Seychelles Coral Reefs: Bleaching, Recovery & Restoration

Seychelles Coral Reefs: What You're Actually Going to Find

The first time I put a regulator in my mouth off Mahé, I was twenty-three and had no reference point for what I was looking at. The coral gardens around Sainte Anne Marine National Park looked extraordinary to me then — varied, colourful, alive with parrotfish and hawksbill turtles moving through formations I couldn't name. It took another decade, and dives in the Maldives, the Coral Triangle, and the outer Kimberley coast, before I understood what I'd actually been seeing: a reef system in the early stages of recovery from one of the worst bleaching events in recorded Indian Ocean history.

The Seychelles coral reefs are not what the resort photography suggests. That's not a criticism — it's essential information. The 1998 mass bleaching event, driven by the El Niño-induced sea surface temperature anomaly that year, killed between 70 and 90 percent of coral cover across the granitic inner islands. What you're diving now is a reef that has spent more than two decades clawing its way back, supported by active restoration programmes, marine protected areas, and some of the most rigorous reef science in the Western Indian Ocean. That context changes everything about how you read what you see underwater.

And what you see is genuinely compelling. The Seychelles coral reef system spans both the granitic inner islands — Mahé, Praslin, La Digue — and the outer coralline atolls: Aldabra, Cosmoledo, Alphonse, Farquhar. These are ecologically distinct environments separated by hundreds of kilometres of open ocean, and they've had different bleaching histories and different recovery trajectories. If you're planning a dive trip and treating "the Seychelles" as a single reef destination, you're already making a mistake. The outer atolls, particularly Aldabra — a UNESCO World Heritage Site with restricted access — have recovered faster and more completely than the inner island reefs, which face ongoing pressure from sedimentation, coastal development, and warmer inshore waters.

The conservation story here is serious. Nature Seychelles, operating the Reef Rescuers project at Cousin Island, has been running active coral transplantation since 2010. The science behind it is sound, the monitoring data is published, and the results — while not a complete restoration — represent meaningful progress. If you're going to dive the Seychelles coral reefs, you should understand what you're looking at and why it matters beyond the postcard.

What Makes Seychelles Coral Reefs Ecologically Distinct

Most reef systems in the Indian Ocean sit on carbonate limestone substrate — the accumulated skeletal remains of coral colonies built over millennia. The Maldives are the clearest example: flat atolls, sandy lagoons, and reef structures that grow in predictable formations because the substrate is uniform and the topography is low. The Seychelles inner islands are something else entirely. They're granite. Ancient Precambrian granite, the oldest oceanic island granite on the planet, which means the reef here grows against a substrate that doesn't behave like limestone — it doesn't dissolve, it doesn't erode into sand the same way, and it creates a vertical complexity that changes how coral colonies establish and how fish communities organise themselves around them.

I've dived the same depth range — 8 to 18 metres — in both the Maldives and off the east coast of Mahé, and the structural difference is immediately apparent. In the Maldives, reef walls drop cleanly and coral growth is concentrated in predictable band formations. Off the granitic islands of the Seychelles, you're navigating boulders the size of houses, undercuts, swim-throughs, and ledges where coral has colonised every available angle. It's more chaotic, harder to read, and — when the coral cover is healthy — more visually complex than anything I've seen in the atolls.

The outer coralline islands operate differently again. Aldabra's reef system, largely isolated from human pressure and with restricted visitor access (you need a permit from the Seychelles Islands Foundation, and getting one takes planning), has coral cover that approaches what I'd call genuinely pristine. Cosmoledo and Astove, even further south, are logistically punishing to reach — liveaboard only, weather-dependent, and not for travellers who need certainty in their itinerary. But the reefs there are among the least disturbed in the entire Western Indian Ocean.

Coral Species Diversity Across Granitic and Outer Atolls

The Seychelles hosts approximately 150 to 180 recorded coral species — a figure that places it in the mid-range for Indian Ocean diversity, below the extraordinary species richness of the Coral Triangle but well above the Red Sea or the eastern Mediterranean. The dominant genera across the inner islands are Acropora, Porites, Pavona, and Galaxea — with Acropora being both the most visually dramatic and the most bleaching-susceptible. The 1998 event hit Acropora colonies hardest. Porites, slower-growing and more thermally tolerant, fared better and now forms the backbone of many recovering reef sections around Mahé and Praslin.

