None of them costs anything and all of them are broken daily by people who mean well.
A coral head the size of a football may be fifty years old. A fin kick destroys it in a second, and it will not come back within your lifetime. Everything below follows from that arithmetic.
One: never stand on the reef, even in shallow water — find sand or stay swimming. Two: keep your fins up and behind you; the most common damage is a careless downstroke. Three: touch nothing, including "just to see if it moves". Four: take nothing, not shells, not coral fragments, not the empty ones.
Five: feed nothing. Bread changes fish behaviour, encourages aggression and damages their digestion, and it is the single most common well-meant mistake on Egyptian boats. Six: use mineral sunscreen or cover up instead; oxybenzone bleaches coral at concentrations far below what a busy bay reaches.
Bread changes fish behaviour, encourages aggression and damages their digestion, and it is the single most common well-meant mistake on Egyptian boats.
Seven, and least obvious: keep your distance from anything large and alive. Turtles need to surface, dugongs need to feed, dolphins need to rest. A ring of swimmers prevents all three, and the animal leaves the site for good. The best encounters happen to people who hold back.
