Truffle-fried oysters and oyster soup have long been favorites in Hong Kong’s bustling restaurants.  Oysters have also been grist to the city’s industrial mill: the process of lime-extraction (which dates back to the Tang dynasty) deriving calcium oxide for use in building, boat caulking and agriculture by burning shells or coral skeleton.

Many believe that these myriad appetites of the city which boasts the highest concentration of ultra high-net-worth individuals in the world have caused the rapid decline of its famed oyster reefs which once stretched across an estimated 1,000 km of coastline in the Pearl River Delta area.

A study conducted by University of Hong Kong’s Swire Institute of Marine Science and environmental organisation The Nature Conservancy has shown the enormous potential lost when we lose our native oyster reefs. An individual oyster can, the 2020 study found, filter up to 30 liters of water per hour and 500 liters per day at summer temperatures (the metabolism of oysters, like all marine invertebrates, increases with temperature).

Oyster reefs also provide shelter for crabs and snails, nursery habitats for juvenile fish and feeding grounds for larger fish. They help in denitrification by removing excess nutrients, help seagrass recovery and reduce the resuspension (erosion) of fine sediment, improving water clarity.

Associate Prof. Bayden Russell, Associate Director at The Swire Institute of Marine Science, the University of Hong Kong and involved in the study, explains, “we’re discovering how abundant and widespread these reefs must have been in the region. The level of impact on them has been surprising.” 

The project was a community endeavour, Russell adds. “We deployed a few trial reefs in a couple of places, and that has only been possible because we have been working with the farmers and fishermen.”

The Nature Conservancy has worked on shellfish reef restoration involving local fishing communities in Australia, United States and New Zealand, identifying suitable sites for restoration, creating oyster reef bases and scattering these areas with baby oysters and mussels for the last twenty years, with a typical project costing around US$64,000 for 400m² of reef. The organisation is also helping struggling oyster farmers impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic (and concomitant drops in restaurant oyster consumption) by purchasing five million surplus oysters to be used to seed native shellfish reefs.

Marine Thomas, Conservation Project Manager at The Nature Conservancy, Hong Kong, says when restoring shellfish reefs it is important to understand what is left, how healthy it is and whether the reef is still reproducing in the water. Reef restoration projects such as this are therefore not possible in every context. Oysters, importantly, need something hard to settle on (substrate), even if it is a limestone rock or other oyster shell, to attach to and keep growing. “This then guides us with the kind of restoration method we need to apply,” she says. “In Hong Kong, which has plentiful shellfish larvae, we can undertake restoration wherever we find suitable substrates.” 

A mature reef takes five years to grow; however a trial reef, established under a fish farm in Hong Kong’s Tolo Harbour in 2019, has been colonised by a variety of sea life, including crabs and sea urchins (which are not typically found in the region). In other locations where The Nature Conservancy operates, restored shellfish beds have helped reduce flooding and improve coastal water quality. And that’s good news for our environment, as well as Hong Kongers’ dinner plates.

Author: Bindu Gopal Rao, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: 1. Kyle Obermann, all others The Nature Conservancy

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When hurricane Delta hit the coast of Mexico on 7th October 2020, experts reckoned that repairing and replanting the ravaged coral colonies of the Mesoamerican Reef (MAR) and the coastline around Quintana Roo south of Cancun could cost about USD $800,000. Rapid response was critical as broken coral dies within weeks. But government funding, predictably, could take much longer to materialise. Conservationists and local businesses alike realised that the cost of not repairing the battered reef would be greater than the cost of restoring it, as the Mesoamercian Reef is second in size only to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and home to 500 types of fish, 70 different corals, sea turtles and whale sharks. Yet, 80 percent of the living coral along Mexico’s Caribbean coast has been lost or degraded in the past 40 years due to pollution, overfishing, disease and increasingly extreme weather events. A simple and cost-effective solution came to their rescue: insurance.

A pioneering nature-based insurance policy purchased in 2019 by the Quintana Roo state government in conjunction with environmental NGO The Nature Conservancy (TNC) funded the efforts of Guardians of the Reef, a group of 80 trained snorkelers, fishermen, biologists, even local restaurant staff led by local diver Emanuel Quirago. They stabilised 1,200 affected coral colonies and removed storm debris from the beaches within 11 days. They also rescued and transplanted almost 9,000 broken coral fragments in artificial nurseries until they could be reattached to the seabed to regenerate new coral colonies. The work is ongoing and the guardians are poised to respond to future storm events if necessary.

