The Coral Nurseries are set!

This is it! All four of our coral nurseries are finally in the water! It took us less than a month to build the nurseries and place them in the water, it was a mission but we did it. 
Aishah swimming with cement block attach to a buoy
Leo and Chloe setting a nursery underwater

The happy happy happy team after the work done!

The nurseries hold mainly branching Acropora coral fragments but also some Porites and Pavona for a total of 128 fragments. The nurseries need intense cleaning to ensure the health and growth of the coral fragments. The design of the nurseries called line nurseries enables quick cleaning and reduces sedimentation on the fragments. We’ve been cleaning the nurseries every week by snorkeling/freediving to avoid the overgrowth of competitive algae on the cable ties and to maintain the nurseries structures clean (pipes, ropes). 

The four line nurseries holding 128 coral fragments

A Porites fragment
A Pavona fragment

A Acropora fragment that has started to self-attach to the cable tie


We did our first monitoring and maintenance dive last week and some fragments have already started to grow over the cable ties and self-attach to them! The monitoring consists in recording the state of the fragments, we consider the following: detached, dead, bleached, overgrown by algae, self-attached, predation scars and disease. We will do these dives one or twice a month to properly clean the nurseries and monitor the fragments. Since there are three of us at the moment, we spilt the task in three. On the last dive, Chloe did the monitoring, Leo cleaned the cement blocks and the buoys with a big brush and Aishah cleaned the fragments one by one carefully with a toothbrush.  The nursery phase will last between 6 months and 1 year depending on the fragments size and the coral genus. We will take good care of all our coral fragments until they reach the suitable size to be outplanting on the reef.


Stay tune coral lovers!

Aishah and Chloé

Aishah and Leo during the last week dive






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