The outer atolls carry a different species composition. Aldabra's reef system includes strong populations of massive Porites corals — some colonies estimated at several hundred years old — alongside healthy Acropora tables and branching formations that were largely spared the 1998 temperature spike due to the atoll's deeper water circulation and its distance from the warming epicentre. If you're a diver who wants to see what the inner island reefs might eventually recover to, Aldabra is the reference point. The problem is getting there: the Seychelles Islands Foundation controls access, liveaboard permits are limited, and the crossing from Mahé takes the better part of two days in good weather.

Coral species Seychelles researchers have documented also include significant populations of soft corals — Sinularia and Lobophytum genera — which have colonised rubble zones left by bleaching mortality and provide interim habitat structure while hard coral recovery continues.

How Reef Structure Here Differs from Maldivian Atolls

The Maldives are engineered by their own geology for reef diving access. Channels between atolls funnel nutrient-rich water and create predictable current dives; the flat lagoon floors make navigation simple; and the resort infrastructure — particularly in the central atolls — is built around the assumption that guests will be in the water twice a day with minimal effort. Everything is optimised. The Seychelles is not optimised. The granite topography creates dive sites that require more navigation skill, more attention to surge and swell direction, and — at some of the more exposed outer island sites — a genuine tolerance for conditions that would be considered challenging in a Maldivian context.

That's not a flaw. It's a character difference. The complexity of the granite substrate means that a recovering Seychelles reef, even at 40 percent coral cover, reads as more ecologically layered than a Maldivian reef at the same cover percentage — because the physical structure underneath supports more microhabitat variety. Moray eels, octopus, and lionfish occupy ledges and overhangs that simply don't exist on a flat carbonate reef. The fish communities are different as a result. I'd take a complex granite reef at 50 percent recovery over a flat limestone reef at 70 percent, every time.

The 1998 Bleaching Event: Scale and Lasting Damage to Seychelles Coral Reefs

The 1998 El Niño brought sea surface temperatures across the Western Indian Ocean to between 1.5 and 3 degrees Celsius above the long-term seasonal maximum. That's not a large number. But coral bleaching — the expulsion of the symbiotic algae that give corals their colour and provide up to 90 percent of their energy — begins at sustained anomalies of just 1 degree above the thermal threshold for a given species. The 1998 event held those elevated temperatures for weeks. The result was the most severe mass bleaching event in recorded Indian Ocean history at that point, and the Seychelles inner island reefs bore the full force of it.

Coral cover across the granitic inner islands dropped from an estimated 30 to 40 percent pre-bleaching to below 10 percent in many surveyed sites. Some locations recorded near-total mortality. The Institute for Marine Remote Sensing at the University of South Florida (IMaRS/USF), working under the Millennium Coral Reef Mapping Project, provided satellite-derived reef extent data that helped quantify the geographic scale of the damage — and the RCoE Geoportal subsequently made much of this mapping data accessible for ongoing monitoring. The numbers are stark.

Coral Cover Loss and Species-Level Impact Data

Acropora species — the branching and tabular corals that create the three-dimensional reef architecture most associated with healthy tropical reefs — suffered mortality rates above 90 percent across many inner island sites. Pocillopora and Stylophora colonies, similarly thermally sensitive, were devastated. The more thermally tolerant massive Porites corals survived at higher rates, which is why post-1998 reef surveys showed a community composition skewed heavily toward slow-growing, dome-shaped colonies — structurally simpler, ecologically less diverse, but alive.

The knock-on effects extended beyond coral mortality. Reef fish communities that depended on branching coral for shelter — particularly juvenile fish using Acropora tables as nursery habitat — declined sharply in the years following the bleaching. Invertebrate populations shifted. Algae colonised dead coral skeletons faster than coral recruits could establish in many sites, creating a competitive dynamic that slowed natural recovery significantly. This is the same pattern I observed on bleached sections of the Great Barrier Reef's outer northern reefs — the coral dies, the algae moves in, and recovery depends on whether herbivorous fish populations are intact enough to keep the algae cropped back. In the Seychelles, where fishing pressure on herbivores had been significant in the inner islands, that recovery mechanism was compromised from the start.