The funds for the insurance policy came from the Coastal Zone Management Trust, set up by the state government with support from TNC and revenues were paid by beachfront property owners and hoteliers. A parametric insurance policy like this involves calculating pre-specified payouts depending on various potential trigger events – in this case, the payout varies according to wind strength. The restoration of these coral reefs, which attract over a million snorkelers and divers annually, has ecological and commercial benefits. Healthy reefs absorb 97 percent of each wave’s energy so they buffer the coast against storm damage and provide nurseries for breeding fish.

“Insurance plus government commitments paired with on-the-ground rapid response create the perfect formula to quickly repair critical coral reefs,” says Fernando Secaira, Mexico’s climate risk and resilience lead for The Nature Conservancy. TNC was able to enlist the participation of local businesses by making them aware that the health of this fragile coastal ecosystem was intrinsically linked to their economic success. “It’s a win-win and we look forward to identifying other parts of the world where this approach could work,” he says. They are exploring the feasibility of insuring reefs in regions like the Caribbean, Central America and Asia. Studies show that insurance policies like this could help protect coral reefs against natural disasters – perhaps to protect Florida reefs from future hurricanes and coral in Hawaii from marine heatwaves or coral bleaching.

Nature advocate and CEO of US-based fintech company Cultivo Dr Manuel Piñuela believes that this parametric insurance for nature-based projects will grow over the coming years: “We see innovation around insurance and reducing risk as a critical component to unlock investment into nature.”

Author: Anna Turns, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: 1. Daniela Zambrano The Nature Conservancy, all others The Nature Conservancy

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Sixty miles south of Montreal, near the United States-Canada border, Missisquoi National Wildlife Refuge is one of the most pristine wetland ecosystems in the Candian Northeast. An important wintering area for white-tailed deer, this network of woodland bogs and glassy lakes is a refuge for endangered birds, including swooping great blue heron and the charismatic red-billed wood ducks that are nicknamed ‘acorn ducks’ for their preferred fall food.

So scientists from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the US Geological Survey were surprised when a 2016 study found that the region’s wetlands were also home to an abundance of fish with bizarre abnormalities.
“An astonishing 60 to 100 percent of all the male smallmouth bass we examined had female egg cells growing in their testes,” says the study’s lead author, Luke Iwanowicz. The problem, they knew, was a little white pill.

Invented in the 1950s and introduced to the mass market in the 1960s, the contraceptive pill was revolutionary for humans: freeing women from a physically gruelling cycle of pregnancies as it gave couples control over family size.

For freshwater fish species, the result of this contraceptive revolution has been less rosy. By the early 2000s, it had become clear that the synthetic oestrogens in the pill, excreted by humans, were making their way into water systems and disrupting fish populations’ fragile endocrine balance.

“We identified that some individual fish in fish populations were being affected by a range of compounds going in the environment that can mimic and/or disrupt oestrogen signalling in fish,” says Charles Tyler, Professor of Ecotoxicology and Environmental Biology at the University of Exeter, who has researched the effects of oestrogenic pills on marine life in the UK.

The main offender is ethinylestradiol (EE2), the synthetic oestrogen found in contraceptives. Designed to be resistant to degradation and inactivation, EE2 is more stable in the human body than naturally occurring oestrogen. When excreted into our water supplies by humans, however, EE2 can make its way into aquatic habitats, causing an intersex condition in which male fish display female traits like carrying eggs in their testes; rendering the population infertile. The effects, studies including the Missisquoi study have found, is transgenerational, disrupting the reproductive capacity of fish populations for many life cycles.

What was needed was a solution that preserved the social benefits of pharmaceutical contraception as it enabled marine species to thrive. Mithra, a Belgian biotech company that specialises in novel reproductive pharmacology, came up with one answer: Estelle, a contraceptive pill based on natural oestrogen, estetrol (E4), a unique human hormone produced by the fetal liver early during pregnancy. It forms the basis of their new Estelle contraceptive pill.

Dr. Graham Dixon, Chief Scientific Officer of Mithra Women’s Health, argued in a statement heralding the launch of the new pill that it would be a ‘game-changer’: “E4 is significantly more environmentally friendly compared to alternatives currently on the market, does not accumulate in living organisms and dissipates rapidly from water and sediment.”

Mithra’s own research has found that E4 incurred no adverse effects on aquatic egg production, testicular growth or fish reproduction and that only 2.5 percent of released E4 was biologically active.

