Kep: The Sea That Came Back — Chronicle of a Sanctuary Reborn
- Art for Kep
- 18 minutes ago
- 5 min read
Ten years ago, the Kep archipelago was an exhausted sea: seagrass meadows ploughed under, dugongs gone, dolphins reduced to rumour. Today that same sea carries an international label, a quarter of a vast national restoration plan is already deployed, and fishermen are watching species they thought lost for good come back. A look back at two decades of stubborn work that turned this forgotten corner of the gulf into one of Southeast Asia's finest marine conservation success stories.
A Sea on Its Knees
Just a decade ago, the waters lapping the thirteen islands of the Kep archipelago — Koh Seh, Koh Angkrong, Koh Mak Prang, Koh Pou and their neighbours, at the southern tip of Cambodia — were the stage for a quiet disaster. Bottom trawlers methodically scraped the seagrass meadows, tore through coral reefs, and hauled in the last specimens of the marine megafauna. Electric fishing, dynamite: nothing was spared.
Local fishermen came home empty-handed. Dugongs had vanished. Dolphins, listed as "Endangered" on the IUCN Red List, had become little more than rare ghosts glimpsed in the distance. And beneath the surface, in the seagrass meadows that shelter the country's largest concentration of seahorses, six of the ocean's most discreet species were quietly dying out — caught as bycatch or sold dried to Vietnamese middlemen.
A Bet on Concrete and Patience
It was against this backdrop of devastation that Marine Conservation Cambodia (MCC), a British organisation founded in 2008 and established in the Kep archipelago from 2013-2014, set out to map the invisible: the distribution, density and life cycle of seahorses, then of entire seagrass meadows. Allied with Project Seahorse, Chicago's Shedd Aquarium and Cambodia's Fisheries Department, it built one of the most rigorous seahorse conservation programmes in Southeast Asia.
The method rests on an innovation as simple as it is effective: submerged concrete structures, known first as Conservation and Anti-Trawling Structures (CANTS) and later as Fishery Productivity Structures (FPS), deployed to physically block trawl nets, provide substrate for seagrass to take root, and form artificial reefs. Around Koh Seh, two strict no-take zones were established: no fishing, no anchoring, no unsupervised tourist activity, patrolled regularly by local authorities.
More than 350 of these structures have been deployed across the archipelago in five years. The project earned MCC the National Geographic Society's Marine Protection Prize in 2018 — the first in a long line of international honours.
What the Numbers Say
MCC's surveys, covering 35,820 hectares, recorded some 6,399 hectares of seagrass meadows by mid-2023, along with 1,202 hectares of algae, 440 hectares of bivalve beds and 65 hectares of coral reef. The Kep seagrass meadow turned out to be the largest in Cambodia and one of the most diverse in the region, with ten seagrass species recorded and more than 2,500 hectares under active regeneration. The Kep Marine Fisheries Management Area, declared at national level in April 2018 after four years of work, covers 11,354 hectares on its own.
At sites fitted with FPS structures, fish abundance is now six times higher than normal — 2,040 fish recorded, spanning 55 species, with a marked return of juveniles from commercially important species. Dry figures, perhaps, but ones that translate into a concrete reality for fishermen across the project's nine partner communities: fuller nets, and, occasionally, the reappearance of species no one expected to see again.
The Return of the Ghost Species
On the monitoring teams' screens, the data tells a story once thought lost. MCC's field surveys have documented the return of the Irrawaddy dolphin, the Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin and the dugong to the waters of Kep and Kampot — three species many believed had been driven from these shores for good.
Then there is the seahorse, discreet rider of the forgotten archipelago. Six species have been recorded in these waters: Hippocampus spinosissimus, H. kuda, H. histrix, H. trimaculatus, H. kelloggi and the delicate H. mohnikei. A creature of paradoxes — one of the slowest swimmers in the ocean, unable to top one and a half kilometres an hour, yet a formidable hunter that captures up to 90% of its prey under good conditions, far outpacing the lion. It is also the only animal on Earth in which the male carries the young to term. Thanks to MCC's work, the species is now listed under CITES for Cambodia.
A "Hope Spot" Named by Sylvia Earle
On April 1, 2019, international recognition arrived. The Kep archipelago was declared a "Hope Spot" by Mission Blue, the alliance founded by legendary oceanographer Sylvia Earle, which designates sites deemed "critical to the health of the ocean." A symbolic yet powerful accolade, placing these Cambodian waters on the world map of marine biodiversity worth protecting — and crowning more than a decade of fieldwork by MCC, an active member of the province's technical management committee for the zone.
From the Archipelago to the Whole Coast
What is happening in Kep is no longer confined to its thirteen islands. Led by Cambodia's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, with support from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the French Development Agency (AFD), the Sustainable Coastal and Marine Fisheries (SCMF) project reached a symbolic milestone in 2026: 1,250 fishery productivity structures deployed, a quarter of the total target, already protecting more than 20,000 hectares of marine habitat across four provinces — Kampot, Kep, Koh Kong and Preah Sihanouk.
Mandated by the ministry and funded by the ADB, MCC is set to deploy 5,000 structures in total along the entire Cambodian coastline. Work that began on a handful of isolated islands has now taken on a national scale, carried forward by a coalition of institutions, international donors and nine fishing communities involved at every stage: site selection, block fabrication, monitoring, deployment.
"This 25% milestone represents far more than technical progress, says Rachana Thap, Executive Director of MCC. It reflects the commitment, the sacrifices and the unity of communities and partners in protecting Cambodia's ocean."
The Sea as Memory
What the Kep archipelago demonstrates goes beyond a simple Cambodian case study. The restoration of seagrass meadows, the increase in fish biomass, the reappearance of indicator species — seahorses, dugongs, Irrawaddy dolphins, sea turtles — all point to an ecological resilience that few scientists would have dared predict fifteen years ago.
There is nothing miraculous about this story: eighteen years of stubborn presence on the ground, concrete blocks laid one by one on the seabed, fishermen treated as partners rather than adversaries, and a stubborn conviction that the ocean, given the chance, knows how to remember itself. Off Kep, the seahorse continues to drift on the warm currents of the Gulf of Thailand, its tail curled around a blade of seagrass, indifferent to the battles fought in its name. It has been here for millions of years. Thanks to this work, it may well stay.