Strengthening MPA boundaries

Happy New Year everybody! We had a nice party at Bongo Bongo yesterday evening with a wonderful dinner and of course lechon (a whole roasted small pig and everything of it is consumed). Filipino's like the ears and tongue best, which suited the Europeans just fine, they could focus on the meat, accompanied by an intestine and liver sauce (or not) but also a wonderful ceviche (raw fish with a lot of lime) of marlin.

Filipinos have a nice habit of starting the New Year: anything that you have that has an engine needs to be started asap in the new year. The noise of the engine brings good fortune to the car/ motor bike. Since we can use some good luck, Dolf happily put the habit to the test. Let's wait and see. We certainly had a lot of exhaust fumes in our lungs as a start of the new year. Because of two days of continuous rain, the road to and from the arboretum has become very muddy at some parts. Yesterdays work consisted of strengthening the road by throwing large and small rocks, gravel and sand in some puddles. It only helped partially. The car still became stuck when we were heading to Bongo Bongo in our party clothing. Fortunately the workers just finished their day and they were able to pull the car out of the mud for us.

Hurray! We finally moved over to Zamboanguita a few days ago. In the morning, we do not hear pigs, goats, cars and church bells but birds and creaking bamboo (and the occasional motorbike). The arboretum is a wonderful place to live, in the middle of nature and a bit secluded from society.

Unfortunately we do have brownouts every day, meaning we have no elektricity for 15 minutes up to two hours. The internet is connected to the solar power grid of the owner of the arboretum, so funnily enough we do have internet during a brownout. The village of Zamboanguita itself is a 15 minute drive with the car, so it is for instance not possible anymore to walk over and do some shopping. As long as we do not have any more problems with our car and motorbike, this is no problem. In a few more months we have volunteers running all over the place and we do not have time to do our own shopping anyway. The constructors are (of course) behind schedule, but we have now 10 people walking around doing the building, so in two weeks we have at least an equipment room, kitchen and two huts, we hope.

One of the first official happenings in which we could participate as MCP in the municipality of Zamboanguita was helping setting the boundaries again for an already existing Marine Protected Area (MPA) in Dalakit. The MPA is enforced for quite some years, but the demarcation lines disappeared after several typhoons, which makes it hard to show where the no-fishing zone starts.

The coastal resource manager Tony managed to motivate a team of enthusiastic local fisherman to help with the work. They prepared 46 concrete blocks, used for sinkers and made a nice system for attaching rope to the styrofoam buoys.

The first part of the day was already a challenge: get the marine patrol boat into the water. With 10 strong man slowly pushing the boat forward from the sand in the water, we eventually managed to get the boat in the water. The concrete blocks of about 100 kgs each were moved with a digger as close as possible to the water. One block was tied to the boat and dragged in the water, until it was deep enough to float. Then the rope and buoy were attached and the block was dropped at the right spot. The boat could only take one block at the time, meaning that it had to go back and forth to the coast to pick up each new block.

Unfortunately the water was a bit too murky to check if the sinkers were dropped correctly while scuba diving, so that task still remains. We did have the opportunity to have a look at a 20 year old artificial reef which was full of fish and also included some hard and soft coral.

The strong points of this MPA is not the coral reef, because it hardly exists here, but the extended seagrass beds, the nearby river mouth and adjacent mangroves. There are a lot of young fish to be found here, who now get a chance to grow up relatively undisturbed. Most young fish spent part in their life hidden away under the mangroves or in or near river mouths were there are relatively few predators. But most important, the local people of this neighborhood thought it was really important to start this MPA, have paid the expenses out of their own barangay (neighborhood) budget and are willing to help freely with the implementation and enforcement.

Of course there is always way for improvement. The styrofoam buoys will deteriorate in several months and need to be replaced constantly, which means the residue will disappear in the sea. The blocks were dragged through the seagrass beds, instead of lifted over it because the digger could not drive in the water. On the other hand, with a very limited budget, it is still possible to work actively on marine conservation. We as MCP now have a role in helping develop a less destructive way to set up marker buoys and see if we can increase the budget, so that we can for instance use buoys of hard plastic that last several years.

