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!