Pipelines to Coral Conservation

By Rachael Philip

WHEN pleasure becomes a passion, Azizah Wahid rounds up her team at Panasonic Malaysia and dives in for a purpose. RACHAEL PHILIP reports.

Behind her diving mask, one can barely make out Azizah Wahid’s expression. But it’s obvious she’s happy. Clicking away with a camera at about 10m underwater, she swims from one coral community to another.

She is especially interested in the coral growing on an artificial reef that she and her team created on the seabed of Pulau Perhentian last year. Brightly coloured fish weave in and out of the corals. This has been their abode for the past few months.

On land much later, Azizah says: “Some corals have grown to this size (gesturing with the palms of her hands).”

The artificial reefs, actually PVC pipes geometrically shaped as waist-high prisms, were pinned into the seabed last year as part of Panasonic Malaysia’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programme.

The non-toxic pipes are excellent surfaces for corals, algae and even oysters to attach themselves to. In time, this provides some form of structure and food for other marine life such as fish.

As Panasonic Malaysia’s manager of corporate communications and branding, Azizah did not have to look far when the company wanted to adopt a CSR project.

Diving was one thing she and her husband loved. She could not get enough of the enchanting underwater world and being in the midst of exotic marine creatures. Sunken shipwrecks were her playground.

“On holidays, I used to watch scuba divers emerge from the waters and thought it must be interesting down there,” she says.

Out of curiosity, she took up snorkelling. What she saw, she realised, was just the tip of the iceberg. There, just metres below, was a brave new world waiting to be discovered.

Azizah signed up for the scuba diving course. Equipped with a licence, there was no turning back for her. Divers say this is an addictive hobby. Her remisier husband was sucked into it two years later.

She picked up advanced techniques from commercial divers and reached a depth of 160ft with a group of divers filming a documentary on a shipwreck. Her job was to hold the lighting equipment for them.

After having dived in almost all the well-known dives spots from Maldives and Mauritius to Indonesia, Australia and, of course, all the islands of Malaysia, she felt compelled to do something more.

For 11 years as a diver, she witnessed first hand the decline of coral reefs. Large, thriving colonies of corals on one holiday are reduced to a smaller mass of reef on her next visit some years later.

Studies done on the loss of coral reefs are very disturbing. To put it simply, corals are disappearing twice as fast as the rainforest, or at a rate of one per cent a year.

Besides the obvious benefits to coastal communities, coral reefs are also environmentally important because they remove and recycle carbon dioxide which, in excessive amounts, contributes to global warming.

Through the gloriously clear waters of Pulau Perhentian, the rubble that is dead coral lying on the seabed is a grim sight. It does not help that dead corals look somewhat like human bones.

Azizah started small. She took part in projects to clean beaches and seabeds, mostly leisure activities organised by dive centres and other organisations.

In 2004, she got involved in a “dive and clean up” effort organised by the Terengganu State government. The following year she kick-started Panasonic Malaysia’s conservation plan with a community project at Pulau Kecil. They cleaned up the beach front and explained to the children of Sekolah Kebangsaan Pulau Perhentian the importance of conservation work.

They also partnered with University Malaysia Terengganu and the Terengganu Marine Park to plant five artificial reefs off Teluk Pauh. The team also engaged in an underwater crayon drawing feat which made it into the Malaysian Guinness Book of Records.

Last year, they planted more reefs, 10 in all, and revisited the children at the school.

This year, after a seven-hour drive from Kuala Lumpur and the ferry ride from Kuala Besut, the first thing she and her team did was to revisit the reefs they planted in the previous visits.

“This is the fruit of our labour,” she says. “It was so exciting to see marine life teeming around the corals which have grown so well.”

The five reefs planted in 2005 in Teluk Pauh were eventually transferred to the Marine Park and the corals bloomed to about 10cm while last year’s effort sprouted corals of five cm.

“The high PVC structures make it easier for coral spores to attach themselves. These are later dismantled, with the corals still attached and gently placed on the seabed for them to grow in a more natural manner,” Azizah explains.

This year, as with last year, they were accompanied by Panasonic Malaysia’s managing director Hiroshi Nakamura, also an avid diver and conservationist who has been diving for almost two decades now.

After consultations with the university and the marine park, Panasonic Malaysia decided to make a neat U-shaped formation with the 13 new PVC structures. When they return next year, they hope to find a spectacular submerged garden sustaining corals of diverse variety and colours, while the marine population gets a reposing enclave.

Divers too can swim into this U-shaped area – just be careful not to touch anything!

In batches, 20 Panasonic employers and volunteer divers descended two metres under water to nail the structures in position.

“As we move on, we learn new things. We correct ourselves and we develop a better understanding of things,” Azizah says.

This year, the PVCs, for instance, were all submerged closer to the marine park so they can be easily monitored. Next year they hope to work more closely with the university, in research and dialogue.

“We need their expertise and input to make this a more substantial project,” Azizah says.

CORAL FACTS

* Corals are invertebrates. A coral polyp has a lifespan of between two years and hundreds of years while a colony can live up to several centuries.

* Reef-forming corals do not grow at depths of over 30m or where the water temperature falls below 16 degree Celcius.

* Coral polyps are actually translucent animals. Reefs get their wild hues from the billions of colourful zooxanthellae (ZOH-oh-ZAN- thell-ee) algae they host.

* Coral reefs teem with life, covering less than one per cent of the ocean floor, but supporting about 25 per cent of all marine creatures.

* Scientists believe that we are losing coral reefs much faster than rainforests. It’s hard to quantify this because of the difficulty in getting data from the 70s and 80s when scuba diving was just taking off.

Source: nationalgeographic.com

(c) 2007 New Straits Times. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.