After a hard day of work about 15 sinkers with buoys were dropped, so work continued the next day. The final result is an MPA of around 500 m in length and 300 m wide. The patrolling will be done by the locals themselves. We will be monitoring the site regularly to see if any changes occur. It is really nice to see that local people can get so enthusiastic in conserving their own environment!

Filipino bureaucracy

Getting a drivers license can be a pain in the ass. We thought to make it easy for ourselves in the Netherlands: let's get an international drivers license. Done in 5 minutes. But not good enough for the Filipino ANWB. They want a translation of the embassy with official stamp. The nearest embassy is in Manila, so that's not gonna happen. Solution: you buy a temporary student license for a month and after that you do a theory exam and a practical exam. Nice detail: you only have to do the practical exam if you bring your own car, since do do not have cars of their own. You do have to pay for it though, even if you do not do the test. Sounds easy, just pay and you have your temporary license. But no, that is not how it works. After 5 hours which included 4 hours and 55 minutes of waiting and 4 minutes of walking to 6 different counters we walked out of the office again and we can repeat the whole exercise next month for the real license.

Of course if you now the right person in the office you can also pay thrice the amount of money and you just get your license, no exam, no drugs test, no medical test and hardly any waiting. Apparently we already now two of those persons through different friends...

Ok, you have a drivers license. The next step is a car. MCP has a second hand car since a couple of weeks. We have been driving around happily for 5 days and then the problems started. We have a month guarantee on the car, but unfortunately that does not guarantee that the mechanic will actually fix the problem. We are now in a state of mind that we wouldn't be surprised that the car will fall apart on day 31 (figuratively speaking of course), so we have to pay the mechanic for multiple problems.

Good mechanics are hard to find and even if you have one, the cheap Chinese parts they use to replace the old ones are not really helpful because they tend to malfunction after a couple of months/weeks/days according to your amount of luck. And that is were the real problem lies. Second hand cars come from Korea or Japan and are usually stripped to the bone in the Philippines and rebuild again with the earlier named cheap Chinese parts. From the outside everything looks fine and the first few days actually everything is fine. But a new car costs a fortune and will eventually break down at some point as well and the same song starts all over again. Who do people have cars here in the first place? From my mildly aggressive tone you have probably figured out by now that we some slight issues with our lovely car. Fortunately our motorbike is still working properly. 

I am happy to inform you that I wrote this particular part of the blog 1 week ago and the car is still functioning.

Not everything we do is frustrating though. We had a four day ReefCheck training Mid-December given by the developer of the training. We were incredibly lucky that this training was planned at the place were we are staying now and that we could join in. With a group of 20 participants including students from the Siliman University, different dive shops and Marine Conservation Philippines we followed an interesting program of lectures, diving and snorkeling.

With ReefCheck surveys you measure the abundance of human disturbances by looking at different indicator species of fish and invertebrates. You also look for abundance of coral and damage to coral trough for instance dynamite fishing, anchor damage or typhoons. In each area you want to research, you make two transects of 100m at a shallow depth and a bit deeper. Monitoring takes place as often as possible.

Since this research is simultaneously done in over 90 countries, Reef Check is a good tool to look at human disturbances worldwide. It is a relatively easy method to learn because it focuses only on a limited amount of species, which is also the disadvantage. Ecologically more interested species are left out, in favor of heavily over fished species or edible inverts. You do not very often see a Bumphead parrotfish or Humphead wrasse because they are well liked on the dinner table and grow quite big. Other common fish you find on the reef, like rabbitfish or angelfish are not part of the survey. Still, it can be quite difficult to recognize all the different kind of snappers and to not confuse them with other fish species!

MCP will be using Reef Check for part of the research and so it is useful for us to be qualified as Ecodivers from now on. We can use the Reef Check methodology and upload to data to the worldwide database. Our next step is to become official Reef Check trainers so that we can train our volunteers up to Ecodivers. For now, we will be using the extended documentation material and powerpoints to train our volunteers so they can help with the surveys. We will add some extra species because we are interested not only in human disturbances both also in the actual health of the reef ecosystem.

