(Hong Kong, 7 December 2016) Living Seas Hong Kong proudly wins the gold award in the Hong Kong Cleanup 2016 for the Most Trash Collected! A big thanks to all our volunteers for their contributions. Not only do we have a cleaner sea, but without their support we could not regain the title again from 2014.

The awards presentation ceremony took place at the Tasmania Ballroom,Central, Hong Kong. Dod, Jeffrey and Harry represented LSHK to receive the award. Let’s work together to raise the awareness about marine debris. Remember – “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle”.

For the details of the cleanup please refer to http://livingseas.hk/wordpress/926-2/

Photo: Dod, Harry and Jeffrey represent LSHK to receive the award.

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(Hong Kong, 29 October 2016) Styrofoam again was a major component of marine litter in the eastern waters of Hong Kong, as observed by volunteers from Living Seas Hong Kong (LSHK; 勃勃海洋) participating in the 2016 Hong Kong Cleanup campaign to clean the coastal areas in Hong Kong.

Bayside Beach (Pik Sha Wan 碧沙灣), Clearwater Bay was chosen as the cleanup site. This beach is popular not only with the local community, but also with snorkelers, divers and fishermen. Volunteers are divided into two groups: divers search and collect underwater marine debris and other group collects and removes refuse along the shoreline.

Bayside Beach was found in poor condition for this year’s cleanup. Volunteers saw more plastic and polystyrene than they have seen in recent cleanups. Styrofoam waste had broken down into thousands and thousands of very small pieces. Wind and storms had blown the pieces to the shore, accumulating on the beach especially around bushes and in drainage pools. Extra effort was needed to remove them.

In 2015 LSHK collected a total of 351 kgs of rubbish; this year almost 500 kgs was collected with fewer volunteers. Despite the recent increase in public awareness we continue to see excessive rubbish in our seas.

David O’Dwyer, Chairman of LSHK, said, “Waste continues to be a major issue for our marine environment and despite increasing public awareness and involvement, it remains a major problem for our marine life. The main sources of styrofoam waste found are packaging for which industry must take a substantial part of the blame, as well as small pieces from lunch boxes.”

“The Hong Kong public needs to stop this damaging life habit. These enter the sea and are now part of our food chain. A large and consistent effort is needed to stop this devastation,” he added.

The annual Hong Kong Cleanup Challenge runs from September through November, and is the region’s largest event of its kind. Volunteers recorded the type and quantity of litter found. The data will be compiled and analyzed so that we can better understand the challenge, and create awareness, action, and industry recommendations to help solve the issue.

Photo: Styrofoam is everywhere – on the beach, around the bushes and floating on water.

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Living Seas Hong Kong participates in Hong Kong Reef Check 2016
Raising public awareness about the value of coral reefs

(Hong Kong, 13 August 2016) A team of divers from Living Seas Hong Kong 勃勃海洋 (LSHK) participated in the Hong Kong Reef Check 2016 to monitor the health of the coral communities in Hong Kong.

The LSHK team prepared their scuba diving gear and set off to Tau Tun, Kat O Island (吉澳頭墩). Divers recorded the indicator species including 20 fishes and invertebrates along with the coral coverage and health status. The data helps to assess the coral condition and fauna diversity of the coral reef ecosystems over time.

Coral communities are rich in biodiversity. Species observed by the LSHK Team include wrasses, groupers and snappers. Invertebrates like crabs, urchins, sea cucumbers as well as vertebrates including different tropical coral reef fishes make up the rich underwater biodiversity.

Ng Tze Yan, the scientist for LSHK’s Hong Kong Reef Check team, said, “As we observed, the existing coral reefs at Tau Tun are quite healthy, not bleached or damaged. There are quite a number of fishes that we can find.”

“However, there are quite a number of sea urchins there. High densities of sea urchins can feed on the corals and cause damage. We should have a closer look at the situation.” Ng added.

“Our motto for LSHK is to preserve the marine environment for future generations,” said Jeffrey Lee, the co-founder of LSHK. “So one thing we can do is contribute our part to the reef check survey. This is also an opportunity to educate people about the state of Hong Kong’s marine environment and what we can do to help to preserve it.”

Hong Kong Reef Check 2016, a four-month exercise starting from June, covers the marine areas in the eastern part of Hong Kong waters, including a number of sites of ecological importance.

Participation in the global Reef Check initiative helps to track changes and stochastic impacts on reef systems worldwide. The data is primarily obtained through the annual reef check survey performed by citizen scientists under the guidance of a marine biologist. The data collected then feeds into a global database.

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Living Seas Hong Kong (勃勃海洋) is organising another coastal clean-up event for Hong Kong Cleanup / 清潔香港 on 18th October 2015 (Sunday), starting at 9am.

This is our 3rd cleanup for HK Cleanup and our 7th cleanup at this location. Last year we were awarded the title for the most trash collected in the 2014 HK Coastal Cleanup. Please join us to maintain that title for this year.

Again, we will be doing both beach cleanup and underwater cleanup (for qualified divers).

Please click on the following link to complete a registration form and to let us know how you can help out on the day.

Cleanup event online registration form

Look forward to seeing you.

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Living Seas Hong Kong was very proud  to receive an award at the Hong Kong Cleanup Challenge award ceremony on the 25th November. The Gold award is recognition for the hard work from all our volunteers at 19th October cleanup event at Bayside Beach.  Our award was for the most number of pieces collected.  At our 19th October, beach and underwater cleanup event beach we  found an environmental disaster with a snowstorm of polystyrene pieces on the beach and lots of ghost nets in the reef area.

