Meet Open Ocean: marine conservation on our reef

It's easy to walk past the Open Ocean field station at Roots without quite clocking what goes on there. It's a marine conservation non-profit, founded in 2010 and now based at the resort, run almost entirely by volunteers rather than paid staff.

Their work sits on four pillars: education (school visits and public workshops), research (data collection on the reef, sea grass meadows and local species), citizen science (letting volunteers take part in real survey work rather than just observing), and conservation (beach and reef clean-ups with the local community).

One of the more notable threads is a marine biology course programme run in partnership with the University of Glasgow, combining structured fieldwork with real research contribution — not just a certificate at the end of it, but actual data that feeds into ongoing study of the Red Sea.

If you're staying at Roots and want to do more than log dives, it's worth asking what's running that week.