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News > October
18th,
2010
October
18th,
2010
Coral Nursery Maintenance & Data Collection
2010 has been a tough year for the corals. With extreme temperatures
along with other pressures many corals have been severely stressed,
some to the breaking point.
MSDT Debbie Gottdenker helping to arrange some of the coral fragments.
In an attempt
to correct the balance and breath new life back into Koh Tao’s
coral population Eco Koh Tao, in conjunction with the Save Koh Tao
Group joined forces with scientists from the Prince of Songkhla
University in Southern Thailand and the DMCR (Department of Marine
and Coastal Resources) to develop extensive coral nurseries across
the island.
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| Scientist
from Prince of Songkhla University
with tags to track the progress of the corals |
Tagged
corals on our
coral nursery at Twins |
On
October 18, after one month in the water team members from the university
returned to check on the progress of the corals and see how they
had fared since transplantation.
Coral nurseries work a little like gardening. By take a ‘cutting’
from one coral colony it is possible to break that up and create
a number of ‘new’ colonies. We have been doing this
to date on Koh Tao but certainly not in the sort of volume that
this project provides.
This picture
shows where he coral was broken or fragmented (the flat part) and
how in a month the branch is re-forming itself and growing out of
the centre.
Having
transplanted over 450 coral fragments onto each of our coral nurseries
the corals have to then survive long enough to grow and become a
healthy new colony on its own. Thankfully, most have done so with
limited mortality across the nurseries.
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| Measuring
and tracking the changes is vitally
important to determin the feasibility of this project |
See
how the live coral tissue has grown over the
plastic creating its own secure base in only a month |
Eco
Koh Tao and Crystal Dive are responsible for maintaining and collecting
data from two of Koh Tao’s nurseries, one at Twins by the
island of Koh Nangyuan, and one at our very own artificial dive
site ‘Junkyard Reef’ located off Mae Haad beach.
Mortality has been higher in Mae Haad which, being closer to the
population centres of Koh Tao, pollution and other stressors remain
higher.
Thanks to MSDT’s Debbie Gottdenker, Jennifer Dowling and Iain
Johnston who helped to tidy up the nurseries and collect our first
batch of data.
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