Reef Rescuers and Active Coral Restoration in the Seychelles

Nature Seychelles launched the Reef Rescuers project in 2010, and it remains one of the most substantive active reef restoration programmes in the Western Indian Ocean. The model is coral gardening: fragments of donor coral colonies are collected from healthy source populations, suspended on underwater nursery structures — typically rope or metal-framed "trees" anchored at 6 to 12 metres depth — and allowed to grow under monitored conditions before being transplanted onto degraded reef substrate. The primary site is Cousin Island Special Reserve, managed by Nature Seychelles in partnership with BirdLife International, which provides the protected marine environment necessary for nursery operations without the fishing and boat traffic pressure that would compromise fragment survival rates.

I've visited coral nursery operations in three ocean systems — the Maldives, the Coral Triangle off Sulawesi, and here — and the Reef Rescuers infrastructure is among the better-organised I've seen at this scale. That's not faint praise. Coral gardening operations frequently underperform because the nursery management is inconsistent, the transplantation sites are poorly chosen, or the monitoring data isn't collected rigorously enough to inform adaptive management. The Nature Seychelles programme publishes monitoring reports and has maintained consistent methodology long enough to generate meaningful longitudinal data.

If you want to visit the Cousin Island nursery sites as a diver, contact Nature Seychelles directly — visits are managed and not available through standard dive operators. Allow at least three weeks of lead time. The island itself requires a day-trip permit and a 15-minute boat crossing from Praslin; the marine reserve surrounding it is strictly managed, which is precisely why the nursery works.

Underwater Nurseries and Transplantation Techniques

The nursery structures used by Reef Rescuers are designed to maximise water flow around coral fragments while minimising competition from algae and sediment accumulation. Fragments — typically 5 to 10 centimetres in length — are collected from donor colonies showing thermal tolerance characteristics, a selection criterion that has become increasingly important as the programme has matured and climate projections for the Western Indian Ocean have sharpened. The logic is straightforward: if you're going to spend the resources transplanting coral onto degraded reef, you want to transplant genotypes that have demonstrated some capacity to survive elevated temperatures, not just the most visually impressive colonies.

Transplantation onto the reef substrate uses a coral epoxy or cement plug to anchor fragments onto cleared rubble surfaces. Survival rates in the immediate post-transplantation period — the first 90 days — are the critical metric, and the Reef Rescuers programme has reported survival rates in the 65 to 80 percent range for established transplant cohorts, which is competitive with similar operations in the Caribbean and Pacific. Long-term survival — beyond three years — is harder to track and more variable, dependent on subsequent thermal events and local water quality conditions.

Restoration Success Rates and Long-Term Monitoring

The honest assessment of coral restoration success anywhere in the world is that it works at the site level but cannot operate at the scale required to restore reef systems thoroughly. Nature Seychelles has transplanted thousands of coral fragments across multiple sites around Cousin Island and neighbouring reefs, and the monitoring data shows measurable increases in coral cover at those specific locations. That's real. But the total area of degraded reef in the Seychelles inner islands is orders of magnitude larger than any nursery-and-transplant programme can address directly.

What restoration does achieve — and this is where the Reef Rescuers work has genuine value beyond the square metres of reef it directly covers — is the maintenance of coral populations through thermal stress periods, the propagation of thermally tolerant genotypes, and the generation of scientific data on recovery rates, species performance, and site-level resilience that informs marine protected area management. Reef Resilience frameworks developed from this kind of monitoring data are increasingly used to prioritise which reef sections receive active protection and which are allowed to recover naturally. That prioritisation matters when resources are finite — which they always are.

Recovery Progress Compared to Other Indian Ocean Reefs

Twenty-six years after the 1998 event, the Seychelles inner island reefs are at somewhere between 20 and 35 percent coral cover across surveyed sites — a figure that represents genuine recovery from the post-bleaching low but remains well below the 40 to 60 percent cover that characterises a reef system operating at full ecological function. The outer atolls are ahead of this curve. Aldabra's protected reef system, benefiting from lower thermal stress, minimal human pressure, and strong larval connectivity from the broader Western Indian Ocean reef network, has recovered to cover levels that approach pre-1998 baselines in some zones.

Compare this to the Maldives, which experienced similarly severe bleaching in 1998 and again in 2016, and the recovery trajectories tell a complicated story.

