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

珊瑚礁提供价值数十亿美元的商品和服务，但它们极易受到气候变化的影响。因此，现在主要的研究和保护重点是恢复受损的珊瑚礁，并通过辅助进化积极帮助珊瑚适应气候变化。在过去十年里，由PI推动的研究表明，珊瑚礁恢复和辅助进化最有希望的技术之一是饲养和种植有性繁殖的珊瑚。然而，这种方法受到劳动密集型方法和低存活率的限制。珊瑚幼虫繁殖方法的结果是昂贵得令人望而却步，而且限于小规模(10‘S到数百平方米)。因此，虽然我们可以在实验室或苗圃中培育大量用于珊瑚礁恢复和辅助进化的有性繁殖珊瑚，但我们需要开发更有效的方法来将珊瑚种植到珊瑚礁。为了克服这些瓶颈，我们开发了一种用于移植幼年珊瑚的创新技术(珊瑚塞)，旨在a)提高珊瑚有性繁殖过程中的处理效率，b)避免漫长的苗圃繁育期，c)提高将珊瑚种植到珊瑚礁的效率和时间，以及d)通过保护珊瑚免受放牧压力来提高外植后的早期存活率。在试点试验中，珊瑚辅助插头已被证明更快地种植，并显著提高试管受精产生的珊瑚的存活率。该项目旨在向一系列利益攸关方提供更广泛的概念验证测试，对设计进行微调以提高其有效性，并创建丰富的模式，向珊瑚礁修复从业者提供珊瑚礁辅助插头，作为珊瑚礁保护的工具。

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.