Meet the scientists!

I wokr for a marine conservation charity. We’re based in the village of Andavadoaka, a small place that’s a long way from anywhere! It also happens to be the most beautiful place on earth which helps. We’ve got a big operation there based at heart of the first Marine Protected Area run by villagers and the local community in Madagascar. A Marine Protected Area (or MPA for short) is a space in which there are certain rules about fishing and and other activities that everyone agrees to follow so that the coral reefs and the marine animals living on them are protected and can live in certain parts of the MPA without being caught by fishermen. 

My job is to look at the coral reefs and the marine creatures living on them and work out how the Marine Protected Area is helping them. Are the Corals growing? Are there more fish in areas where there’s no fishing than areas where there is? Are the fish bigger? There are many questions that you can ask and me and my colleagues are trying to answer as many of them as possible!

We wake up early most days. some days we start with a pre-breakfast SCUBA Dive. I’m also a PADI Divemaster and many people come out to learn to dive in Andavadoaka because of the wonderful coral reefs so some of my dives involve helping our dive instructor out with dive courses. Because of the calm waters, early mornings are usually the best for this. 

Once everyone has worked up an appetite, it’s onto Breakfast for my morning caffeine and nutella infusion before getting ready for our next dive. Research dives are my favourite as these involve taking a boat out coral reef sites that we sometimes only visit once a year. It gives me a chance to collect data to add to an ongoing project to determine how healthy the reefs around Andavadoaka are! If I’m not diving though, then I’m usually reading some scientific papers or answering e-mails or looking through some data trying to make head and fish-tail of it…

Lunchtime follows and then it’s a few hours of downtime. Electricity is only on for 8-9 hours a day so you have to make sure you’ve charged your laptop or the early afternoons become very slow!

When the power does start up again,we begin an afternoon programme of lessons and workshops for our volunteers here to help us with our marine conservation programme. This can involve teaching them to identify coral, fish or providing an overview on a specific project that we’ll be undertaking as a group in the near future. 

Before dinner, we plan the next days schedule: Where we’re going and what we’re doing. Then we all meet for dinner and Vao-Vao (Malagasy translation: Literally ‘New news’) where we discuss the days news. A long day and an early sunset leaves most of us ready for bed by the time we’re finished so it’s back to our huts to start it all again tomorrow! 

The people of Andavadoaka and the surrounding villages have a very different way of life to yours and mine. Things that we take for granted such as television and the internet are available to very few in Madagascar. A few people own radios and in the evenings whole families will crowd round and listen to local news and messages being passed from town to town. Practically no-one owns a TV so on the rare occasion that somebody brings a DVD player and a TV or projector to town, the entire village will turn out to watch whatever is being shown. 

People in Andavadoaka don’t get much of a chance to listen to the Radio or watch things on TVs so when they get the opportunity, it’s a big event and so it’s a really good way to spread the message about conservation, their Marine Portected Area and why it’s so important for future generations. The money would allow us to make several local radio programmes that we can broadcast across all the local villages and one really good video that we can take on tour with a projector and show in all the villages across the MPA! 

P.S. If you vote for me, I promise to put them all on youtube so you can watch too!