Seychelles vs Maldives: Reef Resilience in Practice

The Maldives reef system has recovered faster in terms of raw coral cover percentage in many atoll locations — partly because the carbonate substrate is more immediately hospitable to coral recruitment, partly because the Maldivian resort industry has invested heavily in reef monitoring and localised protection as a direct commercial interest, and partly because the central atoll geography creates upwelling patterns that buffer some sites against the worst thermal anomalies. If you dive the Maldives today, particularly in the central atolls around Ari or Baa, you'll find coral cover and fish biomass that exceeds what you'll encounter in the Seychelles inner islands at comparable depths.

But the Seychelles outer atolls — Aldabra specifically — are a different comparison entirely. Aldabra's reef system has no equivalent in the Maldives in terms of structural complexity, species composition, or the degree of isolation from human pressure. The granite-and-carbonate mixed substrate of the Seychelles system as a whole also means that recovery, when it happens, tends to produce more structurally complex reef than the Maldivian equivalent. Slower, yes. More complex when it arrives, also yes.

The 2016 bleaching event — which hit the Maldives harder than the Seychelles in many locations — reset parts of the Maldivian recovery that had been underway since 1998. The Seychelles was not spared in 2016, but the inner island reefs, already adapted to a post-bleaching community composition, showed marginally better resilience in some monitored sites. Marginally. Don't overread that.

Climate Threats and Predicted Recovery Timelines for Seychelles Reefs

The trajectory of Seychelles coral reef recovery is not linear, and anyone telling you it is hasn't been paying attention to the thermal anomaly data coming out of the Western Indian Ocean over the past decade. The 2016 bleaching event interrupted recovery that had been building since 1998. A third major event — which climate modelling increasingly suggests is a question of when, not if, under current emissions trajectories — would hit reefs that are still in mid-recovery and likely cause damage that the existing restoration infrastructure cannot meaningfully offset.

The science on this is not ambiguous. Under a high-emissions scenario, the Western Indian Ocean is projected to experience annual bleaching-level thermal stress events by the 2040s at the latest. Under a moderate mitigation scenario, that timeline extends — but not by enough to be reassuring. The Reef Rescuers programme and Nature Seychelles are working within this reality, which is why the focus on thermally tolerant genotype selection has intensified in recent years. It's not pessimism. It's adaptive management under constraint.

Larval Connectivity and Reef Network Resilience

One of the structural advantages the Seychelles reef system has over more isolated reef environments is larval connectivity — the dispersal of coral larvae from healthy source reefs to damaged ones via ocean current systems. The Western Indian Ocean current patterns, particularly the South Equatorial Current and the seasonal reversal driven by the monsoon system, connect the outer Seychelles atolls to reef systems across a vast geographic range. Aldabra, as a high-cover source reef, contributes larvae to downstream reef systems including parts of the inner Seychelles, the Mascarene Plateau reefs, and potentially the northern Mozambique Channel.

This connectivity matters because natural recruitment — coral larvae settling on available substrate and establishing new colonies — is the primary mechanism of reef recovery at scale. Active restoration can accelerate recovery at specific sites, but the background rate of natural recruitment determines whether the broader reef system recovers or stagnates. The Millennium Coral Reef Mapping Project data, processed through IMaRS/USF, has helped map these connectivity networks across the Indian Ocean, and the Seychelles sits at a node in that network that gives it more natural recovery potential than geographically isolated reef systems — like some of the outer Pacific atolls — that lack nearby source populations.

The monsoon reversal here — the shift from the Southeast Trades to the Northwest Monsoon around November — changes current direction significantly and affects larval dispersal pathways in ways that are still being modelled. It's not a simple system.

Conservation Bodies and Marine Policy Frameworks Protecting Seychelles Reefs

The marine protected area framework in the Seychelles has expanded significantly since the 1998 bleaching event — partly as a direct response to it, partly driven by international conservation commitments and the economic reality that reef-dependent tourism is the country's primary foreign exchange earner. The Seychelles currently has a network of marine protected areas covering a substantial portion of its Exclusive Economic Zone, including the Sainte Anne Marine National Park, the Cousin Island Special Reserve, and the Aldabra World Heritage Site. On paper, this is an impressive framework. In practice, enforcement capacity is uneven, and the inner island MPAs face ongoing pressure from artisanal fishing, boat anchoring on live coral, and the cumulative water quality impacts of coastal development on Mahé.

