Innovative Coral Rearing Techniques
We’re thrilled to report some good news from our Coral Research team! It is always rewarding to see evidence of our research and strategies paying off to the benefit of the coral reefs we care about so deeply, as well as the long term health of our oceans.
Coral reef decline has negatively impacted the ability of corals to produce viable offspring during reproductive spawning events. One of our goals at the Coral Innovation Hub is to rehabilitate threatened coral populations by propagating sexually-produced corals, collecting coral gametes during spawning events and cross fertilizing them to produce genetically distinct corals.
In September 2019, the Cape Eleuthera Institute hosted a coral breeding and restoration workshop led by SECORE International, supported by The Nature Conservancy and the Perry Institute for Marine Science, as a part of the Bahamas Coral Innovation Hub project. During the workshop, we reared around a million larvae from the mountainous star coral, and a thousand settlement units were outplanted onto the reefs around South Eleuthera. After our last monitoring in January 2021, we were thrilled to see star coral juveniles budding and getting bigger. This is an important achievement, evidencing the success of the innovative larval propagation and coral husbandry techniques applied at the Coral Innovation Hub. Now, our researchers are getting ready for the next spawning season.