Establishing the Current Cover and Abundance of Coral in Malindi Marine National Park

Abstract

Malindi Marine National Park and Reserve is a major coral reef region in Kenya that is managed by Kenya Wildlife Service. It consists of 6km² of shallow lagoon containing coral, sea grass and sand, which facilitate high touristic activities. In 1998, Kenyan reefs experienced between 50% and 90% coral mortality attributed to a temperature anomaly that caused global coral bleaching. Due to additional impacts from increased sediment loads from Sabaki River, the coral cover at Malindi was specifically estimated to have reduced from 35–45% (pre-bleaching) to 10–20 % (post-bleaching). However, little is known about the spatial variability and recovery in Malindi coral cover over the last decade. Hence, this study sought to establish the current coral cover and identify the coral genera present of Malindi Marine Park. This was achieved using the random sampling design adapted from Paul & Jokiel [1] with a 25m transect line for estimating the total cover in the three coral gardens: old coral garden, new coral garden and north reef. Also, a catalogue of coral genera occurring along the Kenyan coast was used on the sampling sites to identify the current coral genera. Results indicate that the whole park has a percentage coral cover of 21.61% with 25 coral genera encountered in the study. Porites spp was found to be the most abundant genera while Tubipora spp was the least encountered genera in the park. Though there’s no significant difference among the three coral gardens, the park is seen to have high diversity in hard corals. A further study is recommended to analyze the threats posed by tourists to this important ecosystem.