Any beneficial effects on aquatic populations will, of course, require broader uptake of the new drug, however in May 2021, the European Commission announced that the pill had been approved, and it will be commercially launched during the second half of the year in Germany, Poland and Austria. A rollout is already commencing in the US from the end of June.

Looking ahead, Tyler says, there are reasons to be hopeful about the prospects for freshwater fish: “There’s a move towards more eco-pharmaco vigilance,” he says. “Looking for drugs which are less harmful to the environment.” He adds that the world has a ‘moral and social responsibility’ to make these drugs accessible to everyone.

Author: Sally Howard and George Walker, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Charles Tyler, Missisquoi National Wildlife Refuge and Unsplash

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One of Australia’s great forests once grew hidden from sight off the east coast of Tasmania. Swathes of giant kelp, known as kelp forests, grew from the ocean floor, towering 30 to 40 metres into massive floating canopies across the surface of the sea. “They were charismatic, six to seven storey tall underwater jungles, basically,” says Cayne Layton, postdoctoral research fellow at Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies. “It is said that some floating canopies were so thick that they were on navigation charts as a navigational hazard.”

Today, 95 percent of this globally significant forest of the world’s fastest-growing plant – giant kelp can grow up to 50 centimetres a day – has been wiped out by the inexorable shift of the warm East Australian Current – the ocean current made famous in the movie Finding Nemo – displacing the cold, nutrient-rich Southern Ocean waters. The remaining five percent now grow only in scattered patches. The decline of these forests, listed as Australia’s first endangered marine community, has been relentless since the 1940s, largely unnoticed and unremarked by the local community. But the fightback has begun, and the early results are promising.

In the spring of 2020, Layton and a team of scientists planted three restoration plots of kelp on rocky reefs along Tasmania’s east coast, having collected spores from surviving giant kelp plants identified as tolerant to the warmer seas.

The scientists planted tens of thousands of millimetre long juvenile kelp on the reefs. When they returned months later, at the end of summer, they were greeted by a beautiful sight.

“One of the sites had no survivors, but at the two other sites we had really good success,” Layton says. “At those two now, we have over 200 surviving giant kelp. The average size is about a metre, and the largest is over four metres tall, so they’re kind of like stringy teenagers at the moment.

“The really exciting thing for us is that in those first assessments after summer, the kelp looked really healthy. That was encouraging – that the increased thermal tolerance we found in the lab was translated to the field.”

The team will again plant giant kelp this winter, and hope to do so each year into the future.

The rehabilitation of these underwater forests has been touted as a tool in the quest to mitigate climate change – great forests that absorb great quantities of carbon – though Layton cautions that the science is still young when it comes to giant kelp’s carbon sequestration ability. Such efforts, along with regrowing seagrasses, are central to marine protection as the climate warms.

Their value to the planet and marine communities, however, is unquestionable. And moment by moment, these fast-growing marine marvels are now straining once more towards the sun and perhaps even a return one day to navigation charts.

“We’re very happy (with the planting), but it’s still early days,” Layton says. “We want these individuals to grow up and become mature and start producing their own babies. Restoration is never going to work if it’s reliant on me and my colleagues planting these kelp. We’ve got to kickstart the natural cycle, so those individuals that we plant start producing their own juveniles.

“They can reach reproductive age within a year, so we’re hoping that towards the end of this year the largest ones will start to become reproductive. That’ll be the next big exciting step for us.”

Author: Andrew Bain, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Cayne Layton, Masayuki Tatsumi

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With its brilliant blue waters, the Adriatic Sea – the body of water separating the Italian peninsula from the Balkans – is a firm favourite with European holiday makers. Its shallow depth and species diversity also provide for a rich commercial fishing ground, with over 1,000 bottom-trawling vessels fishing its seas in a given week, chiefly Italian and Croatian commercial fleets in pursuit of bass, bream and mackerel.

The seafloor nets used by these trawlers are, sadly, a problem for non-commercial species too: dolphins, sharks and the sea turtles that flock to the Adriatic to feed on jellyfish and squid. Fishing trawlers inadvertently capture 6,500 sea turtles a year in the Adriatic, a phenomenon termed ‘bycatch’ or ‘wasted sea life’; over 2,000 of these turtles, it is estimated, will die.

“Bycatch is a very real problem that requires urgent attention and action,” says Lucy Babey, Deputy Director of marine charity ORCA. “Each year hundreds of thousands of turtles, sea mammals, and millions of sharks are incidentally caught and killed in fishing gear around the world.”

