An early design of the ceramic coral starters, showing a steel cage for protection from predators.
Credit: T. Whitman
Over the past couple of decades, one of the most actively depressing environmental stories has undoubtedly been the Great Barrier Reef. The world’s premiere region for coral growth is also a center of biodiversity, and helps drive many large-scale oceanic cycles—and a combination of global warming and ocean acidification has a real chance of destroying it entirely.
Well, now things seem to be looking up—at least, a bit.
A new effort led by the Australian Institute of Marine Science looks to directly restore the reef by planting “baby corals” all over the area. It involves not just a specifically tailored delivery robot, but an advanced AI model that scans the sea floor and autonomously selects the best spots for spawning.
The baby-drop robot works by hanging off the side of a boat, with multiple cameras facing down. As it scans along the bed, it takes note of the placement of existing coral, both bleached and unbleached, and decides when to drop a piece of ceramic material that can provide the same physical scaffold for new growth as an existing coral.
This ceramic starter comes pre-seeded with a juvenile coral grown in aquaculture, now placed in the best oceanic growth spots with down-to-the-meter precision. The hope is that a “reef-scale” effort of this type could re-seed the world’s most important underwater biofilter, reversing (in part, at least) the damage of the past century.
This is actually just a test run for the real thing: in particular, using smaller boats with fewer payloads, and operating in calm, shallow waters. In the future, the team looks to expand to cover the entire reef. The boats carrying the robotic baby-droppers are currently driven by human sailors, but in the future the team hopes to increase capacity by making the boats autonomous, as well.
This release comes hot on the heels of a study showing that the Australian reef might actually be able to recover if the world hits global climate targets. It’s also one of several attempts to directly assist coral growth, though most efforts center on mitigating factors harming coral rather than on promoting their growth.
In all likelihood, the autonomous approach will be needed. The above video shows the RangerBot, designed by the Queensland University of Technology to find and kill “crown of thorns” starfish by injecting them with a poison. These sorts of efforts will be vital to mitigating the harms of climate change. Just remember that, right now, even the most optimistic of projections show a 70% to 90% decrease in coral density, before the turn-around.
When it comes to the world’s great reefs, there are real efforts to save them—but things will almost certainly get worse before they get better.