勃勃海洋 Living Seas Hong Kong is calling for more protection of our vital marine life and marine habitats, to this end we continued our efforts in 2024 by conducting more marine life surveys dives to identify areas within Hong Kong waters of high marine biodiversity.
It was a highly productive year with some great results and some amazing observations recorded.
In 2024 we conducting eleven Marine Life Surveys covering areas in the Eastern waters, we initiated these marine life surveys back in 2021 and we now have four years of data. This is a citizen science initiative with a formalised process to record what marine life are found at different dive sites in Hong Kong.
This year we surveyed 11 different dive sites in the Eastern waters of Hong Kong, as illustrated with the following map.
If you would like to see a complete map of the sites we have surveyed.
https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=19pBnfgCRq3X9DarA5Vsk2nKvaCk6j10&usp=sharing
2024 was a very productive year, with more that 2,100 observations recorded and a record number of species seen, photographed and recorded. The following charts shows the number of Living Seas species by date and dive site.
Dive sites within Port Shelter area of Sai Kung continue to show exceptional marine biodiversity, with Basalt Island yielding some amazing observations this year. The results continue to support that areas such as Basalt Island, Sharp Island and Bluff Island need more protection from harmful human activities. Harmful activities include overfishing, ghost nets, poor anchoring and marine litter.
A quick look at a few of our marine dive days this year.
The team from our May 19th survey dive to Basalt, with hand signal for ghost pipefish, an exciting first time observation on our survey dives.
The July dive and the first time we dove on the Western side of Tsim Chau island in Tai Long Wan. Gloomy conditions with rain, but some first time sightings of blackspotted pufferfish, blue spotted wrasse, it was also of interest that we found an extensive area of seaweed. The fact that the seaweed continued to thrive into warmer summer waters, was of particular interest to researchers at HKU.
20th October Survey dive, yielded some surprise results, with two unusual trevally sightings, and some first time sightings of special damselfish at Sharp Island. We get surprises everytime we go underwater.
Watch this space for more updates coming.