Blue Lagoon

As a Project Coordinator/Assistant, your main duties will be:

• Lead a team of volunteers. These volunteers will need to be trained to conduct transect surveys in the area.
• Record the quantity and diversity of fishes at several monitoring sites.
• Track fluctuations in the benthic community over time. This information will then be entered into our coral and fish monitoring database, which you will also be in charge for updating.
• Monitor levels of illegal fishing activities in the area. This means making patrols along the coast and on the water as well as reporting your sightings to the local Coast Guards.
• You will be responsible for maintenance of the boat you use. You will need to coordinate with one of our captains to organize your monitoring.

As a Volunteer Coordination Intern, your main tasks will be as follows:

• Coordinate short-term volunteers’ groups who join the Blue Lagoon and Coral Reef monitoring programmes throughout the year.
• Keep a record of information such as fishes’ populations and coral status (monitoring activities in which volunteers participate).
• If necessary, you will also help eradicate threats to reefs and fishes.

Overall, you will be in charge for taking care of the project volunteers. You will make sure they do their job and you will be at their disposal to help them and show them what they can do to help them to achieve their goals for the projects.

Your main duties include planning and managing day-to-day activities which include:

• Implementation of the coral nursery.
• Maintenance of the nursery through cleaning.
• Repairs as required.
• Write reports.
• Data collection (water parameters, size of coral fragments and so on).
• Transplantation phase.

We are still in the early stages of the project. This means that the main activities involve collecting the required data, analyzing it, planning weekly maintenance activities and monitoring the coral nursery site.

As a trainee, you need to be a good diver and team leader. You must also know about statistical analysis and have a good scientific understanding of the marine ecosystem, especially the coral reef ecosystem.

As a Marine Turtle Monitoring Intern, your first mission will be to lead and train volunteers. This will include:

• Conduct marine turtle surveys in the Blue Bay Marine Park.
• Estimate the actual population of turtles in the Blue Bay MPA.
• Determine:  
• the degree of turtle residence in the MPA.
• time spent away from the MPA.
• the importance of the MPA as a feeding site for turtles.
• stressors on the population.

Data and photographs will need to be collected and recorded correctly to obtain as much information as possible about the behaviour of the different species living in the Marine Park.

You will do this from a glass-bottom boat or by snorkelling. You must, therefore, be a good swimmer and snorkeller.

The Blue Bay lagoon contains both Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) and fisheries reserves. They intend to restrict fishing activity and preserve the marine environment. Although regulations and rules are put up, not everyone follow them, and marine wildlife remains threatened.

We conduct a human activity monitoring program aimed to track illegal fishing in the area. Excursions take place twice a week at 7 a.m. by boat, kayak, SUP or beach patrol. All data is collected and stored on an Excel spreadsheet. From there they are analysed and summarized in a monthly report which can be sent to the local government.