Love Our Oceans, be Part of the Change!
The UAE is full of busy professionals with hugely generous hearts, who are trying to act ecologically but don’t have a huge amount of free time.
We always try to be as inclusive as possible, so we needed to find a way to give this important demographic easy access to our marine conservation efforts.
We have designed some courses that allow all you busy people to study the theory at home, followed by practical work in the water on the days that suit you best (either weekends or weekdays). And we call you local heroes, because juggling a busy work schedule, kids and family and still finding time to help protect the planet deserves at least a cape and some serious recognition!
Local Hero Course for Professionals and Busy People!
Whether you’re a professional in a company or a professional Mum, this course is for the people who really want to help protect the ocean but don’t have a huge amount of free time.
The Local Hero conservation course offers you a unique opportunity to learn all about the ocean environment on your own time. It starts with the 5 modules of our Online Marine Conservation course, which you can complete online when you have the time available, expanding your knowledge of the alien world just below the surface.
Once you have completed the 5 modules, you can come to Freestyle Divers and gain some hands-on conservation diving experience as well as in-water context for your newly acquired knowledge. This abridged version of our onsite core marine conservation course will give you a good foundation to build upon to help you understand how the underwater world works. We will cover the following topics:
- The Blue Planet : Why are the oceans important and how do they help the whole planet to sustain life? What are the chemical and physical limitations of the oceans and how does this affect marine species?
- Marine Ecosystems: A look at how the previously identified physical factors affect distribution of marine life and an examination of the different ecosystems throughout the Earth’s oceans.
- Marine Biodiversity: An introduction to the range of species found throughout the planet’s ocean ecosystems and how the ocean environment drives speciation.
- The State of the Reefs: What are the threats posed to the earth’s marine ecosystems and particularly the coral reefs throughout the tropical regions? Whether caused naturally or by man, the health of the oceans is declining and we identify and examine the threats in this section.
- Marine Conservation: What techniques and actions can be taken to mitigate these threats? Is marine conservation just a drop in the ocean?
This is followed by 4 dives over two days that will look at the following
- Coral reef ecosystems – start learning about coral identification.
- Relationships on the reef (symbiosis examples; clownfish and anemone, cleaner shrimp and wrasse).
- Vertebrates and invertebrates (2nd day more advanced fish and invertebrate identification).
- Coral reef conservation (coral nurseries, damaged coral, coral diseases, bleaching).
Shark and Turtle Courses
These options are also hybrid courses, combining 5 sessions of on-line learning for the Core Marine Conservation Course with one day at the dive centre to do 2 dives focused on either sharks or turtles. This is priced at 1,650 AED.
Environmental Monitoring
We are always running monitoring programs on the local reefs. So if you are a diver, an underwater photographer or videographer, a marine biology student or marine biologist or just an interested person, contact us on info@freestyledivers.me to see how you can get involved.