The coral reefs of the Surin Islands, which are about 150 km north of Phuket, are believed to have largely recovered from the intense bleaching they suffered in 2010, national park officials have reported.
“In 2010, El Nino saw sea temperatures in the Gulf of Thailand and the Andaman Sea rise by 2-3ºC, which resulted in coal bleaching across about 80 square kilometres,” Prarop Plang Ngan, Chief Phuket Marine National Park Operation Center 2, told The Phuket News. He added: “Our staff went out to to inspect the damage done after more coral bleaching conditions in the park in May 2019.”
Restoration efforts were undertaken by park officials and the Phuket Rajabhat University Faculty of Science and Technology. The team went to inspect the results of their efforts at the end of last month and Mr Pharop confirmed to local media that the vast majority of the damaged corals have now recovered.
“We were following up on the recovery of the corals in the park and found that more than 90 per cent of the corals had improved,” he said. The officers established three recovery areas, at Stork Island, Hin Pae and Tarinla Island, where coral regrowth could be monitored. They noticed that, where corallimorphs – organisms associated with the stony, reef-building corals – were thriving, other types of corals were not.
“We removed the corallimorph from the experimental plots and found that where the corallimorph was removed, branch corals had grown five to 10 centimetres in only eight months,” Mr Prarop said. “In the future, corallimorph may take a year to dominate an area naturally, so we will pay more attention to this and remove it where necessary to help other forms of corals to grow.”
The Surin Islands are among the big natural tourist attractions around Phuket, popular with divers and snorkelers who come to see the once-remarkable reefs. National park officials have been making efforts to reduce the harmful impacts of the the tourism trade in the whole area in order to protect and preserve the reefs here.
More extreme measures were taken at Koh Tachai, about 35 km south of the Surin Islands, which has been indefinitely closed to tourism since October 2016. Similarly, the famous Maya Bay in the Phi Phi Islands was closed to boat traffic earlier this year to protect nearby corals.
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