You will see in the title of this post a few grammatical errors, these dear reader are intentional and will matter to those that know us well. (A pun on a name and of course the title comes from a book by the wonderful writer and conservationist Douglas Adams).
July started with us braving some strong winds around the islands of Pattaya to start our coral gardening project, We began by setting up a little test area in Koh Sak and planted just a few small corals onto our man made structures. These coral fragments were taken from the east side of Koh Sak where there seems to be patches of damaged staghorn corals caused by boats mooring too close to the reefs.
All through July we have been backwards and forwards to check on the corals on the artificial reef and we believe an 80% success rate of them surviving is not too shabby for our first try. 

This month we also put together and taught our new Shark Conservation course with a group of students from local schools in Bangkok, the course consisted of a lecture into the biology/ecology of sharks there feeding behaviours and the common myths that are built up around these apex predators.
We then took a trip to Dive Tribes lab where we have a few sharks that are prepared with tags ready for a release program and are continued to be studied by Dive Tribe .The next day students helped with the safe transport of the sharks onto our waiting dive boat and then proceeded to release them onto the reefs around Koh Sak. We try to release them in areas where fishing trawlers and boats can not get in , this gives them protection and good feeding grounds. 
Was the course a success ? Well we believe so and this month (August) Dive Tribe have been working with a student from Australia conducting more studies into behaviours and post by-catch survival rates using a variety of methods. 

The weather throughout July has been very hot, so much so that at the end of June we noticed that many of the reefs were starting to bleach. A team of volunteers began diving with us to access the bleaching across reefs at Koh Sak, Hat Nuan , Koh Rin, Koh Phai and Koh Kumberdan. The initial picture did not look good and although we were working very randomly we could see a pattern in all the reefs that most of the large corals, Tabulet,Massive and Sub-massive were bleaching quite badly. This was due to temperature of the oceans being a constant 31 degrees celcius through out the month. We have kept a check on these through out August also and we are happy to report that the water temp has gone down a couple of degrees and most of the corals have returned to their former glory.
We still need help monitoring corals, installing transect lines and working on the reefs so if you would like to dive very cheaply and help us out , please get in touch with us on our Contact Us page.

In July we also noticed that the mooring buoy we placed on the Kut Wreck in Pattaya needed some maintenance, so the buoy was duly removed and the maintenance work began replacing some bolts and shackles to make sure that the steel line would not break. We replaced the buoy after 3 days of down time and it has done its job perfectly until late August (more of this in our August report).
If you do notice the mooring is missing at any time during your dives around Pattaya please get in touch with us HERE, and let us know the date when you noticed the buoy was missing.
 

Well congratulations are in order also, Gwyn Mills CEO of Dive Tribe also became one of the first PADI speciality seahorse instructors along with Neil James from Seafari's Dive Center whom we work very closely with. They can both now take you to their wonderful Seahorse site where they can 99% guarantee you will see and be able to study seahorses with them. Thailand sadly has the largest seahorse trade in the world and these little critters need all our help to protect and preserve them. Gwyn and Neil can confidently take you through identification, breeding cycles and where to find these critters and include dives on the seahorse site (we found 11 last week on there) and how to run transect, search patterns and how to log your data on the iSeahorse website. We want to turn you into  citizen scientist !! So all in all an action packed month, thanks to all the students that have dived, volunteered and taken courses with us this month, special thanks to Seafari dive center for really getting behind what Dive Tribe is about. 
Remember if you want to learn to dive or get involved in any of our marine conservation activities just get in touch HERE, by choosing us we can offer cut price dive courses and you will dive with one of the most ecologically aware and conservation minded divers on the planet. By diving with us you have made a conscious effort to "PROTECT AND PRESERVE" our marine environment.  

A video of Julys work can be seen HERE Please watch and leave a comment