Tioman #2 - a good cause
The diving that we did on Saturday was a new experience for us - instead of looking for pretty things under water we went looking for garbage!Saturday Sept 16th was Project Aware's - International Cleanup day and the Tioman dive shop, B&J, was participating in it, so we joined in as well. World-wide there were over 100 countries and over 300000 people participating and picked up around 3.6 million kilograms of garbage!
In the first dive we were cleaning up the local reef around the jetty, picking up garbage like cans, fishing line and other stuff that people have thrown over the sides of boats and off the jetty.
In the second dive we were looking for crown of thorn on the coral. Crown of Thorn is a type of starfish which kills the coral by latching on and sucking all of the nutrients from it. Normally this is just a part of nature and some coral gets killed but right now there is an outbreak of them and the reefs are not able to grow fast enough to counter what the CoT are eating. Since these starfish have poisonous spikes all over them you have to be very careful removing them using a long poker stick and then carefully putting them into a bag to take to shore and bury them.
Overall it was an interesting day and we got free T-shirts for participating - can't have too many t-shirts...
posted by Doug and Sarah @ 8:32 PM
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