2015 Annual Report

2015 marked an important milestone in our Foundation’s life – completion of the field-work for our Global Reef Expedition (GRE). We circumnavigated the globe on the GRE, engaged with 15 different countries and surveyed 97 islands and over 1,000 individual reefs. However, …

Coral Reefs: Trouble in Paradise Film

Coral Reefs: Trouble in Paradise Film by Living Oceans Foundation tells the story of an international scientific team in the Chagos Archipelago, a tropical paradise in the British Indian Ocean Territory with some of the healthiest coral reefs on the planet. …

Sharks Take a Bite

Back in the summer of 2013, while conducting the Global Reef Expedition mission to French Polynesia, a team of cinematographers and researchers from Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation were documenting shark feeding without the use of bait or other attractants. This article …

COTS Control, Collection, and Conservation

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Expedition Log: Maldives – Day 18 Over a short three-week period, our team of four scientists collected over 7,500 crown of thorns starfish (COTS) from three locations off North Malé Atoll and South Malé Atoll in the Maldives. While this …

Securing the Survival of Anantara’s reefs

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Expedition Log: Maldives – Day 17 Our third area of research in the Maldives involved recent outbreaks of COTS reported from South Malé Atoll near Anantara Dhigu and Veli. Marine Biologists Marta Rigo and Alba had first observed starfish in the …

Poisoning COTS or removal by hand?

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Expedition Log: Maldives – Day 14 Crown of thorns starfish (COTS) have undergone population explosions since at least the 1960s and scientists and managers have tried to control these outbreaks for just as long. The standard practice to control COTS …

Cotton Candy Corals

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A mass bleaching event in the Indian Ocean turns corals cotton-candy shades of pink and blue Written by Elizabeth Rauer The phrase ‘coral-bleaching’ brings to mind ghostly-white skeletons of coral but what we found when we dived on reefs in the …

Courageous Crabs

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Expedition Log: Maldives – Day 13 Corals have very few defenses against crown of thorns starfish (COTS). Their shape may partially protect them, especially species with long, closely spaced branches that are inaccessible to the stomach of the starfish. There …