Michela Congiu
Marine biologist at the MEDSEA Foundation and freediver. I help bring Sardinia's Posidonia meadows back, one cutting at a time.
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On one breath
I was at home underwater long before I studied it. Nine years of synchronised swimming, six of them in competition, taught me to hold my breath upside down and still count the music. Then came five years of competitive freediving.
Biology ran alongside, at the University of Cagliari: a bachelor's in 2020, then a master's in marine bio-ecology in 2023, 110/110 cum laude. Since 2025 I've been a registered biologist with the Ordine dei Biologi della Sardegna.
Planting a sea forest
Since September 2023 I've been a junior researcher in the Marine Unit of the MEDSEA Foundation. Most of my days revolve around Posidonia oceanica, the seagrass that grows only in the Mediterranean and holds its coasts together.
Anchors, trawling and coastal building have torn up part of Sardinia's meadows. With the A Sea Forest to Save the Planet campaign we plant them back: cuttings that storms and anchors have already ripped loose are gathered and staked into the seabed, where they can root again.
MEDSEA Foundation, Mediterranean Sea and Coast
What I'm working on
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Meadow restoration
Designing and running Posidonia replanting for Interreg Euro-MED projects and the Sea Forest campaign. I presented our method, detached cuttings and small stakes, at the 2nd European Seagrass Restoration Workshop in Arcachon in April 2025.
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Marine protected areas
In Blue4All, a Horizon Europe project, helping protected areas manage better and bring local stakeholders in. I contributed to its 2026 guidelines on the financial management of MPAs.
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Fieldwork and writing
Monitoring and surveys in the water, then the proposals and technical reports that keep the work funded.
- leaves up to a metre long
- one square metre can release up to 14 litres of oxygen a day
- Sardinia: about 170,000 hectares of meadow, 14% of it damaged
- one clone off Formentera may be 100,000 years old
Freefall
Past twenty metres you stop kicking. Your lungs have shrunk enough that the sea pulls you down by itself, and everything goes quiet. Five years of competition taught me to like that silence, and to use it.
When the work needs longer on the bottom, I switch to tanks: I'm a PADI Rescue Diver with current BLSD, Advanced Open Water and Enriched Air, and I hold a motorboat licence for trips out to 12 miles.
Il viaggio delle balene
In October 2026 I sailed on Il viaggio delle balene, the Whale Journey: a week-long expedition around Sardinia that links its marine protected areas, from Capo Testa – Punta Falcone to Asinara, Capo Caccia and on around the island. With my MEDSEA colleague Lara Carosso I ran the cetacean monitoring: watching from deck, photographing fins for identification, and listening through a hydrophone, nights included.
The same route carried two other kinds of tracking, which gave this year's mission its name, Tracce nel Blu: environmental DNA for the Mediterranean monk seal, with the University of Milano-Bicocca, and microplastic sampling with CNR-IRBIM.
- When
- 3–9 October 2026
- Route
- 497 nautical miles
- On watch
- 30 hours
- Listening
- 23 hours on the hydrophone
- Seen
- striped and bottlenose dolphins
Into the mud
Before the meadows, my research went into the sediment. For my master's, in Dr Alessandro Cau's marine biology and ecology lab in Cagliari, I studied microplastic contamination in marine organisms and deep-sea sediments. In the environmental microbiology lab I learned to pull DNA out of the same mud.
In 2022 an Erasmus+ traineeship took me to the University of the Algarve, extracting microplastics from coastal sediments for the PlasticSea project with Prof. Maria João Bebianno.
Where the red goes
Water swallows red light first, and at this depth it's long gone. This gorgonian is crimson, but down here it looks grey until you bring your own light.
The tag
At the bottom of a competition line there's a tag you bring back up, proof that you made it. Mine says:
- Registered biologist, Ordine dei Biologi della Sardegna
- MSc Marine Bio-Ecology, University of Cagliari, 110/110 cum laude
- Apnea Academy freediver, level 1
- PADI Rescue Diver with BLSD, Advanced Open Water, Enriched Air
- BOSIET-OPITO offshore safety
- Motorboat licence, 12 nautical miles
- Italian, English (C1), Spanish (A2)
Coming up together
Freedivers never surface alone: someone is always watching from above. Most of what I do works the same way.
At MEDSEA I organise public outreach events and clean-ups. At university I represented biology students for three years, first on my course and then in the Faculty of Biology and Pharmacy, helped first-years settle in as a tutor buddy, and was part of Reset UniCA. Before any of that, in 2017, I joined an environmental volunteer camp in Jena, Germany.
Around the sea
Out of the water, I'm rarely far from it.
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Surf and windsurf
On the water whenever the wind is up.
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Trekking and via ferrata
Hikes, treks and via ferrata routes.
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Clean-ups
Organising and joining clean-ups of local beaches and seabeds.
Write to me
About Posidonia restoration, marine protected areas, outreach, or a dive.
michelacongiu@
I work at the MEDSEA Foundation