Colette’s Custom Framing, Inc KeOlaMagazine.com | May – June July – August 2020
ART GALLERY
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Featuring the ne work of local artists such as Shawn Mackey and many more. Come view our gallery and let us help you with your custom framing needs, too!
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larger salvaged corals are broken into smaller, uniform pieces and adhered to useful substrates to grow in a type of nursery. These coral fragments will grow many times faster than if still in one piece, gradually filling in voids and fusing into one continuous organism after the “cuttings” recognize they all share the same DNA. Micro-fragmentation as a propagation technique has the potential, Susanne says, to create a large volume of coral in a relatively short amount of time. “You take a little piece from the ocean and then you bring it back in two years,” Susanne says, “and by then it will be the size it would have been in 20 years normally, ready to reproduce. That is the hope.” The coral lab hosts visitors from many walks of life: students on field trips, casual tourists on vacation, ocean lovers, divers, and snorkelers of every stripe—even business groups. In most cases, Susanne says, visitors arrive at the lab, located inside the Hawai‘i Ocean Science and Technology Park along Hawai‘i Island’s Kona coast, not knowing much about coral, and leave with a newfound interest and appreciation for the animal that looks like a rock. “They love the idea of how they reproduce—just cut off a little piece!” the director says. “They recognize that thatʻs one of the things that represents part of the solution—buying time for nature to replenish itself. They are always surprised that they might be stepping on something thatʻs alive.” Susanne views the issue of reef loss through the lens of her public health background. Without viable reefs, she says, the countless communities of people who rely on them will become as vulnerable and unhealthy as the coral itself. “Theyʻre going to have trouble feeding themselves,” she says. “Weʻre going to lose more fishermen, and theyʻre going to start migrating. Whenever people are taking off from their culture and their homes and their support systems, it really is a recipe for disaster. So, I look at it as a public health problem.” In May 2019, Heather Howard founded the Coral Reef Education Institute in Kona after selling her fancy new truck, buying a cheap clunker, and using what was left for seed money to cover the instituteʻs earliest expenses: computer, website, business cards, nonprofit status paperwork. “We basically started by just rubbing two pennies together,” Heather says. “Everything has been out of our own pockets. We hope that will change of course...the further down the road we get, the more it evolves.” Currently, the institute is engaged in training divers in identifying and counting corals, mentoring high school students interested in ocean conservation, raising money for scholarships, and sending teams to popular West Hawai‘i beaches to help swimmers exchange toxic sunscreen for reefsafe varieties. Heather dreams of building the Pacific Ocean Science Center, a world-class coral education, research, and conservation facility along the Kona coast where scientists, students, and the general public can work together to mitigate human impacts on the reefs. “The more we learn about what’s going on with the corals,” Heather says, “the more we learn that the problems corals face are human-based. We have to change human behavior... because if we continue on the path we’re on, even planting corals might not be that successful.” ■ For more information: OneCoralReef.org LegacyReefFoundation.org