Question about the sand on the reefs?

[Fish_Whisperer]

After returning from Cozumel, last October, I dreamed that I was diving a huge wall, and as the current carried me along, I was picking up sponges and corals that had been torn off and replanting them. I looked in front of me and behind me and saw hundreds of other recreational divers doing the same thing, all up and down the wall. It was an amazingly vivid and beautiful dream....

Thanks for all of the great links and sharing your knowledge, Archman. Thumbs-up to you, pal.

 

[ckofabq]

Absolutely outstanding thread. This is why I came to ScubaBoard!
Thanks for the OP and the responses.
Craig-
(hope all of you there right now are having a great time!)

 

[scubawife]

A lot of large-scale reef restoration is to fix damage done by ship groundings. Those are the super-expensive, high profile activities. Here's one that was done off Florida.
http://sanctuaries.noaa.gov/special/columbus/columbus.html

On less grand scales, there's the (relatively) cheaper efforts of folks like this.
http://www.reefball.com/map/antiguascience/reef_ball_foundation_coral_propa.htm
Those reef balls weigh a ton, let me tell ya!

This is kinda cool too.
http://www.ecoreefs.com/home.php

Typically it's easier for coral reef managers to construct these artificial reef structures, and then let natural coral larvae from somewhere else settle on it and re-establish new hermatypic colonies. The long-term hope is that the live corals will successfully grow over these manmade structures to the extent that they don't *implode* the fake habitat, but have built up enough bioherm capacity of their own.

Of course, all this implies that there's a good supply of baby coral larvae floating around in the water column. Which means there's live coral reefs somewhere else locally.

Cozumel's surrounded by deep walls, which are covered in corals. Not only are these deeper corals better protected against natural or manmade damage, but they're perfect sources of local larvae that can resettle on damaged shallow reefs.

The CEA in Akumal is planning to use reefballs. (ceakumal.blogspot.com , ceakumal.org) It should be interesting to see what sort of success they have.

 

[archman]

The CEA in Akumal is planning to use reefballs. (ceakumal.blogspot.com , ceakumal.org) It should be interesting to see what sort of success they have.

From direct experience, I can say three things.

1. Almost everyone grossly underestimates the amount of labor and equipment needed to build and deploy these things.

2. Deployment's much tougher than construction.

3. Reefballs look irritatingly smaller underwater than on land.

I hope CEA has a lot of brawny volunteers!

 

[Fish_Whisperer]

I thought everything looked bigger underwater? *refraining from making any double entendres...*

 

[archman]

Newbie reefball builders tend to psychologically magnify the scale of the things after they've spilt some blood and tears. Once they're plopped in the ocean, stark reality kicks in. Especially with those tiny-sized models. They're just big flowerpots, essentially. But that's the only size that can (relatively) easily be deployed. The bigger reefballs are logistical nightmares.

 

[cjames]

I saw reefballs for the first time in Lembeh and yeah the work they talked about to get them in the water for what kind of surface area they provide seems hard to justify. That said, we puny humans can only do so much.

You talked about the corals coming in from larvae which makes sense, do they ever try to coral propogation from frags that have been aquacultured or recovered from broken heads or is this simply too expensive? In Lembeh, they had a lot of coral rubble that we looked to move to better spots (more light, not covered by other rubble, etc.) Its hard as an amateur, want to be marine ecologist to know when doing stuff like that actually is the wrong thing to do. What happens naturally, even though it seems wrong, is actually usually right.

 

[archman]

...do they ever try to coral propogation from frags that have been aquacultured or recovered from broken heads or is this simply too expensive? In Lembeh, they had a lot of coral rubble that we looked to move to better spots (more light, not covered by other rubble, etc.).

The small, blind holes on the sides of reef balls are made for transplants to be attached. Look here to see what various species look like in "plug form".
http://www.artificialreefs.org/Corals/corals.htm

Don't transplant fire coral!