In plain English, this means growing coral in controlled conditions before releasing them into the ocean.
At their coral spawning and rearing lab, we were shown tiny polyps that were being grown over weeks in bubbling tanks before a team of scuba divers would transplant them into the sea. Subconsciously, I had lumped coral with marine flora—they looked like stationary plants to me. I learned, somewhat sheepishly, that corals are actually part of marine fauna—they are invertebrates.
At Soneva Jani in Baa Atoll, my husband and I snorkelled at the house reef and found metal tables on the sea floor where new coral was growing. It is a delicate and pain-staking process because it requires specific conditions for the zooxanthellae which provide “food" for coral growth inside the polyps to thrive. Nature creates these conditions effortlessly until we humans go and muck them up. “If the conditions aren’t right, the zooxanthellae will abandon the polyps, causing them to die," said our tour guide.
Without coral, the sea loses its colour and much of the marine life that transfixes us humans. Island nations like the Maldives with a huge influx of tourists seeking to dive and snorkel in their seas depend on the beauty of corals to keep up their economy. Several partnerships between the Maldives government and luxury resorts have been fostered to ameliorate the devastating effects of global warming and the El Niño currents. For resorts like Soneva Jani, where the overwater villas literally sit over the sea, coral reefs are an essential part of their charm. It is what brings people to the place. Says Gerhard Stutz, the German general manager of Soneva Fushi, “For resorts like ours that are part of the fragile marine ecosystem in the Maldives, sustainable tourism cannot just be about reusing towels. It has to be about regenerating our waters."
On my last day, as I snorkelled in the house reef at Soneva Jani, I floated about the metal tables and observed tiny coral polyps waving in the currents. They were of different sizes. Having seen them in the lab, I could tell which ones were the “babies", just a few weeks into the water, and which were the older ones with larger polyps. Already fish were swimming around the polyps attracted by the small invertebrates that it had spawned. Soon the manta and eagle rays would show up and then the sharks. The circle of life—in this tiny part of the Indian Ocean—would begin again.
Shoba Narayan is an independent writer based in Bengaluru and has been a long-time contributor to Mint.
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