Reef Revival
Reef Revival is a Galapagos-based coral reef restoration project. After the devastating 1997-8 El Nino event 97 % of Galapagos’ coral reefs were lost to bleaching and 16 of the archipelago’s 17 reefs were made extinct.
This morning, we met with Jose, who is the project’s chief coral gardener. He explained how they collect broken pieces of coral, attach them to ropes underwater, and within a year, they grow from a finger to a melon. The mortality rate for this process is an astoundingly low 3%.
The next step is to transport them to a restoration site where, using a special cement, they glue the newly grown corals to the seabed to form a reef. He explained the monitoring process, so we could join him in the water to collect data on these transplanted corals. Using a colour card to reference health of different coral colours, we were to free dive down to inspect each colony, recording its condition of bleaching an algal overgrowth.
We were impressed to find thriving corals, most with no signs of ill health. Jose explained that these are the resilient genomes that survived the mass bleaching event of 1997-8. This year, he continued, is expected to be a super-El Nino, possibly the biggest yet. Water temperatures are already elevated for this time of year and the potential impacts on marine life could be devastating, but Jose has hope that the corals will be able to survive the event.
