Closing the circle: is it feasible to rehabilitate reefs with sexually propagated corals?
By James R. Guest, M. V. Baria, Edgardo D. Gomez, Andrew Heyward, Alasdair Edwards. Coral reefs, 2013
150 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Sexual propagation of corals specifically for reef rehabilitation remains largely experimental. In this study, we refined low technology culture and transplantation approaches and assessed the role of colony size and age, at time of transfer from nursery to reef, on subsequent survival. Larvae from Acropora millepora were reared from gametes and settled on engineered substrates, called coral plug-ins, that were designed to simplify transplantation to areas of degraded reef. Plug-ins, with laboratory spawned and settled coral recruits attached, were maintained in nurseries until they were at least 7 months old before being transplanted to replicate coral limestone outcrops within a marine protected area until they were 31 months old. Survival rates of transplanted corals that remained at the protected in situ nursery the longest were 3.9–5.6 times higher than corals transplanted to the reef earlier, demonstrating that an intermediate ocean nursery stage is critical in the sexual propagation of corals for reef rehabilitation. 3 years post-settlement, colonies were reproductively mature, making this one of few published studies to date to rear a broadcasting scleractinian from eggs to spawning adults. While our data show that it is technically feasible to transplant sexually propagated corals and rear them until maturity, producing a single 2.5-year-old coral on the reef cost at least US$60. ‘What if’ scenarios indicate that the cost per transplantable coral could be reduced by almost 80 %, nevertheless, it is likely that the high cost per coral using sexual propagation methods would constrain delivery of new corals to relatively small scales in many countries with coral reefs.
Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change, Oceanography
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e1b077e20773a4b932dfb4ea3dd425be8cbb0bf2
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Citations in the corpus
- Coral restoration research and technical developments: what we have learned so far (2019, background): “The cost of a single 2.5-year-old Acropora millepora grown from a sexual propagule on the reef costs at least US$61 (Guest et al. 2014).”
- Sexual production of corals for reef restoration in the Anthropocene (2020, background): “…approach, is to generate and deploy sexually produced corals (e.g. Heyward et al. 2002, Edwards & Gomez 2007, Harrison 2011, Nakamura et al. 2011, Guest et al. 2014, Omori & Iwao 2014, Chamberland et al. 2015, 2017, Harrison et al. 2016, dela Cruz & Harrison 2017, Pollock et al. 2017, Omori…”
- The cost and feasibility of marine coastal restoration. (2015, methodology): “…per coral colony was provided (Shafir et al. 2006, Garrison and Ward 2008, Shaish et al. 2008, Ferse 2010, Levy et al. 2010, Nakamura et al. 2011, Guest et al. 2014), calculations for the restoration cost per area were based on a transplanting schedule with four coral colonies out- planted per…”
- Coral propagation: a review of techniques for ornamental trade and reef restoration (2017, methodology): “Sexual propagation protocols have developed considerably over the last 15 years, with successful techniques established for both brooding and broadcast spawning species (Heyward & Negri 1999; Petersen et al. 2006; Linden & Rinkevich 2011; Baria et al. 2012; Guest et al. 2014).”