Coralclip®: a low‐cost solution for rapid and targeted out‐planting of coral at scale

Abstract

Re‐attaching or out‐planting coral as fragments, colonies, and on larval settlement devices to substrates is a major bottleneck limiting scalabilty and viability of reef restoration practices. Many attachment approaches are in use, but none that are low‐cost, opportunistic, rapid but effective, for integration into existing tour operations on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) where staff and boat time is a major cost and chemical fixatives cannot be easily used. We describe a novel attachment device—Coralclip®—developed to meet this need and so aid maintenance and restoration of GBR tourism sites. Coralclip® is a stainless steel springclip attached by a nail integrated through the spring coil, and can be deployed with a coral fragment in as fast as 15 seconds. Initial laboratory tests demonstrated that Coralclip® secured coral fragments or larval settlement tiles under dynamic flow regimes characteristic of exposed reefs. Coral out‐planting from fragments of opportunity and from nurseries (n = 4,580; 0.3–1.9 coral/minute; US$0.6–3.0/coral deployed) or larval settlement tiles (n = 400; 2.5 tiles/minute; US$0.5 tile deployed−1) when deployed by divers from routine boat operations at Opal Reef confirmed highly effective attachment, with ≤15% failure of clips found after 3–7 months. We discuss how Coralclip® is a cost‐effective means to support reef maintenance and restoration practices.

Coral growth, survivorship and return-on-effort within nurseries at high-value sites on the Great Barrier Reef

“…Recent dramatic loss of coral cover on the GBR [ 11 , 13 ] has led to efforts to evaluate how low-cost nurseries could be used to propagate coral [ 26 ] to support high throughput outplanting [ 27 ] in this bioregion. Here we report the first 9–12 months of data from multi-taxa nursery installations at a high value reef site on Opal Reef.…”

“…Whilst naturally occurring fragments of opportunity are desirable for coral outplanting at high-value tourism sites on the GBR [ 27 ], sites with reduced live coral cover rarely have a continuous supply required for routine site maintenance (J.E., Pers. Obs.…”

“…Obs. ), in particular where using high-throughput practices can regularly result in hundreds of corals outplanted per day [ 27 ]. We therefore installed the first multi-taxa coral nursery on the northern GBR in 2018 (Opal Reef; [ 26 ]) to evaluate “success” of growing coral on coral nurseries.…”

A framework for selectively breeding corals for assisted evolution

“…The method used for outplanting corals in this study is not suitable for larger scale restoration and should not be considered as such as it is laborious, slow, and costly and only appropriate at a scale of tens to hundreds of square metres (Guest et al, 2014). The outplanting methodology should minimize the use of tools and attachment materials (i.e., Coralclip®; Suggett et al, 2019). SUs should be designed so that they are easy to transport, can be rapidly and easy deployed, can be readily attached to the reef substrate (i.e., tetrapods; Chamberland et al, 2017) and, if possible be made of sustainable and ecologically friendly constituents (i.e., sustainable cement; de Brito and Kurda, 2021).…”

Using Propagules to Restore Coastal Marine Ecosystems

“…It does, however, have limitations: it is labor intensive, relies on access to sufficiently abundant donor colonies or fragments, and is generally limited to branching corals (Edwards and Clark, 1999;Edwards, 2010;Ladd et al, 2019). Some studies have therefore focused on generating more rapid attachment methods (e.g., Suggett et al, 2020) or on growing corals in nurseries to minimize reliance on wild colonies (e.g., Shafir et al, 2006). Recent "microfragmenting" techniques, in which small fragments (<1 cm 2 ) of the same species and genotype are placed close together to more rapidly reach larger sizes by fusing with neighboring fragments have also been developed for slow-growing, massive corals (Page and Vaughan, 2014).…”