The Coralassist Plug: overcoming mortality bottlenecks for coral IVF and reef restoration

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Coral reefs provide goods and services worth billions of dollars, yet they are extremely vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Asa result, there is now a major research and conservation focus on restoring damaged reefs and actively assisting corals to adapt toclimate change via assisted evolution. Research driven by the PI over the last decade has shown that one of the most promisingtechniques for reef rehabilitation and assisted evolution involves rearing and outplanting sexually propagated corals. However, thisapproach is constrained by labour intensive methods and low survival rates. The results in coral larval propagation methods beingprohibitively expensive and limited to small scales (10's to hundreds of square metres). Therefore, while we can produce largenumbers of sexually propagated for reef rehabilitation and assisted evolution in the laboratory or in nurseries, we need to developmore efficient ways of outplanting corals to the reef. To overcome these bottlenecks, we have developed an innovative technique(the Coralassist Plug) for transplanting juvenile corals that is designed to a) improve handling efficiency during coral sexualpropagation, b) avoid the need for a lengthy nursery rearing period, c) improve efficiency and time to outplant corals to the reef andd) increase early survivorship after outplantation by protecting corals from grazing pressure. In pilot trials, the Coralassist Plug hasproven to be much faster to outplant and to dramatically improve survivorship of IVF produced corals. This project aims to providewider proof of concept testing with a range of stakeholders, to fine-tune the design to increase its effectiveness, and to create abusiness model to provide the Coralassist Plug to reef restoration practitioners as a tool for coral reef conservation.