Wolf, J. (2015). Rebuilding more Resilient Coral Reefs. Solutions 6(2): 18-22. https://thesolutionsjournal.com/article/rebuilding-more-resilient-coral-reefs/
Perspectives Coral Reefs by Jason Wolf
O
ur oceans are vast, mysterious, full of natural beauty, and vital to life on earth. The oceans drive our weather patterns, keep our air clean, and provide the foundation of a complex food web that sustains life as we know it. With so much depending upon the oceans, it is hard to believe that we know more about the surface of the Earth’s moon than we do about what lies beneath the surface in this amazing marine ecosystem. Partly, what makes our oceans such incredible places are the animals and organisms that inhabit them. Some of the most complex and interesting of these are corals. Hard corals live in dense colonies made up of hundreds or thousands of individual polyps connected by living tissue. A coral polyp has one of the most interesting symbiotic relationships we know of in our oceans because it’s comprised of a plant, algae which is what gives it color, an animal, the coral itself, and a bacteria which serves as an antibiotic coating that protects the coral from disease and certain types of predation. The algae create a photosynthetic reaction to sunlight which creates energy that feeds the bacteria, while the coral itself feeds on microorganisms floating by in the currents and tides. The result is the production of calcium carbonate, which gives corals their shape and creates the hard surfaces and structure that we know as a coral reef. Coral reefs make up less than one percent of our oceans and yet, despite their small size and sea floor coverage, more than 4,000 species of fish, and as much as 40 percent of marine life worldwide depend on coral reefs at some point in their life
Florida Fish and Wildlife
A Mote team prepares corals for outplanting.
cycle.1 Whether for spawning, nursery grounds, refuge, or forage, coral reefs play a key role in the health of our oceans and of the planet as a whole. Sadly, in the past 30 years, 25–40 percent of all corals worldwide and 92 percent of the branching corals indigenous to Florida and the American Caribbean have perished due to climate change, pollution, ocean acidification, and disease.2 With such disturbingly low numbers remaining, recovery without help from humans is extremely unlikely and probably would not occur in our lifetime. However, there is hope. Scientists and researchers at Mote Marine Laboratory in Florida in the US have made some exciting discoveries and breakthroughs over the last seven years that appear to be a potential answer to save our dying coral reefs. Through processes called coral fragmentation and micro-fragmentation, researchers have found that corals, which grow very slowly and only reproduce roughly once per year, can
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actually grow very quickly when cut down into small pieces. Branching corals, such as staghorn and elkhorn, when fragmented into one- to twoinch pieces will grow very rapidly and will nearly double in size over just a couple of months. In only 6 to 12 months, reef building corals, such as brain, boulder, and star corals, when cut down into fragments of just two to three polyps, respond with growth rates of 25 to 40 times what occurs in a mature colony. When these corals are outplanted back to reef areas where their ancestors once thrived, the corals quickly stabilize, affix themselves permanently to the hard substrate, and begin to grow rapidly to a mature size. The results have been nothing short of amazing and the survival rate of these outplanted corals is more than 92 percent after three years in the wild. Human skin grows relatively slowly, however, when cut or injured, it grows extremely quickly as a healing response and overall physiological survival instinct. Corals, when cut into