In the quest to restore damaged and degraded coral reefs, Dr Anjani Ganase and her team have undertaken an approach to research reef types and to allow, as far as possible, nature’s process to lead the way.
The first time that I observed coral spawning was in Curacao in 2010 during my Master’s research internship. My dive buddy and I, both Master’s candidates at the CARMABI Research Station, were invited to join a team collecting sperm and eggs from Elkhorn corals. Although coral spawning had been observed since the 1980s, scientists were still figuring out the best methods for culturing coral larvae in the lab in order to study the early life history of coral species and for the purpose of coral restoration. Coral spawning refers to the release of coral gametes (sperm and eggs) of the corals into the water column where they mix and fertilise. The coral larvae form and swim down to the reef to settle and grow. This happens seasonally timed by environmental cues.
As a casual observer, I wasn’t sure what to look for and was distracted by many other organisms creeping around in the dark. Suddenly there were tiny pink bundles (sperm/ egg bundles) drifting around us and many nets were cast over the branching colonies to capture for fertilisation in the lab. It was a night to remember! At that time, I never thought that I would be attempting to do this 13 years later. In 2022, the person I needed to call was my dive buddy, Dr Valerie Chamberland, who is now a lead researcher at SECORE International studying the reproductive patterns of corals in the Caribbean for the purpose of enhancing restoration.
Coral reefs of Trinidad and Tobago
When I returned to TT, I realised that we urgently needed to care for our coral reefs that were allowed to degrade out of sight out of mind. Firstly, Trinbagonians needed to see what coral reefs of Tobago look like and to be educated on how we impact corals and how this affects our lifestyles. This research became the Maritime Ocean Collection (maritimeoceancollection.com) a platform to view coral reefs of Tobago in an immersive Google Street View mode. Secondly, we needed to prepare ourselves for a future of climate change with projections of severe coral bleaching events and disease outbreaks that will drive coral mortality as the global ocean warms. To do this, Tobago needs to build it capacity in coral restoration. We had lots to learn from our Caribbean neighbours.
[caption id="attachment_1009502" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Brain coral releasing sperm and egg bundles during spawning. - Anjani Ganase[/caption]
Unlike the common forms of coral restoration that rely on coral farming and the use of coral clones to rebuild the reef, we need to build resilience through genetic mixing as much as possible. There are several modes of sexual reproduction that corals use but about 75 per cent of the coral species carry out broadcast spawning which is an annual event where corals synchronously release massive amounts of sperm and eggs in the water column. Coral larvae propagati
