Mangrove Day – Monday, May 25, 2015

On May 25, Mangrove Day was a combination of a beach pick up for propagules in the morning and planting and expanding our very own Mangrove nursery at Ventura apartments.

We were picking up live propagules at Uprising Resort beach for about 3 hours filling up bin bags. With a team of about 22 this was highly effective with rough estimates of this pickup of over 5,000 propagules, resulting as one of the best beach pickups we've ever had. In the afternoon we started filling up the empty plastic bottles and planted around 2,000. Thus expanding our nursery from around 5,500 to 7,500. The very exciting thing about this nursery is that there’s room for much, much more. All in all it was one of the most successful Mangrove pick up and planting days we've had in a while.

Mangroves are incredibly important part of conservation of our oceans creatures. Mangroves provide a home and shelter for a big part of ocean juvenile creatures, and if there is a constant decrease in mangrove forests on a global scale, this is a problem for us all. The main steps the Mangrove for Fiji project encounter include; collecting propagules, planting the propagules in a protected garden area, where they can be monitored and nurtured to increase survival rate and the last step planting them in the wild.

By Theo Peeters, England