What it's like to work at MMRP

May 2019

Partnered with Six Senses Laamu, our manta team in the south of the Maldives is stationed just a ten-minute boat ride away from a year-round manta aggregation site. Since developing a partnership with the resort in 2014, we’ve never had a month without manta sightings making this an incredibly unique and valuable site in the Maldives. Although only a small population of mantas reside in Laamu, 126 at the moment, the residents here are frequent visitors to our cleaning stations. Every morning, we either head out for a research trip or join Six Senses guests on their dives to meet our favourite residents and help them become citizen scientists themselves.

Currently, our research is focused on measuring manta rays and investigating what they are up to when we aren’t around! As entertaining as it would be to see us measure manta rays with a tape measure, we are a bit reliant on technology and use a stereo video system. Since we see the same mantas regularly, we can measure them frequently and track their growth over time. Besides measuring mantas, we’re also using an RUV (Remote Underwater Video camera) to record the mantas when we aren’t around. Check out our “day in the life” video to see what the RUV captured that we missed while on our research dive!

While research is a large part of our role here, we’ve also been working as part of the Maldives Underwater Initiative team at the resort to foster relationships in the community. In February and March, we visited three local schools on the island of Gan and taught the children about marine megafauna and coral reefs. We then had the chance to take them snorkelling! Many kids on the local islands have never seen a coral reef and seeing their reactions to the underwater world for the first time is an unforgettable and heartwarming experience. We haven't told the kids yet, but we recently received a grant to buy 15 sets of snorkelling gear for each of the 13 schools in Laamu. This equipment will be incredibly valuable in the schools allowing teachers to take their students snorkelling throughout the year. We're planning to start distributing the snorkelling equipment in June.