How We Do It

Welcome to our Resilience & Recovery program! We snip five fragments from healthy mature colonies of corals on the reef for placement in our mid-water spawning nurseries, ensuring we maintain sufficient genetic diversity within species to avoid genetic bottlenecks during spawning. We use species across all key functional groups and all life histories. The five fragments of each genotype are secured to each individual branch of our coral trees. The fragments grow towards each other and fuse to form a single colony. In the water column, away from the normal ecological stressors on the reef such as parasites, predators and competitors, the corals grow about five times faster than on the reef. We leave the corals in the nursery to attain reproductive viability and to participate in the annual synchronised spawning. The hundreds of millions of additional fertilised larvae from the spawning nurseries helps build reef resilience in the good times. In periods of prolonged warm water that results in coral bleaching, we lower the nurseries into cooler, deep water until conditions ease. In this way, we preserve our spawning stock to turbo charge reef recovery in the bad times.

We build our spawning nurseries to a scale that is manageable by a small team. We design the program employing sound scientific principles but operation does need scientists to make it work. We design the nurseries themselves to be easily lowered into cooler deep water in times of trouble to preserve the valuable spawning stock. And most importantly, our program is designed to be easily replicated by communities everywhere. Assisting coral reefs to adapt and thrive in a warming world will take a wide variety of methods, some of which will be high tech and expensive. Others, such as our spawning nurseries, allow meaningful participation by communities at relatively low cost. Contact us now to ask us how.