The Big Picture

It can be difficult to envision the payback for a lot of marine protections. This makes them hard to enforce. Here are three different ways Asia saves its shores.

- Melissa Hobson

For divers and dive professionals, protecting our coral reefs and the marine ecosystem is of the utmost importance. Yet it can be a challenge to know how to help these beautiful environments when acting as an individual – whether that be a tourist, diver, dive guide or even a dive shop. Here are three distinct initiatives that illustrate different approaches to community action, which can combine for much greater overall impact.

The tale of the thresher shark

Dive operators themselves can lead to change in legislation, as has successfully been demonstrated in Malapascua, in the Philippines. The island’s waters are home to Monad Shoal and its beguiling pelagic thresher sharks (Alopias pelagicus). Tourists travel from around the globe and head to Monad in the early hours of the morning to see these elegant sharks.

It’s at dawn that the threshers, tails the length of their bodies, climb from their normal range at 150m to visit several cleaning stations on seamounts at a depth of around 30m. The shoal is the only known location worldwide where the threshers predictably visit recreational-diving depths.

Monad Shoal was established as a Marine Protected Area in 2002. Despite the municipality collecting a marine-park fee of 150 pesos (US$3) from tourists, it has never been altogether clear how the money is used. The lack of maintenance of mooring buoys was a persistent problem. Some illegal fishing of the sharks was also still taking place.

The dive centres of Malapascua decided something had to be done. In 2010, several of them banded together to form the Malapascua Marine Protection Fund. Evolution Diving Resort was a founding member of the initiative, and has long ranked in the Green Fins Top 10, testament to its environmental credentials.