Sea turtle mortalities are caused by drowning, as individuals are ensnared and dragged underwater in trawlers’ nets; disorientated turtles find it difficult to change their swimming direction in order to escape through the net’s mouth.

Enter the TED, or Turtle Excluder Device, a structure fitted to the top or bottom of the trawl net that allows larger species to escape. The first TEDs, simple metal grids, were developed in the 1960s in the U.S., where green, leatherback and loggerhead turtles were routinely caught in the nets used by deep-sea shrimp trawlers. European commercial fishing fleets have, however, resisted the wholesale application of TEDs, in the belief the devices exclude larger commercial species, such as cod, as they reduce catch quality due to crushing against the grid. Traditional designs also become clogged with debris, meaning the TED can no longer either catch fish effectively or exclude turtles.

Now a new-generation ‘flexible TED’ is being pioneered in the Adriatic. Mounted on the rearmost part of the trawling net, a tubular potion known as the ‘codend’, the device, designed by marine experts at The Italian National Research Council (CNR), is a tilted escape hatch that acts like a valve, opening when it is hit by a larger weight, such as a turtle or dolphin. Additionally, the net is fitted with an accelerator funnel, to drive the fish down and away from the exit, protecting the quality of the catch.

In a 2019 pilot, CNR’s flexible TED prevented the capture of sea turtles as it affected neither the weight nor composition of the commercial catch and reduced debris capture.

The adoption of the device, says Claudio Vasapollo, a marine biologist involved in the research, “could avoid the bycatch of more than 8,000 sea turtles a year in the Adriatic Sea”. “Although,” he continues, “any solution will need to get the fishing industry on board”.
“It is a matter of urgency that governments invest in, and legislate for, effective bycatch solutions for larger species such as dolphins and turtles,” ORCA’s Lucy Babey adds, of the new-generation TEDs. “These animals play crucial roles within their ecosystem, which are at risk of collapse without them.”

Author: Sally Howard, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Turtle banner image and 3. Zdeněk Macháček & Kris Mikael Krister, 1. David Clode, 2. CNR

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For fish, rivers are high-speed traffic lanes in the same way that motorways are for humans. The Ruhr in west Germany, for example, is such a highway, leading fish to spawning and feeding grounds as well as summer or winter resting places in small lakes and tributaries. On those motorways, however, fish, just like humans, also have to deal with narrow lanes, road works or complete closures. And any such obstacle can have serious consequences for species diversity.

“Fish need unobstructed water ways as they depend on different conditions in different life stages,” says Svenja Storm, a fishing biologist at the regional fishing association of Westphalia/Lippe. “Where an adult fish finds the optimal food for itself, there does not have to be a suitable place for the positioning of spawn or the growth of the young fish. In fact, all fish species migrate in the course of their life in order to optimize their food intake, to avoid unfavourable conditions such as water bodies falling dry to increase the reproductive success.”

One man currently trying to solve this problem is Markus Kühlmann. The 53-year-old engineer has spent the last nine years transforming the 219-kilometre-long Ruhr into the aquatic superhighway it once was. At Baldeney weir near Essen, Kühlmann, together with a team of engineers, biologists, ecologists and hydraulic engineers, developed a system that is unique to the world: a continuously running elevator which transports the fish to the top of the weir.

Part of the impetus for the project, which cost a cool US $8 million, were regulations published by the European Union and the German Environment Agency which require all water bodies in Germany to be in “good condition” again by 2027. Within this regulation was the provision for every German river to be passable for fish.

There being the political will to get Kühlmann’s project off the ground, there was an immediate problem. This location in the Ruhr was not spacious enough for a traditional fish ladder (a series of pools where one is a little higher than the next to allow fish to climb the distance step by step).

Looking for an alternative, Kühlmann found novel fish elevator designs in France, Australia and the United States: “But they did not cover enough height or were created only for certain species,” he says. “We had to come up with something completely new.” He teamed up with engineers from southern Germany as well the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology to first develop a computer simulation.

The way the eventual elevator design works is simple: there’s a tube with a flexible chamber; when the chamber is at the bottom, the fish enter, get transported nine meters upwards and exit the chamber again to continue their journey. To prevent fish from queuing in front of a closed door at the bottom while the lift is at the top, the system consists of two tubes with alternating elevators. Kühlmann and his team developed specific algorithms and underwater sonars to detect when the chamber is full or if a particularly large fish – possibly a predator – is waiting in the elevator and preventing other fish from entering. (The large fish is then transported separately.) “A second software is fed with environmental data that influence the migration activity of the animals, such as season, water temperature or moon phase. That way, the operating intervals of the elevator automatically adjust,” Kühlmann explains.