Nature Seychelles is the primary on-the-ground conservation organisation driving both the Reef Rescuers restoration work and broader reef monitoring across the inner islands. BirdLife International, which manages Cousin Island as a Special Reserve, provides the institutional framework that keeps the nursery site protected from the fishing and tourism pressure that would otherwise compromise it. The relationship between these two organisations — one focused on marine ecosystems, one historically focused on seabird conservation — is a productive one, because Cousin Island's value as a seabird sanctuary depends on a healthy surrounding marine ecosystem, and vice versa.

What I'd push back on — and this is a position that will irritate some people in the conservation sector — is the tendency to frame MPA designation as equivalent to reef protection. A line on a map is not a functioning marine reserve. The Seychelles MPAs that have genuine enforcement capacity and active management — Cousin Island, the outer sections of Aldabra — show measurable ecological differences from adjacent unprotected areas. The ones that exist primarily as policy instruments, without the patrol capacity or community buy-in to make them functional, do not. That distinction matters if you're evaluating conservation claims about this destination.

The Reef Resilience framework, applied across the Western Indian Ocean through collaborative research networks, is increasingly informing which sites receive priority management attention — a rational allocation of limited resources that the Seychelles marine policy framework has been slow to formally adopt but which Nature Seychelles applies operationally in its site selection decisions.

What Divers and Travellers Should Actually Expect Underwater

If you're coming to the Seychelles specifically to dive coral reefs, you need to calibrate your expectations against the recovery timeline, not against the promotional imagery. The inner island reefs — accessible from Mahé, Praslin, and the mid-range resorts on islands like Desroches — are recovering reefs. You will find coral. You will find fish. You will find sites with genuine ecological interest, particularly around the granite formations where structural complexity compensates for lower cover percentages. What you will not find, in most inner island locations, is the unbroken coral density you'd encounter in the Maldivian central atolls or on a healthy outer Pacific reef.

The outer atolls are a different proposition entirely. Aldabra is worth the logistical effort — a liveaboard from Mahé, advance permit application through the Seychelles Islands Foundation, and the acceptance that weather may alter your itinerary — if pristine reef ecology is your primary objective. Cosmoledo and Astove require the same commitment and deliver comparable rewards. These are not destinations for travellers who need flexibility.

The conservation work happening here — through Reef Rescuers, Nature Seychelles, and the broader scientific networks including IMaRS/USF and the Millennium Coral Reef Mapping Project — gives the Seychelles coral reef system a recovery infrastructure that most comparable reef environments lack. That doesn't guarantee the outcome. But it means the reefs here are being watched, measured, and actively supported in ways that matter.

Go in knowing what the reef has been through. The story underwater is more interesting for it.

Season and Conditions: The inter-monsoon windows — April to May and October to November — deliver the best diving conditions in the inner islands, with visibility reaching 20 to 25 metres and surface conditions manageable enough for day-boat operations from Mahé. The Northwest Monsoon, running roughly December through March, brings swell from the northwest that makes many exposed sites on the west coast of Mahé undiveable and pushes operators to sheltered east-coast and inner-island sites. This is nothing like the monsoon pattern in Phuket, where the southwest swell in October is the primary concern — here the direction reversal catches visiting sailors and dive tourists off-guard because it's the opposite of what they expect from Indian Ocean seasonal logic.

Field Hack: Book Cousin Island nursery dive visits directly through Nature Seychelles at least three weeks in advance — not through your resort dive operator, who will not have access. The crossing from Praslin takes approximately 15 minutes by speedboat, and the reserve requires a day-visit permit (currently 100 SCR for non-residents) in addition to the dive arrangement. The nursery sites are at 8 to 12 metres and suitable for Open Water certified divers, but the reserve's current patterns can be stronger than they look from the surface.

Honest Warning: The "private island resort reef" experience marketed by several inner island properties — the idea that your resort's house reef is a pristine coral garden accessible from the beach — is, in most cases, significantly overstated. I've snorkelled the house reefs of four inner island properties and found live coral cover ranging from sparse to genuinely disappointing. The resorts that are honest about this and offer boat transfers to better sites are the ones worth booking. If a property's marketing leads with its house reef, ask for recent independent dive reports before you commit.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How much coral cover was lost in the 1998 bleaching event?

