The Adventure Dive Club
Living with the Ocean
Concept
The concept of the nursery came from researchers from the National Institute of Oceanography in Israel who participated in a cooperative research project with the PMBC and researchers from 4 other countries, UK, Italy, Singapore and Philippines, under the programme “Developing ubiquitous practices for restoration of Indo-Pacific reefs”, REEFRES, supported by European Commission.
The nursery method is a way of cultivating coral fragments using traditional forestation techniques. By removing limited amounts of coral fragments this reduces the impact to the donor colonies and aids reproduction of new coral colonies.
The nursery is suspended above the substrate which allows the fragments to grow with reduced threats from corallivoes, such as parrotfish, crown of thorns and drupella.
Method.
Nursery assembly
The main frame of the nursery is made from forklift truck pallets. They are bolted together and suspended off the substrate by inflated inner tubes which are fixed on the underside.
The whole nursery is tethered in place by ropes attached to screws that are fixed into the substrate.
Coral fragments are carefully removed from the donor colonies.
Fragments range from 2 cm to 5 cm in length. Care must be taken not to handle the fragments too much and to cause unnecessary damage to the donors.
Each donor colony is tagged with cable ties and then monitored to see what is the effect of removing the branches.
This picture clearly shows the axial polyp tip starting to regrow after only 2 weeks.
No other negative effects have been noticed to date.
The fragments are then inserted into plastic tubes. In some cases we need to add a small drop of superglue to fix the fragment to the tube.
Care is taken not to effect other parts of the fragment with the superglue.
The next step is to place the fragments into a sheet of meshing which will support the fragment for the next 6 months. The trays are then fixed onto the floating pallets.
Monitoring
The most time consuming part of the project is the monitoring. Each month a team of local volunteer divers helps to clean the barnacles and algae growing on the frame work. Each tray has 10 control fragments which we photograph and measure for comparison. Lastly all the fragments are counted and examined for health to establish the survival/mortality rates.
At the same time the same type of monitoring is undertaken on the coral fragments that have already been transplanted to their permanent sites.
Coral Rehabilitation Workshop
Interested in enrolling yourself or your class in our Coral Rehabilitation Workshop?
Prerequisites:
Minimum age: 13 years old
Diving experience: Not necessary, but required if the students participate in any under water activities.
Volunteers Needed
At present we are searching for at least 20 experience dive volunteers to assist relocate corals from the present coral nursery to their final homes in a site known as Table Coral City in November 2007.
The work will involve
- Dives to between 5 meters and 15 meters depth
- Preparation of new coral sites
- Transportation of coral fragments
- Installation of coral fragments
- Collecting data
- Removal and cleaning of existing nursery framework
- Replacement of framework
- Collection of new coral fragments
- Tagging new coral fragments
- Installation of new coral fragments into nursery
Only experienced divers may participate.