After years of development, the fish elevator started operating in August 2020 and has been running round the clock since then.

Officials from other cities such as Augsburg are looking to adopt the high-tech elevator model, although Kühlmann admits the price tag of what’s currently a bespoke build will inhibit roll-out of replicas of the Baldeney fish ladder across the globe. That said, Kühlmann hopes his insights will help other regions to think more radically about how they can help migratory fish get from A to B.

Author: Florian Sturm, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Florian Sturm

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The scars of the ice age may be carved into Cumbria’s sweeping valleys and fells, but that’s not all that remains of the era.

Ennerdale Water, a glacial lake in the western Lake District, is home to England’s last migratory population of Arctic charr. Landlocked here since the ice retreated, now the fish emerge under cover of darkness each November to spawn in the adjoining river instead.

Yet that instinct has proven problematic, exposing this threatened aquatic species to water pollution in an environment where the gravel the fish use as their spawning nests was in short supply. Gareth Browning of Forestry England explains that the Ennerdale population had plummeted to around 20 spawning charr by the end of the 1990s. Having outlasted the glaciers, the charr was about to disappear from the lake forever.

At that point, local landowners stepped in to form the Ennerdale Arctic Charr Restoration project. It remains a collaboration between the Environment Agency, Forestry England and other Wild Ennerdale partners.

Unfortunately, they didn’t know much about the fish at first. “It was very much initially a discovery project,” Browning says – and this was its own challenge and led to a process of trial and error.

The team’s first intervention was to replace a crude pipe bridge on the River Liza, which was blocking water flow, hoping this would once again allow the charr to swim upriver to spawn; disappointingly, however, the population didn’t respond. It took a broader survey to discover a second bridge at Woundell Beck was blocking the flow of gravel for charr nests.

The improved river flow also helped another issue that was threatening the fish: riverine needle litter from the conifers planted beside the water courses after the Second World War. “Conifers are very good at stripping pollution out of the atmosphere,” Browning explains, “but that pollution’s quite acidic.” Allowing the Liza to flow freely reduced these harmful pH spikes as did replacing conifers in the surrounding area with native broadleaves, juniper and heathland. At the same time, the Environment Agency undertook an off-site breeding programme to boost fish stock, taking eggs from local fish, and returning the hatched fry to the River Liza.

In 2020 over 700 charr spawned in the River Liza and other once-threatened species are unexpectedly blooming too, such as the formerly extinct Marsh Fritillary butterfly.

Dr Ian Winfield has studied the link between climate change and the cold-water charr, he believes that tracking the population health of species such as the charr is key to understanding the impacts of climate change. Milder winters, he says, pose a risk to the incubating eggs of a species at the southernmost limit of their natural territory.: “They really need water temperatures similar to those of a domestic fridge in order to survive well,” Winfeld says.

The humble Arctic charr’s fate is also a barometer for the health of the Lake District, a much-prized natural environment that sees 15 million visitors each year. “If the population is doing well then the lake is doing well,” Winfield adds.

Author: Ruth Bushi, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Ennerdale banner image: Kreuzschnabel/ Wikimedia Commons, 1. Gareth Browning, 2. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, 3. Dr Ian J. Winfield
(Wikimedia License – https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode)

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Apart from coastal bathers who’ve gingerly waded through its tickling stems or sailors who snared their anchors in its undergrowth, few of us are aware of the 60-plus species of marine flowering plants that constitute seagrass. Fewer of us still appreciate that, like their submarine cousin coral, seagrass orchards are under threat. “The problem with seagrass is that it’s not a charismatic habitat like your coral reef or tropical mangrove,” says Project Seagrass’ Leanne Cullen-Unsworth of the family marine plants that grow in shallow and sheltered coastal waters across the globe.

Seagrass provides a range of services to terrestrial ecosystems: food and habitat for marine organisms, maintaining water quality and stabilising the seabed. Most importantly, seagrass meadows are the hidden stars of carbon sequestration; absorbing atmospheric carbon at quicker and higher rates than ecosystems such as tropical forests, one hectare of seagrass can store around 400 kg of carbon dioxide per year, up to 40 times more than a hectare of dry-land forest. (Making it second only to arctic tundra in its capacity as a carbon sink.)

