Maziwe Reserve and Marine Conservation

This year, we have continued to support the Friends of Maziwe Projects along the coast of Tanzania. The focus has mainly been on the Maziwe Marine Reserve, which is a reasonably small but vibrant coral reef about 9 km off the coast, gazetted as a marine reserve way back in the 1990s. This status of Marine Reserve means that it is intended to be entirely off-limits for fishing and any other kind of extraction. Still, it was mainly paper protection, and fishing went on as usual. The most alarming thing in the ’90s was the onset of dynamite fishing. In 2008 a group of concerned stakeholders came together to form what now is called Friends of Maziwe. Jon and Annette Simonson donated a fiberglass boat and engine, and we approached the Marine Parks to ask if they would support us if we would start a daily patrol out to the Maziwe reef to help with enforcement. They agreed, and the Dorobo Fund has contributed to the running cost of fuel and salaries since then. We have four full-time rangers who take turns going out for 8 hours each day to the reserve. Just their presence there has made a difference as when fishermen come on to the reef, our rangers can call the Marine Parks headquarters, and eventually, they will act and confiscate the boat with all of its equipment.

Our Maziwe Reserve Patrol Team working on the relocation and enforcement projects.

The main reason the government decided to give Maziwe protected area status was that it was a proper island with trees on it and was a critical Green Turtle nesting site. Over time the island was eroded to the point that all the trees died, and now it is only a sand bar (although an important one for sea birds) which gets covered during the spring tides. This means that without some sort of intervention, the entire Turtle population that was using Maziwe for their nests will disappear as female turtles return to where they hatched to lay their eggs. So, again, with the blessing of Marine parks, we began to relocate the turtle nests to two protected sites on the mainland. We use the same boat as the patrols, and during the two weeks of each month of the neap tide, we have a team of 4 who have been trained to go out to Maziwe early in the morning (4 a.m.) to look for any new nests and if they find them to relocate them.

Kids from the nearby Ushongo Village observing a Green Turtle nest relocation.

One of the cement buoys put in place.

We are happy to say that both the Enforcement Project and the Turtle relocations projects are going well, but the support from the Dorobo Fund is key to that success. To date, we have relocated and released over 55,000 baby turtles from the sites on the beach.

The Maziwe reserve has never had any physical demarcation to show fishermen where they can no longer go for fishing, and for years it has been a goal to do that. We identified 7 points around the reserve where we want to place demarcation Buoys. Four of these points we took from the original gazetted points, and then we added some in between so the boundary would be more visible. It is more complicated than we expected as some of the locations where we want to put Buoys are over 60 meters deep, which means we have to have an anchor of close to 800 kilos to be sure that it will hold even during storms and strong currents. It is also 9 kilometers off the coast. We made a mold and brought the materials needed all the way out to the Sandbar 9 km offshore to pour these anchors. We have created two concrete anchors so far and now know that that part of the process can be completed. In November, we also managed to move one of these heavy anchors and put in place our first Buoy point!! (See video link)

We plan to get all 7 Buoys in place in 2020. Although we are partnering with an organization called Coral Reef Care for this exercise, the Dorobo Fund is the primary funder.

We are thrilled at what we achieved this year; however, empowering local communities to be the custodians of their resources has always been at the center of what we do. Friends of Maziwe does not have the capacity to work on the community level, so we approached an organization called Mwambao. Mwambao is based in Zanzibar and has a good track record of working with fishing communities both in Zanzibar and on the Mainland in Tanga Region. We asked if they would be willing to come into Ushongo Village, which is the fishing village where Friends of Maziwe is based and work with the fishing community there. We are happy that after an initial fact-finding visit, they agreed and have started work in Ushongo. Their primary tool is to convince the fishing community to choose an inshore reef to close Octopus fishing on for around three months. Due to the life cycle of Octopus and how quickly they grow, closure of 3 months can have a dramatic effect on size and amount of catch once they reopen for extraction. Once again, it is the Dorobo Fund who has funded this Mwambao project, and we need ongoing funding for this.