May 2016

Pez Maya

Pez Maya Spreads Awareness for Project Aware

Objectives
-

Educate volunteers about Project Aware and the 2 main projects

Create activities and fundraising for Sharks and Rays in Peril
Maintain monthly dives for Dive Against Debris
Spread awareness about these issues through social media

Summary
This month there was a huge emphasis towards contributing to the two main issues currently presented
by Project Aware. The goal of this project was to raise money to help support the work done by Project
Aware in order to help progress in protection regulations for sharks and rays. Another huge project set up
to help with Dive Against Debris, is a set schedule to clean a different dive site once a month and input
the information through Project Awares database.
Report
One of GVIs long term objectives is to
work towards providing environmental
sustainability. Project Aware has chosen
Sharks & Rays in Peril and Dive Against
Debris as the main targets due to their
detrimental impact on our oceans
currently.
Sharks & Rays in Peril
Unfortunately sharks and rays have many
species that are currently endangered and
on the verge of extinction due to the
amount of overfishing and pollution.
Hundreds of thousands of sharks are
currently being killed daily due to
commercial fishing, bycatch, and the
demand for Shark fin Soup. Sharks acting
as one of our marine apex predators are
Figure 1 Volunteers enthusiastically finishing a shark relay race.
an incredible impact on the current food
chain and with them slowly diminishing can impact the entire marine ecosystem worldwide.

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Because of the intensity of this issue, Project Aware

has created multiple methods of awareness by
educating, creating events, and promoting which
have led to advances in creating stronger
regulations with shark fishing. As a Project Aware
Charitable Trust, we decided to create our own way
of spreading awareness about this issue for the
month of May. The first step was by presenting
different presentations about the actual casualties
currently occurring to sharks globally, to ensure the
volunteers to understand the importance of our
actions. Following the presentation, we created
weekly activities involving spreading awareness
through social media while fundraising to send the
profits to Project Aware directly. While some days
watching documentaries about sharks, we also
created many unique activities, like shark
sandcastle contests, shark relay races, etc. At the
end of the month we ended up raising a total of
220 but also educated many outsiders who will
hopefully continue to spread awareness.

Figure 2 Final Results of Shark Sand Castles

Dive Against Debris

Due to the high amount of pollution entering our oceans daily, Project Aware has made one of their top
priorities to create different campaigns to not only clean the trash seen, but spread awareness to help
prevent some of the trash from entering in. The amount of trash entering our oceans daily has created
multiple garbage patch gyres within our oceans, creating thick masses of trash blocking marine life from
access to the surface, as well as breaking down into tiny particles to be later consumed by organisms.
Divers are currently the only people
who can collect the trash damaging our
dive sites, so as an active conservation
group, we have created a monthly
challenge of scheduling Dives Against
Debris at our multiple dive sites. This
new plan will help the volunteers gain
experience collecting garbage while
diving, to later on be incorporated on
an online database. Our goal is to
continue this plan to not only clean our
beautiful reefs, but give data to help
further regulations on different
methods of disposing waste.
Figure 3 Volunteers with some rope collected during a Dive Against Debris

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Figure 4 Volunteers and staff ready for shark relay race.

If you want to know more about our Marine Conservation Expedition in Mexico, check out:

http://www.gvi.co.uk/programs/marine-conservation-expedition-mexico/

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