A $1.5 million grant has been awarded to the California Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Roatan Marine Park for a three-year programme to construct the first coral-rearing facility in Honduras, and to test techniques for restoring “rapidly degrading” reefs on its dive-resort island of Roatan.
The research team want to develop new ways of boosting the survival of young corals, an estimated 90% of which die in their first six months of life, as well as training local researchers in coral husbandry.
The grant has been awarded by the Coral Research & Development Accelerator Platform (CORDAP), which supports the academy’s Hope for Reefs initiative to reverse the rapid decline of Earth’s coral reefs by 2030.
The most effective coral-rearing methods found during initial testing in CAS’s Coral Regeneration Lab will be applied to colonies on the Caribbean’s Mesoamerican Reef at Roatan. Work will start to build the laboratory in Roatan Marine Park early next year.
Corals will be monitored in nurseries on the reef and will also be transferred to the land-based facilities for additional testing.
“Corals experience high levels of early mortality, which are currently being worsened by increasingly adverse environmental conditions,” says Rebecca Albright, CAS curator of invertebrate zoology and founder of CoRL.
“On top of stressors like ocean acidification and rising sea temperatures, the Mesoamerican Reef is rapidly losing coral colonies to stony coral tissue-loss disease. This decline in coral populations has led to lower genetic diversity on the reef, leaving it more susceptible to local and global stressors.
“Thanks to CORDAP’s support, we hope to increase the overall number of sexually reproducing corals in this critical ecosystem, bolstering the reef’s genetic diversity and making it more resilient to a changing environment.”
Corals start life as free-swimming larvae in search of a place to settle, but too many deplete their energy reserves and die in the effort.
The team are exploring what they say are three promising ways of assisting the larvae: increasing water alkalinity to enhance early skeletal formation; dosing them with amino acids to enhance nutrition; and inoculating them with algae as a supplemental energy source.
They also plan selective breeding of heat-tolerant individuals, initially using the Indo-Pacific species Acropora millepora, and testing the corals in those marine park sites affected by stony coral tissue loss disease.
Also on Divernet: Coral farmers reshaping the future, Ten ways tech Is rescuing coral, The Big Build: Reef-star dives in overdrive, Coral crash: can our reefs be saved?
