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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

A similar programme for tank breeding and reseeding has been working in Queensland too. Getting tank corals to spawn is hard I believe. They're aiming to breed up higher temperature tolerant initial colony types to use for rebuilding bleached coral.

Small instances are "seeded" onto a bad spot with a stable base matrix like a scaffold, to develop and grow. The matrix either decays over time or is stable and not a problem left in place. My understanding is that beneficial fish and related species are needed for the full biome to "work" and the seeded early coloniser types help these animals come in from surrounding areas. Without this work, a more rapid colonisation by less beneficial types can happen.

Almost any remediation gets my upvote for trying, but at scale avoidance of the man made causes of coral death is much more important.

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A lot of what hobbyists might not realize at first is the fact that coral are colonies of many many tiny organisms each performing their role, like zooxanthellae. These structures are enabled by entire ecosystems of ancillary bacteria on adjacent rock and the water column that maintains the equilibrium. A lot of the acute die off we see is not just warming waters or pollutants harming the coral itself, but primarily the damage to the unseen symbiotes, food sources, and bacterial colonies that are part of the coral's life cycle.

With few exceptions if you have a piece of coral in your tank and it dies, it's your fault. They're immortal otherwise when left undisturbed. Some common pet store coral like pulsing xenia, green star polyps or zooanthids will grow in spite of the worst conditions to the point where they become invasive. All you need is a single polyp and most coral specimens we're familiar with will eventually grow and spread as far as the ecosystem will allow.

Deep deep layered sand beds, areas of stagnant water and high flow water, macroalgae, various gas exchange areas, copepods, amphipods, all of it is part of a holistic picture that is needed for these bacteria to be happy. This process can take years of what I call 'strategic neglect' by not messing with the deeper darker anoxic layers of sand and algae. If those bacteria are happy the coral has no choice but to thrive.

I hope this new effort to get the coral to spawn without subdivision succeeds so that future generations can see the same things we once saw, and the life it creates below.

I'm sure you know this but for others; the "tanks" here are university lab near industrial scale plastic 10,000l tanks, not glass walled home aquarium tanks. Same same, but they know what their doing and what complex symbiotic organisms coral are. UQ's Heron Island has table rigs under lighting but on the mainland at JCU and I believe the CSIRO it's pretty massive.

Australian uni Tank farmed corals have spawned in the same lunar phase as reefs for a while I believe, it's getting them to do it more frequently and doing the "IVF" like stuff, and implanting on scaffolding which is hard.

Not a coral scientist. I welcome corrections

Another place doing some important research is KAUST above Jeddah on the Red Sea. They are working with one of the Barrier Reef photogrammetry capture programs to monitor coral and doing replacement testing etc due to higher average water temps so a coral evolved to withstand Red Sea summer might be a fit for the more recently hotter QLD water. I hope something like this works one of the most amazing things I have ever seen was a spawning event years ago. Coral is the canary in the coal mine of Climate Change and if we can't help them adapt then I am afraid we might not be able to either.

You can do it at home with a lunar light, temperature controller, and a curtain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9jsNTyeGNk

AIMS are the main org I know of that are doing lab-based synchronised spawning in Australia, and more interestingly IMO spawning/survivorship under future conditions. SeaSim is fairly well known here and tends to get national media attention around the annual mass coral spawning event (expected early next month).

https://www.aims.gov.au/about/facilities/national-sea-simula...

> the "tanks" here are university lab near industrial scale plastic 10,000l tanks

Likely polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA), usually called acrylic, and possibly but less likely polyethylene terephthalate (PETE). Both are technically plastic, but plastic often correlates to cheap, and I doubt those tanks are cheap. Also possible but even less likely to be aluminium oxynitride (ALON), which is ceramic not platic, aka transparent aluminum, but I suspect it would be cost-prohibitive.

> ...they know what their doing... I welcome corrections

--> they're ;-)

> ...they know what their doing... I welcome corrections

--> they're ;-)

HEADSHOT

>> which is ceramic not platic

missed opportunity on my >< typo

No one is perfext. :P

Strategic neglect is really the heart of conservation. More than anything, ecosystems need to be left alone, as free as possible of human influences.

That’s not true in North America.

In the northeast, the forests we see are actually cultivated, and much that is deciduous would become pine forest with impassable underbrush without human intervention.

Prevention of wildfires requires human intervention and brush clearing. I believe this is a factor right now in California.

The Great Plains is largely cultivated, and without proper maintenance is shrinking.

Some people theorize that much of the lush vegetation European settlers saw in New England was actually human cultivation, that was left untended due to mass smallpox deaths.

Strategic neglect is a strategy, but when applied naively you may not end up with the ecosystem you wanted.

> Prevention of wildfires requires human intervention and brush clearing. I believe this is a factor right now in California

Prevention of all wildfires requires intervention, but the natural state is lots of small fires and that actually results in fewer huge fires, so “neglect” is a valid strategy. Unfortunately it’s hard to do proscribed burns to “catch up” to the natural state as they are unpopular.

Wildfires are the natural earth's own clearing process, returning carbon harvested by the trees to the soil. It's only a negative thing because it effects us.

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