With the now existing Reef Check group of about 20 people we will be doing surveys in Dauin, Masaplod and Zamboanguita four times a year, starting already in January with a practice survey in Dauin. As MCP we will develop several more transects in Zamboanguita, both in- and outside Marine Protected Areas to see how bad the human disturbance is in our area and whether there are any differences inside and outside MPA's. If we find any human disturbances, we will try to find the cause and see if we can prevent or diminish it by looking for solutions with the local community, municipality and other involved parties.

The unfortunate cocks

In the end, the typhoon Ruby/ Hagupit only caused one night of rain and a few days of overcast weather. Nothing scary. The day after the typhoon we found out that if the typhoon does not come to you, it doesn't mean that it will not affect you. We wanted to get our Filipino drivers licenses, but that was not possible because they could not make internet contact with the head office (?? We had internet). Their working hours are already interesting. We were warned not to come before 9 (computers are still off) and not after 11 (early lunch time), but even within this limited time frame we were told to come back another day. That was the start sign of 2 days without internet, which gave Dolf the time to mess around with our new second hand car. After blowing some fuses he did manage to change the car radio all by himself. All other small stuff which had to be repaired was done by the mechanic (who does not necessarily do a better job than Dolf).

I forgot to mention that I visited the national sport in the Philippines a few weeks ago, the cock fighting. This is a brutal fight between to cocks, who both wear a knife at one of their legs, so they can slice open the other cock. I went with Marvin, the dive master of Bongo Bongo, who used to work there before. Taking an insider with you definitely improves your understanding.

Each Sunday afternoon, there are cock fights in the pit, the stadium. Dauin only has 5000 inhabitants and is not very rich, but the pit is some like a small concrete football stadium with a ring in the middle for the fights. Before each fight the most interesting part of the process takes place. Everybody starts shouting like crazy to place bets on other one of the cocks. A bet on one cock can be has high as 20.000 pesos (around 400 euros, all bets combined) on a normal Sunday. Before the betting starts, both owners of the cocks show how aggressive their cock is by letting him pick at the other cock three times and let the cock prance around on the ground for 30 seconds.

The actual fight can be over in less than 30 seconds if one of the cocks jumps on the other and slices open his whole belly/ neck/ other body parts so the wounded cock can't do anything anymore and sags through his legs. Both cocks are picked up from the ground and dropped again. If one of them does not attack anymore, there is a winner. The looser ends up in the owners frying pan in the evening. After watching 8 fights you get the general idea and it was time to leave again.

Because you are sitting 5 m from the ring and the arena is surrounded by a 1.5 m plastic wall it doesn't look that bad, because you only see the feathers flying around and only a limited amount of blood. After each fight, the blood and feathers are swept away and the blood is removed from the wall. If you visit an illegal cock fight in the garden of the neighbor, it looks a bit more bloody. The looser was showed around with blood leaking from him and the entrails hanging out...

On Super Sunday which is once every 1-2 months, cock fighters from a much bigger area come and fight, sometimes even from Manila. The entrance alone is already 500 pesos (the average payment for a job like construction worker is 300 pesos a day) and people (males) wager their whole salary on a fight.

When your house is on fire, you first save your cocks and only then your wife and children. This common joke shows how important cocks are in Filipino society. Half of the families in Dauin have 5 or more cocks in a cage or on a leash in their garden.

When you see a large group of people making a lot of noise you think they are watching a fight between two people, but most of the time it is just trading or selling cocks or an actual cock fight.

Watch out for falling coconuts

A week ago we explored the bays of Zamboanguita with Tony, the coastal resource manager (CRM) of Zamboanguita. I did not get to post it earlier due to lack of electricity and illness. Our work at Marine Conservation Philippines will be mostly together with him as a representative of the municipality, who manage the Marine Protected Areas (MPA's) of Zamboanguita. Before I explain what we did I first need to explain an MPA more in detail.

In the Philippines, there are several hundreds of MPA's, ranging in size from a few hectares till hundreds of ha. An MPA often has different zones of use. The most important part is the marine sanctuary. This is a no take zone, which means no fishing, no collecting of clams or crabs and no tourism. The sanctuary is surrounded by a buffer zone, where sustainable fishing is usually allowed (which is line fishing, or fishing with small nets). Within the MPA, other areas are usually designated for tourism, fishing and recreation.