Our volunteers did a great job to cleanup as much as was humanly possible.  Congratulations to all.

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In attendance at the ceremony were Living Seas Hong Kong members, David O’Dwyer (Chairman), Jeffrey Lee and Jimmy Lo, together with key volunteers on the day, Julia Leung and Harry Chan.

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What is obvious in Hong Kong is that no matter how much effort is put into cleaning our marine environment trash keeps coming back, there is a need to identify and stop the source of the rubbish that is plaguing our marine environment.[/su_column][/su_row]

[su_row][su_column size=”1/2″] To achieve this we strongly support the Hong Kong Cleanup  efforts to get accurate and complete data on what rubbish is found and we organised this event to assist in this campaign’s efforts, with volunteers divided into groups with roles of data collectors and rubbish collectors.

For this cleanup event  we returned to Bayside Beach, a location we have been to on many occasions.  The last cleanup we organised here was for World Ocean Day on 8th June this year.  Unfortunately this time what we found could be described as an environmental disaster with a huge amount of rubbish on the beach and in the water, much worse than our last visit. [/su_column]
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The beach itself was covered in plastics of various kinds and one end of the beach was a snow storm of polystyrene.  There were two very large blocks, some kind of construction waste,  found which had broken up into literally millions of tiny pieces, uncountable and catastrophic.  Team got to work collecting and recording what was found.

[su_row][su_column size=”1/2″]The situation wasn’t much better for our diving groups, with a large amount of fishing nets, discarded ropes  and plastic bags smothering the coral areas in the bay.  Not a good situation.

Along with the collecting of the damaging debris, the divers were able to release entangled crabs and fish that were caught in newly discarded nets, some of the discarded nets were more that 20 metres long. Discarded nets are common in Hong Kong waters and are referred to as Ghost Nets, cleaning these nets and reducing the occurence is a huge issue. [/su_column] [su_column size=”1/2″]

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At the end of day of a tiring but satisfying day our group efforts were rewarded with a good accurate tally of data on what we found.

Here are some of the highlights

635 plastic bottle caps
216 straws
1300 plastic bags or plastic food wrappers
596 metres of discarded ropes
182 fishing nets or pieces of nets, some new nets retrieved of upto 20 metres.

Full data card can be downloaded. http://livingseas.hk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/CleanupData-19thOct2014.pdf

Living Seas Hong Kong is very grateful for the support of Wilfred Catering

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We are returning to Bayside Beach, Clearwater Bay, a nice bay, with good coral coverage but with a real trash problem.  We are looking for volunteers to get involved, clearing the beach and the coral areas or assisting with sorting and weighing.[/su_column][/su_row]

Everyone and anyone is welcome.

We do need to know how many people are coming, please let us know by email to get_in_touch@livingseas.hk  or sign-up on event page on Facebook

The post Volunteers needed – Beach and underwater cleanup on 19th Oct appeared first on Living Seas Hong Kong.

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We departed Wong Shek Pier, at 9:30am heading for two dives sites, firstly to Crescent Island for a fun dive followed by a dive at Port Island for the reefcheck survey.

Crescent Island itself it located in the far North East of Hong Kong and is just outside the Yan Chau Tong Marine Park.  Port Island is located near the mouth of  Tolo Harbour.

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Unfortunately, given the heavy rain over proceeding days the visibility was poor, around 2m and at times less, never the less we were able to enjoy our diving and to be able to record a number of different fish species over the 100m transect.  Here is a record of the fish we managed to identify, in descending order of frequency:

1. Damsel (mostly Neopomacentrus bankieri)
2. Numerous small wrasse (some different species including Moon wrasse) **
3. Copper sweeper (Pempheris oualensis)
4. Banded Goby (Amblygobius stethophthalmus)
5. Cardinalfish (Apogonichthyoides niger)
6. Butterfly fish (2 species, Chaetodon sp)  **
7. Sargeant Major (Abudefduf bengalensis)
8. Sandperch (Parapericis sp)
9. One very small grouper **
10. One cleaner wrasse (prob Labroides dimidiatus)

The fish listed in bold and with ** are species that we were looking for (indicator species),  other indicator species (such as snapper, sweetlips, moray eels, groupers) were missing.   There were no large fish spotted and a lack of diversity.  Happy to see the butterfly fish, and the cleaner wrasse was a surprise.

The corals were very good, both in terms of coverage and diversity, however this was surveyed by a different group.

It was a fulfilling day, unfortunately the water conditions probably limited our success in spotted species, but from this quick look there is a long way to go before Hong Kong’s marine diversity and especially its fish stocks recover.    Looking forward to seeing the overall results for Reef Check 2014 and to participating again.

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To celebrate World Oceans Day 2014, Living Seas Hong Kong is organising a beach and underwater cleanup at our “adopted beach”  Bayside Beach, Clearwater Bay.   Bayside is a nice, small bay, with good coral coverage but does suffer from construction waste, and other general refuse.  We want to try to help the coral community here to thrive.

Last year we organised two events at this location, one for World Oceans Day 8th June 2013 and the other for International Coastal Cleanup.  Divers worked to clean underwater and folk were working to clear the beach of trash.

Anyone is welcome to come along, register and find more details on our Facebook Page.  Facebook Page  or please send an email via “Contact us” on this website.

Photos from last years World Oceans Day event.

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