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Experiences of past volunteers
"I learnt a huge amount - It was an invaluable, unforgettable experience"
Sophie Durham UK June 2008 12 week expedition
Sophie Durham 20, is from the UK studying geography at Emmanuel College, Cambridge and joined RD in June 2008 for the full 12 week expedition
One evening, Bruno Tsarakele, president of the fishing village of Ifaty, described to me what it was like to fish in the Bay of Ranobe twenty years ago. Fishermen could virtually throw their spear in any direction and catch a huge fish, and pirogues would sail home every evening with big catches of big fish. Ten years ago, Richard Hand, a local dive shop owner, would guarantee his tourists would see sharks on every dive. He described fields of coral and a bay full of fish, rays and turtles. While these reminiscences may well be clouded and exaggerated by nostalgia, the situation in the bay now is certainly different to just a few decades ago. Studies of coral morphology carried out in the bay in the 1960s and 70s by the French researchers at La Station Marine de d’Endoume also described the bay as full of life. They show photographs of areas of 100% branching coral cover and describe the benthic communities as very varied, given the multiplicity of surfaces of the bay. Now, survey data shows the percentage of live coral cover in the lagoon was as low as 1.8% in 2005 and 3.1% in 2006. The coverage was higher outside the lagoon, 20.7% and 25.6% in 2005 and 2006 respectively, but this is still much lower than as other sites in Madagascar and the Indian Ocean. And, due to the fragility of the coral reef ecosystem, the pelagic community has also declined. The only evidence of the existence of turtles are the small, empty shells washed up on the beach from the village. A particularly big increase in sea surface temperature (SST), caused by the El Niño event of 2001, drove away the rays and sharks. Finally, the pirogues no longer sail home full of fish. Accompanying Martyn, the fisheries surveyor, into the village, we stopped pirogues to weigh and record their catch. One lucky fisherman had caught two octopuses and moray eels, but the other boats had a small bucket of tiny glass fish or half a dozen medium sized fish. Not great for a full day’s work.
The grant I received from the H E Durham Fund went to help fund my expedition to Ifaty this summer. I went for twelve weeks to work as a volunteer research assistant with the non-governmental organization (NGO) Reef Doctor. Reef Doctor is a non-profit organization that gets all of its funding from volunteers and small government or university grants. It conducts coral reef research, conservation and education in the Bay of Ranobe. It was set up eight years ago and gradually became more and more established, expanding its activities from research to conservation and education. It remains a small scale, grass roots NGO with about fifteen Malagasy and foreign staff, plus up to four volunteers, but it is well-known by villagers, businesses, tourists and local governors in the Tuléar region, for its efforts towards preservation of the reef and community development of local villages dependent on the sea. Reef Doctor also now works in direct collaboration with the marine department of the University of Tuléar as well as the World Wild Fund for Nature (WWF) and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).
Several pressures on the reef that have led to its decline have been identified. Firstly, high sedimentation rates due to deforestation of terrestrial forests and mangroves and the subsequent increase in soil erosion and river run-off sediment load. This disrupts the feeding, reproduction and settling mechanisms of marine fauna. Sediment reduces the amount of sunlight available to coral’s symbiotic algae, zooxanthelle, for photosynthesis and also physically smothers the coral polyps. Once a month, the amount of sedimentation in key points in the bay is measured – one of the projects I helped out on. We put sediment traps on the sea bed and left them for 24 hours. The water caught in them is then filtered to collect all suspended sediment, and this is then sent to the University of Tuléar for weighing and chemical analysis.
Secondly, the reef is threatened by intensive fishing in localized areas. The population of Ifaty has expanded to about two thousand, creating higher demand for fish, their staple diet. Most Vezo, the fishermen, fish within the lagoon because of its topography as well as their cultural practices. Furthermore, many farmers struggling with severely depleted soils inland hear of the riches of the sea, and migrate to the coast. Being farmers, not Vezo, they do not know how to sail pirogues and use traditional nets, so the practice of ‘beach seine’ has become common. A beach seine is a vast net spread out over the shallow water of the lagoon and dragged in by hand from the beach. It is often made of mosquito nets with holes so small that it dredges up everything in its path – sea grass, fish eggs, juvenile fish, coral and crustaceans. These are all discarded, dead, back into the water. This is clearly extremely destructive to the ecosystem. Reef Doctor has successfully banned the practice of beach seine in the Ifaty area. Anyone found with a beach seine has their net confiscated and replaced with a net with larger holes, which they are then taught how to use. The final significant threat to the reef is increased water temperatures. The rise in SST in 2001 caused a mass coral bleaching event, from which the coral did not recover.
Therefore, the reef has natural factors threatening its survival; global climate change and warmer waters, sedimentation, nutrient loading and diseases, and anthropogenic factors; pollution, tourism, coastal development and overexploitation. And the problem is not restricted to Ifaty. Coral reefs are threatened worldwide. So, why should the reef be protected? There is, of course, the intrinsic value of nature and its right to survive. But it is the economic significance of the reef that gives an incentive to act. The people of Ifaty rely almost solely on the reef for their survival. It is one of the wealthier villages in South West Madagascar in that people have, for the moment, enough to eat, provided there is no natural or political disaster. However, it is a subsistence lifestyle, only sustainable with a small population using traditional fishing methods and in the absence of external pressures on the reef. This is no longer the case in the Bay of Ranobe, and the Vezo lifestyle is teetering unsustainably on a severely degraded coral reef. Tourism brings a much needed alternative income, but the main tourist attraction is the reef. On a larger scale, Madagascar is one of the poorest nations in the world. Poverty and environmental destruction go hand in hand and reinforce each other. Encouraging environmental sustainability is one of the most important ways to go about poverty reduction. Finally, the reef has biological importance, being an extraordinarily diverse ecosystem, and there is still much that science does not know about it. In the very long term, coral is remarkably resilient to disruption. In the shorter term however, it is vital that we protect it.