With an MPA it is possible to protect all sea life and the coastal habitats, like mangroves, coral reef and sea grass. This is also beneficial for the fishing industry, because the number of fish will increase as well as their size and fish do not take the boundaries of an MPA into account which means they will also populate the area around the MPA.

Example of an MPA (green part). Bigger boats are only allowed outside the MPA in open water.

The CRM has already designed a whole plan for the Zamboanguita area, but because of lack of finances, manpower and tropical storms destroying buoys and coral, part of the plan is still in the implementation phase. Which is a good opportunity for MCP to jump in and help.

Yesterday we met some of the key people of the area; the head of the village and the head of the fishermen association and we visited a mangrove area which was replanted by local people. They only speak Visayan, so it's time to add another language to our repertoire otherwise we will be never able to communicate without Tony or another intermediate.

Unfortunately people only speak Visayan in the Visayas (makes sense), the official language next to English is Tagalog. It gets even worse, on the island of Cebu, which is part of the Visayas they speak Cebuano. The vulcanizers who repaired our bike on our holiday only spoke Cebuano. Visayan spoken in Bacolod (the capital of Negros Occidental, 100 km from here) is different than the Visayan they speak here. Some words have a different meaning, are used in a different way or pronounced different. Then there are some 150 other languages spoken in the Philippines. Needless to say, if you speak only English and you want to speak with the locals, you need to learn some additional languages. One small advantage is that the languages have taken over several Spanish and English words, but made their own version of it. At least we can already count, since they count in Spanish both in Tagalog and in Visayan...

Our little trip to Zamboanguit brings us to the title of the weblog. Since the whole coast area is lined with coconut palms, you are bound to pass when it is harvesting time. The palms are often more than 15m high, so you need some agile climbers. To make it a little easier, most of the trunks have 'stairs', little cuts out of the trunk for hand- and foot holds. When the palms are close to the road, they warn the traffic by laying some palm leafs on the road and thus 'blocking' one side of the road. You better stop, because at any moment one of the guys can drop a few coconuts from the tree and you don't want to get them on your head. Of course they have no control of how they fall, so sometimes one bumps one the other half of the road where traffic is just continuing. Well, they need to come down at some point anyway, because if the nuts are not harvested they will start to fall off by themselves at a random time which is even more dangerous.

We encountered our first tropical depression last week and the next one is coming in two days. The Philippines developed an alarm for typhoons, from phase 1-5. Today (last week Tuesday) we are in phase 1, tropical depression, which means just a lot of rain and a deliberate power cut. So, when we were walking along the beach with Tony, in the pouring rain, a fisherman told Tony that it was phase 1. Tony just continued walking like nothing was going on, so we guessed that phase 1 was not so bad, which is indeed the case. Depending on how bad the weather predictions are, schools are canceled as well. So, right now it feels like we're back in Bolivia during the rainy season: everybody is in sleep mode, because there is not much else you can do. The roads are mud pools, depending on whether they are paved or not, we cannot dive because the sea is too rough and even my e-reader abandoned me (you only have the charge the thing once every month, but it was almost empty yesterday evening). One more hour before my laptop runs out of battery and I will join the rest, do nothing, find a book which is not electronic, play games on your phone till the battery is dead or sleep... you just have to go with the flow.

In the end, we had only a two day power cut. Dolf won the bet on how long we would be out of power. One tree fell down in the whole village and of course it had to drop on the electricity poles. Other villages were less lucky with raising water levels and more trees falling down.

Now we are preparing for the next typhoon, which will fortunately be 250 km from here. We bought storm lamps, we have enough beer and rum (apparently the local habit is to have a party just before the electricity goes down) and food to survive a new power cut of a few days and the local people were already cutting branches from trees to prevent that trees will fall down on their houses. To prevent accidents, electricity is will be cut during storms and of course antennas are vulnerable because they stick out. No phone, no internet and no electricity at least on Sunday.