A mix of rock, plant and animal, coral polyps are strange little invertebrates that secrete limestone to make a hard skeleton, ‘root’ to the seafloor and contain algae which photosynthesize, whilst using their tiny tentacles and mouth to grab food from the ocean. However, together, coral polyps build over thousands to tens of thousands of years to create the beautiful coral reefs you’d recognise.
These powerhouse habitats are home to more than 25% of marine life, yet only cover 350,000 km² of seafloor – equivalent to about 0.1% of our oceans. You’ll find coral reefs all over the world, in over 100 countries, from the Great Barrier Reef in Australia to the Red Sea Reef off the coast of Egypt. It’s not just that these ecosystems are beautiful and brimming with life – they are, hence their nickname the ‘rainforests of the oceans’ – they also really support human life more widely.
Firstly they are a huge source of food for many communities – one article noted that nearly half of all U.S. fisheries depend on healthy coral reefs ecosystems for sustainable stocks. People’s livelihoods all over the globe are tied up with the health of coral reefs – whether it’s jobs in fisheries, tourism and other ecosystem services. They also help protect coastal areas and islands by providing natural barriers against waves, storms and floods.
Plus, these incredible creatures are a surprising source of medicine – the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) shares that we are 300-400 times more likely to find a new drug amongst a coral reef species and at sea than we are on a land based ecosystem. Overall the UNEP estimates that the goods and services provided by coral reefs is US $2.7 trillion per year! That’s a huge amount of life depending on only 0.1% of the ocean floor.
You’ve all probably read the headlines of mass coral bleaching events and how coral reefs are doomed to disappear by 2050. It is true that coral reefs are highly impacted by global warming and climate change – they are sensitive to changes in water temperature and ocean acidity and are highly impacted by local pollution. However, coral reefs are resilient and if we can decrease the stresses they are under, they often recover. There are many climate and environmental innovators and scientists that haven’t given up on saving coral reefs – today we delve into two of these pioneers who are doing their bit to save coral reefs and hopefully show you how to get involved yourself.
How AI and sound recordings are supporting coral reef restoration
We welcomed back TEDxLondon speaker, Ben Williams, to Climate Curious to share how his work is helping support coral reef restoration in the recent episode, How AI is decoding coral reefs.
Ben shared how he and his colleagues are using underwater recorders to listen to healthy and degraded coral reefs.
“The first thing you begin to hear is this kind of background crackle. That’s like a campfire in the rain, and then you realize how loud it actually is, and then if you listen for a bit longer, there’s all these other sounds. Kind of whooping sounds or grunting pulses, knocking. That is mainly coming from the fish that we have on these reefs.”
These incredible sounds help conservationists and marine biologists identify all the different species in a reef and judge its health. Degraded coral reefs on the other hand are much quieter. The problem Ben and his colleagues quickly ran into was the huge amount of data they were gathering. For every hour of sound recording it could take a day for one member of the team to identify the species there. Here where AI comes in.
“We found that [the AI] model could actually do a pretty good job at identifying the difference between [healthy reefs versus damaged reefs]. So if we gave it new recordings from a reef it hadn’t heard before, it could tell [in a minute] whether this came from a healthy or degraded reef.”
In partnership with Google’s DeepMind and other bioacoustic work happening in similar fields, Ben has now developed the AI model and it’s able to monitor other coral reefs – not just the reef the model was originally built from. This AI model enables coral reef conservationists to properly understand their coral reefs soundscape data and see how their restoration efforts are going.
“We want to understand if restoration is working, are we bringing back what we would call a fully functioning ecosystem?.. We’re finding we can hear indicators of many of the processes on these reefs in the soundscape that we want to see if they’re recovering.”
In practice, Ben explains this use of AI engages many different layers and groups of people across the world. Through such collaboration they are helping provide evidence to local groups and partners and support their efforts whilst increasing their research data set. If you are excited by this use of AI, Ben shares, this is just the start of using such transformative technology for good. He’s now looking into how AI models can track bomb fishing – a hugely damaging practice found globally – and creating 3D photodigital twins of the reef.
Make sure to watch Ben’s TEDxLondon talk, How AI is helping transform coral reef conservation, if you love what you hear. In this Climate Curious episode, he also shared the exciting citizen science project, Calling in our Coral, which invites people over the globe to restore the ocean with this interactive citizen scientist platform.
How scientists are growing baby corals to restore reefs
If Ben’s team are helping track and monitor what interventions are helping to save coral reefs, then Theresa Fyffe’s team are the ones implementing them. In Theresa’s Climate Curious episode, How baby corals are reviving reefs, she shares how the Great Barrier Reef Foundation and their partners are growing baby corals to restore reefs. But how does it actually work?
“If you were to propagate plants by just breaking off a piece of plants, sticking it in the ground, it’s gonna take a really long time. If you propagate plants from seed, it’s really fast. The way we currently propagate corals is break a piece off, grow it, stick it in. We are literally using coral spawn and from that [we can] get millions and millions of coral babies, whereas you can only get one if you do it the old way.”
This new way of restoring coral reefs was sparked by bringing together 350 Australian scientists and engineers, from across organisations and institutions, and four years later they had created this faster, cheaper and more efficient way to restore reefs. Importantly, these are heat tolerant coral species that help the algae within corals survive higher temperatures caused by climate change (higher sea temperatures are what bleach corals and eventually kill them). Now they are implementing these techniques and have big plans:
“There’s about 200,000 corals that are planted in total each year, and most of those corals don’t survive. And with our work, we’ll be planning around 1.2 million heat tolerant corals, which means that they’ll survive each year starting from about 2030. So we’ll sort of 30 x [times] the current restoration doesn’t
One of the most important aspects of this work is how Theresa and her partners are working closely and equitably with indigenous groups, specifically First Nation communities in the Pacific and across the Great Barrier Reef. As Theresa says, new technology and solutions are no good if they can’t be effectively implemented on the ground, but it’s also about respecting and integrating traditional knowledge. As she says, ‘from a really high level, if you look at the UN stats, the fact [is] that 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity is in the hands of First Nations’. In the Great Barrier Reef and Pacific area, Theresa and her team are working with First Nation groups to set up micro nurseries and other tech like drone deployment to fulfil restoration goals.
For more about Theresa and Great Barrier Reef Foundation’s work, make sure to listen to Theresa’s podcast episode.
At Climate Curious, we will be sure to update you on how all these – and other – coral reef restoration efforts are going. We hope these episodes give you hope and energy that the fight to save coral reefs is far from over!
