Hi all,
After I wrote last night, we went and listened to some live music at the stage area, which was a man playing a saxophone. He was pretty good. Then a presentation about the house reef began which we both found really interesting. I started mentally taking some notes for my blog - e.g., there are 1200 islands in the Maldives, and coral is an animal which supports 25% of all marine life despite only covering 1% of the ocean floor. The presenter, Ivanna, was clearly very passionate and we both listened along eagerly. Once she finished, she ran a Kahoot (a quiz) and announced that the top three finishers would win a snorkelling trip guided by her worth $65 USD per person. The Kahoot started, and 40 people joined. Because we had listened along so intently we got all but one question right (me) and all but two right (Rob). I finished first, and Rob third. We were so thrilled as it meant we got to do the snorkelling trip together! It was meant to run on Wednesday, but us and the Swedish lady, Irene, that finished second all leave Wednesday so Ivanna said she would try to schedule it for Monday or Tuesday instead.
This morning, we had breakfast and then sat on the beach watching beach yoga while talking to Mum and Pa via video call. Unfortunately Pa isn't very well at the moment, so it was nice to briefly distract him. Afterwards, we checked in at the dive centre and they confirmed our tour for later today. Then we hung around on our deck for a while and spotted a sting ray and a shark, and some more schools of fish. Our friends the banner fish hanging underneath our ladder returned again. They are so cute!
We had lunch and went for a swim in the pool before joining our guided snorkel at 2.45pm with Ivanna. This ended up being the highlight of our stay here for both of us, she was fantastic. She was so passionate and it was just the two of us and the second place winner, Irene, from the quiz as well. Ivanna is Colombian. She studied marine biology in Canada and has since lived and worked in the field in Australia (in Rainbow Beach and Port Douglas), Indonesia and now the Maldives since October. She says she eventually wants to be a Science teacher. I was torn between wanting to tell her to run in the opposite direction, or that we are desperate for new teachers in Australia - haha.
We started off at the dive centre with Ivanna telling us some interesting facts about some of the fish we would see on the house reef. She told us the movie 'Finding Nemo' lied, and that in real life if the female clownfish (the boss of the family) dies, the reproductive male becomes a female, and a male in the family then becomes the reproductive male. So really, Nemo's Dad Marlin would have become a female, and Nemo would have reproduced with him. I can see why Disney didn't run with that, especially in 2003!!
Then we walked down the path towards the sandbar and entered the house reef. We had not snorkelled in this area despite looking out towards it daily. It's crazy how the reef is so beautiful in this area but is concealed. We saw so many beautiful fish and coral that Ivanna sought out for us. Parrotfish were interesting, as they use their beak like mouth to scrape algae off of the coral and consume it, then digest it and poo it out as sand. This prevents algae from taking over the coral and killing it. Conversely, coral protects our shorelines and ensures the vast diversity of marine life can survive. It looks like a rock but only appears this way because it develops a hard external skeleton (which is part of what the parrotfish scrapes). Rather than being one big structure, it's actually made up of thousands of small coral polyps that grow and join. Ivanna dove down and picked up a piece of already deadened coral and we held it. It was a lot heavier than you would think.
We also saw some box fish, some unicorn fish (huge horn like structure protruding from its head) and many other colourful ones. We then saw the resident turtle of the house reef, Shelly, a hawksbill turtle which is the same breed Mum and I saw in Sri Lanka in the ocean. It is so magic seeing them in the wild, however, she was damaging the coral to get to plants underneath it. Turtles do this a lot apparently! Finally we saw Maldivian Nemo, the clownfish that is endemic to the Maldives. I tried hard to take a photo but the water was murky here. I have circled him in the photos I took.
Our final stop before we returned to shore was past the underwater coral nursery they have created here. They transplant coral polyps, grow them for 18 months and then place them back onto the ocean floor to continue them growing. Ivanna said they have 30 stations and have so far successfully created 16 sections of new coral on the ocean floor here in this way. The coral is cleaned now and again, and apparently grows 5x faster in this setting than in the natural way.
After the tour, we hung out in the pool for a while. We had noticed it was quieter here yesterday, and we predicted that lots of people had left to return to work Monday, and more would arrive today. We were right - there were only two groups of familiar people in the pool with us today, everyone else was new. We think we heard one other Australian but we aren't 100% sure.
Tonight after dinner, we followed Ivanna's advice and walked down to the house reef end of the beach. It was quiet and dark. It's so nice being able to walk around here without being eaten by mosquitoes, apparently they fumigate for them once a week on the island. We saw what we came for on the beach - bio luminescent plankton (phytoplankton). Ivanna told us to splash the water and sand around with our feet. When we did, phytoplankton lit up in a brilliant blue, like the colour of the Avatar characters in the film! It was amazing. Apparently it's rare to see this time of year so we were very lucky. I couldn't take photos with my phone, but I have taken some from the internet to show you what it looked like. The stars were also beautiful.
We've had a fabulous day and are so grateful we won the prize in the quiz!!
Love to all
Claire
Xoxox
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