Marine and Terrestrial Conservation Programmes in the Seychelles

Facts and figures

GVI Seychelles has surveyed 18 reefs every three months for the last eight years as well as conducting plankton tows, turtle monitoring, whale shark observations, certation sightings and logging all Megafarna observed during dives
12 Marine Park rangers have been trained in fish and Coral ID.
Contributed eight years of unbroken coral monitoring and recruitment data as well as eight years of fish biodiversity data to the Seychelles National Parks Authority. Adding this to the existing previous four years of data we now have an unbroken twelve year data set on the reefs of North west Mahe an almost unprecedented length of time for a reef monitoring program
Approximately 1000 volunteers have passed through GVI Seychelles over the last eight years. All have been trained in coral reef monitoring techniques either learning to identify 47 genre of coral species or 140 fish species
The data collected by GVI Seychelles is used by Government organisations and is the main contribution from the region to the biannual publication of “The Sate of Coral Reefs of The Indian Ocean”

Thursday, March 10, 2011

08/03/11 The Seychelles Carnival

So for those of us that didn’t sign up for the rescue diver course we had the first Seychelles International Carnival in 40 years to attend! A great mixture of parades, music and culture, the sheer number of people both local and tourist alike made it much closer in atmosphere to the Rio festival which it undoubtedly drew inspiration from, rather than smallest capital city in Africa which it is!

Kicking off on the Friday with a procession and running smoothly until ending Sunday evening with some local musical talent and school performances, it was one giant street party for all involved, including some staff members who made it onto the local radio station. To raise awareness for the volunteer work we’re doing of course!

Having been well fed by the numerous stands offering everything from burgers and chips to octopus curry and absorbing as much of the party atmosphere as we could, all that was left was to return back to base. When we returned exhausted from such a full on weekend all that was left to do was trade stories with our newly qualified rescue divers and joke about who had the better weekend! It certainly was close, and no one on base would of traded their experiences for anyone else’s.