Ocean Gardener
Do you want to learn more about coral biology, coral farming, and coral restoration? Ocean Gardener is now offering guided and attended snorkeling tours of their coral farm located on the island of Bali Indonesia.
Join Ocean Gardener for a 4-hour tour of their shallow water Acropora coral farm. Choose between a guided tour led by a Marine Biologists, or an attended tour where a local guide will show you the marked underwater path. At each stop and you will have sign posts and information cards explaining you the different parts of the farm.
What To Expect
Before getting in the water you will learn all the basics about coral biology, what is a coral polyp, learn about coral symbiosis, and how corals grow. Then you will learn the difference between hard and soft corals, learn about coral defense system and all about the slow war between different coral species.
Once you have the basics down, you will start to learn to identify a few different species on the coral farm, and you will learn to identify corals bases on grow forms.
Since you are visiting the coral farm it is imporant to know about coral reprodction. On the farm, corals are being reproduced asexually through fragmentation so you will learn about the two different ways that corals reproduce both sexually and asexually.
Now that all the science is out of the way it’s time to get wet and go snorkeling around the farm. You will visit the different racks with very young coral fragments, to broodstock colonies and all the way to mature colonies that have now becomes healthy artificial reefs. You will even have the chance to fragment corals and plant them on one of the artificial reefs.
During each tour you will have the chance to plant your own coral included in the price. If you would like to plant more or donate to the project to help further their coral restoration effort that is also a possibility.
