Meeting interesting people

We have been pretty busy the last few months. Supervising volunteers, designing and carrying out the biological research, writing research ideas for new thesis students and interns while trying to relax a little bit in between all the activities as well.

We have had some good talks with local institutions. We had a visit from the director of the marine research institute of Siliman University in Dumaguete who was interested in what we are doing and were we live. Hopefully we will be able to cooperate with the university and for instance be able to use their marine lab if thesis students want to make water samples to check the level of pollution and sedimentation and see if we can help them with collecting data. Now it's time to visit the marine lab and talk with professors and teachers to find out exactly what they are doing and if they have data from this area.

Dolf attended a three day conference about seahorses in Dumaguete last week (somebody had to take the volunteers out diving so Annelies could only attend the fist day) and came back full of ideas and a new social network. At the least we can at least contribute to their seahorse research, because yesterday evening during our night dive we found two seahorses, including a pregnant male (yes you read this correctly, the male has a brood pouch).

We now have a good relationship with the mayor of Zamboanguita as well, which resulted in some useful talks and a cooperation with the municipal agricultural and environmental office.We are very lucky that the municipality starts a project in our own barangay (neighbourhood), with money from the GIZ (German embassy, we saw GIZ projects when we were in Bolivia as well). In two barangays of Zamboanguita Marine Protected Areas will be re-implemented or re-enforced. The MPA's will be enlarged and neighbouring sea grass beds and mangroves will be included in the MPA as well. They are important, though often neglected, because they have both a nursery function for fish (juvenile fish hide between the roots and leaves and are safe for predators) and function as a sink for sedimentation from land and thus protecting the coral reefs. We had a nice conversation with the provincial environmental department who is responsible for carrying out the project together with the municipality. We need some patience though: the project was supposed to start in January 2015, but the money still needs to be transferred to the municipality before it can start. The projects also contains a plan to start a mangrove nursery so people can replant mangroves. Our role will be to do the scientific monitoring of the area, to organize activities for the local monitoring team consisting of fishermen and to help out with the mangrove nursery and replanting.

We start coming Friday with finding the sinkers of the old MPA. The MPA needs to be visible for everybody which means the demarcation line will consists of buoys who need to be attached to concrete sinkers. The sinkers are still there from 6 years ago when the MPA was implemented the first time, but the buoys are long gone because of the 2011 typhoon.

The peace corps is very active in the Philippines and the municipalities of Zamboanguita and Siaton have their own volunteer. They work a lot with the local community and speak Visayan fluently. Unfortunately, both volunteers leave in September but we could take over their Visayan books, so now it's time for us to include Visayan lessons in the program and practice with our cook, who speaks both English and Visayan. The Zamboanguita peace corps volunteer already does a lot with environmental education and she even has two environmental clubs/ groups for high school students which we will take over when she leaves.

So, slowly slowly we start working together with more and more people and some of MCP's ideas are starting to take shape.