Reef Doctor goes about this through research, conservation and education, and during my stay with them I was able to get fully involved in all three aspects of its work. Research of the bay is carried out through surveys of the fish and benthic communities, providing a long term data set showing changes in the health of the reef through time. For the first couple of weeks of my project I was in training. I attended lectures on marine ecology, coral morphology and fish family morphology. I had to learn to identify benthic species – corals, invertebrates, algae and other bottom-dwelling organisms. My knowledge was tested first on the computer and then underwater. I then had to learn to carry out underwater benthic transect surveys. Once qualified, I surveyed the bay almost every day and this data collection was one of the ways I felt I was most able to help out.
I also helped with the weekly water testing of the bay, plus sedimentation surveys and fisheries surveys. Three times a year, sea grass is surveyed, to contribute to data collection for the international sea grass research network; SeaGrassNet. We spent two days completing transect surveys of sea grass in two areas of the bay, one ‘high pressure’ and one ‘low pressure’ area, to study species diversity, percentage cover and sea grass health. Sea grass is very important because of its role as a nursery for juvenile fish.
Finally on the research front, with my basic knowledge of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) I was able to help produce maps of the bay displaying our survey data on them; for example, maps showing the areas most heavily fished, or with the least coral coverage, or with the highest sedimentation rates.
Conservation of the reef is perhaps the most important aim for the bay. Reef Doctor helped establish a fishermen’s association, FIMIHARA, which is now self-propagating. FIMIHARA established the bay’s first marine protected area (MPA); Le Rose Garden. The MPA has the best preserved coral in the whole of the lagoon. It is forbidden to fish there, and tourists pay two thousand ariary (~£0.65) to snorkel or dive there. All profits go to FIMIHARA, providing an alternative income for fishermen as well as an incentive to preserve the coral. Members of FIMIHARA recently approached Reef Doctor to discuss the possibility of establishing an octopus no-take zone in the bay. In such a zone, fishing octopuses is periodically forbidden for a specified period of time, to allow populations to grow. We went to five proposed sites to confirm the presence of octopuses and make a recommendation as to the most appropriate site. We also attended a mangrove restoration day organized by another local NGO. The day we went to help plant mangrove trees was very important as it was attended not only by many Malagasy from nearby villagers, but also by a representative of the Malagasy government from the capital city.
The fact that so many villagers were interested in restoring mangrove forests and the fact that FIMIHARA approached Reef Doctor of its own initiative about octopus reserves is a testament to the success of ongoing education projects. Reef Doctor pays for two teachers in Ifaty’s school to teach the marine curriculum, which the education staff plan out. I helped to make lesson plans for the teachers and produced educational materials such as posters on topics ranging from coral morphology, to how to treat burns, to geography and biology. We also produced pamphlets about coral conservation to educate the tourists in nearby hotels. I helped to run the weekly Kid’s Club, where the children of Ifaty play games intended to teach them about environmental issues. For example, we organized a scavenger hunt around the bush where the children had to identify different types of trees and learn a few facts about them.
Finally, Reef Doctor helps villagers to start up projects to earn an alternative income, to widen Ifaty’s economic base and reduce reliance on the sea. I attended the Women’s association meetings, where the women of the village meet to learn to embroider cloth to sell to tourists. The association not only gives the women a chance to meet up and chat, and also some independence from their husband’s fishing income. They will soon be buying some land to set up a boutique for their products.
Conservation work is clearly vital in the Bay of Ranobe because of the extreme rate of coral destruction and because of the heavy dependence of the Vezo on the coral reef and its productivity. Working with Reef Doctor for so long gave me a real insight into how the NGO operated and into what its philosophy was. It does a lot of great work and has, in my opinion, the right way of going about that work. The people living in the area are integral to managing its natural resources. It is not possible to conserve marine resources without working with local communities because it is they who use the resources so intensively and whose lives depend on them. To solve the problems of the coral reef, it is vital to look at the problems the community faces. Too many NGOs and other conservation and development institutions throw money into a project that they have set up based on their own concepts of how things should be done, and do not stay long enough to see it through. This leaves behind a project unlikely to be successful in the long term, and a dependency culture whereby the Malagasy have no incentive to start up their own projects, as they can wait for the next foreign NGO to come and help them. This is what Reef Doctor avoids, by employing Malagasy staff, by listening to the communities and to their needs, and by thinking in the long term. That is why FIMIHARA is a self-sustaining institution and that is why the women’s association is growing organically, organized by the women themselves. The marine environment benefits because it is protected in the long term by both the NGO and the Vezo, and conservation will hopefully become part of everyday life. There are, of course, still issues to be addressed. For example; turtles are still fished out because they are a delicacy that can fetch a lot of money; there are new threats to the coral as a result of global warming; beach seine is still common further up the coast. However, Reef Doctor hopes to be able to leave Ifaty in a few years time and know that the Vezo do, and will continue to, lead a sustainable lifestyle in balance with its natural resources. This is an ambitious, but not unrealistic aim.
Reef Doctor’s volunteer project is one of its main sources of funding. By having paying volunteers come out to help, the organization has an incentive to show them that it is carrying out important and worthy work, so that word will spread and more volunteers will come. Looking back at my expedition to Madagascar, I learnt a huge amount – not only about coral reef ecosystems and their biology but also about how a conservation NGO operates in a developing country, what challenges it faces and how it overcomes them. It was an invaluable, unforgettable experience.
