Words by Smiley Team
In a beautiful display of nature’s resilience, close to 50 million baby corals could be born this month on the Great Barrier Reef.
Bleaching and temperature changes have damaged roughly two-thirds of coral on the reef off the coast of Australia.
However, scientists observed billions of coral offspring emerging overnight after putting sperm and eggs into the ocean - a process that usually takes two to three days.
This mass spawning event signals that the corals can recover from bleaching and offers scientists a window of time to accelerate research into how best to protect and restore them.
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Researchers at the Australian Institute of Marine Science have simulated the coral’s natural habitat in a high-tech facility called the National Sea Simulator, to investigate how sea life responds to changing conditions. Their Principal Research Scientist, Dr Line Bay, oversees the coral spawning research.
“Our science teams have collected hundreds of parent colonies from across the Great Barrier Reef to breed in the National Sea Simulator,” Dr Bay said.
“Breeding corals during spawning allows us to fast-track our understanding on how we can enhance coral survival and growth and help corals better cope with increased seawater temperatures. We do this both in the lab and out on the Reef.
"By perfecting and scaling up these techniques, we hope to increase the number of ‘captive-born’ heat-tolerant young corals, and potentially release these onto large areas of degraded reefs in the future."
The corals spawn once a year, in a process discovered 40 years ago by a team of researchers including Southern Cross University Distinguished Professor Peter Harrison. Today he restores coral larvae on Lizard Island, one of the islands on the Great Barrier Reef, using a technique that took years to develop.
“We’re excited to be scaling up the coral larval restoration process on the Great Barrier Reef collaborating with research partners at Lizard Island, and our aim to optimise large-scale larval production directly on the Reef,” he said.
“We are trialling new methods to capture coral spawn slicks, grow many millions of larvae in different larval culture pools floating in the lagoon at Lizard Island, and then test different methods to deliver and settle healthy larvae onto reef sites damaged by mass bleaching events, which no longer have enough live corals present.”
“The timing of these projects coincides with the 40th anniversary of the discovery of the mass coral spawning on the Great Barrier Reef, and that discovery now enables us to efficiently collect coral spawn and culture larvae from many species to scale up coral restoration processes,” Professor Harrison added.
The Reef Restoration and Adaptation Programme is conducting the research with funding from a partnership between the Australian Government’s Reef Trust and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation.
Watch: 5 ways to be an eco-warrior at home
