Coral how does it grow

This isn't just an ecological tragedy but a serious socio-economic issue because up to a billion people around the world depend upon these coral reefs for their livelihood. You start with coral farming, which has been around for about 15 years. Traditionally it's being done by stringing up coral in a nursery in the ocean and as long as it's a certain fast-growing type of coral, it'll grow in about six months and then you can plant it out there. These projects have shown that you can bring a dead reef back to life but it's been very limited in terms of its impact because it's not a very scalable method.

You basically have to build one of those farms next to each reef you're trying to restore and you can basically only grow one genre of coral, these very fast growing species of coral and there is little you can do to ensure that they survive once you plant them. Often after you do they die in the next warm ocean event. We're building land-based coral farms that incorporate new techniques developed by several research institutes including our partners at the Mote Marine Laboratory in the Florida Keys as well as the Hawai'i Institute of Marine Biology.

They are basically facilities with a bunch of tanks that we can pump seawater through and control the growing conditions. That allows us to do several things: one of them is that we can accelerate coral growth rates by up to 50 times compared to how fast they grow in nature by using a process called micro-fragmenting.

Our approach also allows us to train the corals to be more resilient against warming and acidifying oceans that threaten their survival. We can crank up the heat or the acidity in the tanks and the corals can learn to survive and build up resilience against those climate change conditions. We can also see which individual corals fare best in a warmer ocean climate and take those genotypes that are naturally most resilient and have them seed the next batch of coral.

Read more: Coral reefs in Thailand's Maya Bay begin to recover. This technique has been dubbed assisted evolution. Our farms are also much more scalable. We can just add more tanks to the farm. We can grow hundreds of thousands or even millions of coral from a single facility if it's large enough, and distribute them around a region. Having those economies of scale to be able to provide coral for restoration projects from a single farm is a new approach. Corals grow in colonies of individual polyps, so each animal is a polyp and a single coral you see can actually be hundreds or thousands of these polyps.

What we do is break the coral apart into single polyps and space those tiny pieces out. Once they're in that small form they actually grow much quicker and fuse back together into larger coral. We repeat this process over and over, breaking the coral apart, fusing them together, breaking them apart, fusing them together.

As a result, we keep the coral in all-out growth mode and they grow much faster. That's particularly important for slow-growing species like brain coral. They form the foundation of a reef structure but in traditional reef restoration projects people haven't been able to grow them because they grow very slowly. We're able to incorporate those corals, which is important because we're trying to take a much more holistic approach to reef restoration and want to use as many species as we can.

So assuming you started with a blank slate, how long would it take to grow a lively, healthy reef? If we're starting from scratch, from just collecting corals that we're going to start growing in our farm, it'll be about six or eight months before we're planting our first batch of coral into that reef. It would take around a year to have a kind of reef that looks pretty awesome, that fish are coming back to, that mimics what a real reef would be out there. The key is: we're only trying to put corals into places where they're going to survive so not every reef is able to be restored.

We try to work in places where the local stressors to reefs, things like overfishing and pollution have already been lessened before we go and restore a reef so that we're not putting it in a place where it has no chance to survive.

We're actually a for-profit business, which is something new in reef restoration. Until now, it has been totally grant-funded and donation-funded but we are selling the service of reef restoration to stakeholders that benefit from having a healthy reef. That could be wealthy people that just want a reef off their shore but we're seeing a lot of interest from hotels and resorts or real estate developers that are building new developments.

There are also companies like cruise lines. Read more : Sexual healing for dying coral reefs. When reefs are destroyed from dredging or building a cruise port, they can pay us to restore the reef that they've destroyed. There has also been interest from governments and international development agencies. He has conducted more than 60 scientific expeditions in the Arctic, Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. Sunita L. Her research explores how the larvae of seafloor invertebrates such as anemones and sea stars disperse to isolated, island-like habitats, how larvae settle and colonize new sites, and how their communities change over time.

Kirstin also has ongoing projects in the Arctic and on coral reefs in Palau. Her work frequently takes her underwater using remotely operated vehicles and SCUBA and carries her to the far corners of the world. A meandering career path Mollica grew up in Fort Collins, Colo.

Open Slideshow. Mollica et al. A thriving coral reef community at Hotsarihie, Republic of Palau. A research team led by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution identified a detailed mechanism showing how ocean acidification affects coral skeletons—giving scientists a way to predict more precisely where corals will be more vulnerable. The study was published Jan. They investigated how ocean acidification affects coral skeletal growth and identified where coral reefs may be more vulnerable in the future.

The CT scan images reveal annual growth bands, much like rings on a tree, which showed scientists how corals grew their skeletons upward while also thickening them. A 3-D CT scan reconstruction of a core sample of a coral skeleton. Topics Coral Ocean Acidification. We use cookies to analyze site usage and improve user experience.

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Necessary Necessary. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. Most reef-building corals depend upon zooxanthellae tiny little algae that grow inside of them to photosynthesize and provide food. Though it varies largely on geography and the species of coral, many reef-building corals have a narrow temperature range in which they can thrive.

That said, research has shown that corals can adapt to moderate rising ocean temperatures if they are healthy. Many coral reef animals play important roles within coral reef ecosystems.