The 1998 El Niño-driven bleaching event reduced coral cover across the Seychelles inner granitic islands from a pre-bleaching baseline of roughly 30 to 40 percent down to below 10 percent at many monitored sites — with some locations recording near-total mortality. Acropora species, which form the branching and tabular structures that give healthy reefs their three-dimensional complexity, suffered mortality rates above 90 percent in the worst-affected areas. The outer atolls, particularly Aldabra, fared significantly better due to their distance from the thermal anomaly epicentre and the deeper water circulation that buffered inshore temperatures. The IMaRS/USF satellite mapping data from the Millennium Coral Reef Mapping Project helped quantify the geographic extent of the damage across the broader Western Indian Ocean reef network. Recovery since 1998 has been real but partial — current cover estimates for the inner islands sit in the 20 to 35 percent range, depending on site and survey methodology.

What is the Reef Rescuers project and how does it work?

Reef Rescuers is a coral restoration programme run by Nature Seychelles, launched in 2010 and based primarily at the Cousin Island Special Reserve near Praslin. The programme uses coral gardening methodology: fragments from healthy donor colonies — selected increasingly for thermal tolerance characteristics — are suspended on underwater nursery structures at 6 to 12 metres depth, allowed to grow under monitored conditions, and then transplanted onto degraded reef substrate using coral epoxy or cement anchoring. The nursery infrastructure is maintained within the protected waters of the Cousin Island reserve, managed jointly with BirdLife International, which provides the low-pressure environment the nursery requires to function. Post-transplantation survival rates in established cohorts have been reported in the 65 to 80 percent range for the first 90 days — competitive with similar programmes in the Caribbean and Pacific. The programme also generates longitudinal monitoring data that informs broader marine protected area management decisions across the inner island reef network.

How many coral species are found in Seychelles?

The Seychelles hosts approximately 150 to 180 recorded coral species across its combined inner granitic island reefs and outer coralline atoll systems. The dominant genera in the inner islands include Acropora, Porites, Pavona, and Galaxea — with Porites now forming the structural backbone of many recovering reef sections following the 1998 bleaching event, which hit Acropora populations hardest. The outer atolls, particularly Aldabra, carry a broader and healthier species composition, including massive Porites colonies estimated at several hundred years old and strong Acropora table formations. Significant soft coral populations — Sinularia and Lobophytum genera — have colonised rubble zones left by bleaching mortality and provide interim habitat structure. The species count places the Seychelles in the mid-range for Indian Ocean reef diversity — below the extraordinary richness of the Coral Triangle but well above the Red Sea and substantially more diverse than the eastern Atlantic or Mediterranean reef environments.

How do Seychelles reefs compare to Maldives reefs in recovery?

The Maldives reef system has recovered faster in terms of raw coral cover percentage at many atoll locations since the shared 1998 bleaching event — partly because carbonate substrate is more immediately hospitable to coral recruitment, and partly because the Maldivian resort industry has invested heavily in localised reef monitoring as a direct commercial interest. If you dive the central Maldivian atolls today, you'll generally find higher coral cover and greater fish biomass than the Seychelles inner islands at equivalent depths. However, the 2016 bleaching event reset significant portions of Maldivian recovery that had been building for nearly two decades. The Seychelles outer atolls — Aldabra in particular — have no direct Maldivian equivalent in terms of structural complexity, isolation from human pressure, and ecological integrity. The granite substrate of the Seychelles inner islands also produces more complex reef architecture than the flat carbonate Maldivian formations, meaning that equivalent cover percentages represent different ecological values. Recovery in the Seychelles is slower. The endpoint, when it arrives, is structurally richer.

Which organisations are leading reef restoration in Seychelles?

Nature Seychelles is the primary organisation driving active reef restoration, operating the Reef Rescuers coral gardening programme at Cousin Island since 2010. BirdLife International manages Cousin Island Special Reserve as a protected area and provides the institutional framework that keeps the nursery sites free from fishing and tourism pressure. The Institute for Marine Remote Sensing at the University of South Florida (IMaRS/USF), working through the Millennium Coral Reef Mapping Project and the RCoE Geoportal, has contributed critical satellite-derived reef mapping and monitoring data that underpins conservation planning across the Western Indian Ocean, including the Seychelles. The Reef Resilience network — a broader collaborative framework — informs which sites receive priority management attention. The Seychelles Islands Foundation manages access to and conservation of Aldabra World Heritage Site. Between them, these organisations represent a more substantive scientific and operational infrastructure than most comparable reef systems in the Indian Ocean can point to — though funding constraints and enforcement capacity gaps remain real limitations on what that infrastructure can achieve.