Partly this is down to seagrass’ marine habitat, where oxygen-free sediment traps the carbon in plant material which then remains buried for hundreds of years after the plant dies (unlike the carbon in forests, which can readily be released by burning for fuel).

So seagrass’ loss is a problem for all of us. And sadly, in most global contexts these hard-working marine flora are receding. It is estimated that 92 percent of seagrass in British coasts has been lost in the last century, much of this erosion having occurred by the mid 20th century, when poor water quality borne of rapid industrialisation led to a wasting disease that scientists believe decimated seagrass meadows. Sediments and turbidity have also played their part in seagrass’ demise, as has physical damage from anchors and fishing nets, commercial seaweed production and the tourist industry, where aesthetics of pristine sands and transparent seas reign supreme.

“In tourist spots in the Indo-Pacific it’s common for seagrass to be torn up so a beach looks like the picture postcards,” Cullen-Unsworth says, who is however at pains to point out that seagrass conservation is not simply pitted against human activity – it provides a nursery habitat for commercial fish stocks such as tiger prawn, conch, Atlantic cod and white-spotted spinefoot. Cullen-Unsworth is one of the founders of Project Seagrass, a nonprofit that’s working to raise awareness of this underrated habitat and is undertaking pilot projects to explore how to best regrow eroded seagrass orchards.

Project Seagrass’ first large-scale project, Seagrass Ocean Rescue, is a partnership between Project Seagrass, Cardiff and Swansea universities and Pembrokeshire Coastal forum that aims to reestablish 20,000 square metre seagrass meadow in Dale, West Wales to demonstrate its environmental and biodiversity benefits, and serve as a model that could be replicated anywhere in the world where seagrass meadows are under threat. Costing GB£40,000 [US$52,000], the project is funded by charitable donations and the first of three ocean sites in Wales and England where Project Seagrass plan to restore native seagrasses in coming years.

The project involved volunteer divers harvesting two million donor wild seagrass seeds from extant meadows around the coast of the United Kingdom. The seeds were then planted in biodegradable hessian bags, by volunteers including Welsh schoolchildren, and these bags were launched into the sea at ideal sites off the Pembrokeshire coast. The chief limitation of the project is that native seagrasses take years to reach maturity, making data-gathering on best methods for replanting a slow process. The final seed bags were deployed in December 2020, says Cullen-Unsworth and though it’s early days she’s hopeful.

“We’re already seeing signs of germination,” she says. “It might be five to 10 years before we can absolutely demonstrate evidence of benefits in terms of carbon sequestration and biodiversity support, but still it’s all very exciting.”

Seagrass Ocean Rescue is one of a handful of global projects seeking to reseed lost seagrass meadows, including a 20-year project to restore native eelgrass meadows at Chesapeake Bay in the US and a University of Gothenburg-led project to restore seagrass meadows along Sweden’s West Coast. Cullen-Unsworth believes that this underwater climate hero will soon get the attention it deserves.

“Britons used to be maritime people who were fully aware of marine habits like seagrass and their role in helping ecosystems to thrive. My hope is that seagrass will once again be as appreciated as grasslands and forests.”

Author: Sally Howard, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves

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Under the azure waters of the Andaman Sea, sturgeon, parrot fish and stingrays swim past a strange new structure close to a coral reef formation. Above, a small solar panel bobs on the water’s surface. This is an artificial reef built by Indian environmental charity ReefWatch. The founders of this tiny non-profit outfit are passionate about the conservation of the magnificent coral atolls in India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands, training local divers to collect naturally broken coral fragments and implant them on to an artificial metal reef. There is, they soon realised, one basic problem with building new coral reefs: “Coral reefs grow between 0.5-7 cm per year,” says Nayantara Jain, Executive Director of the programme. “At this rate, it will take artificial reefs decades to flourish.”

So ReefWatch implemented a simple, radical strategy to enable coral to grow faster. “We hook our artificial metal reefs to a small floating solar panel,” explains Jain. The mild electric current generated by the floating solar panel helps speed up coral growth by seven to twelve times by enabling faster accretion of calcium carbonate. And the electric current leaves the coral with more of an energy budget that it can use to survive warmer temperature spells and coral disease. Jain and her small team, which includes three local youth, predict these artificial reefs could have a far-reaching impact. Just before the lockdown, the team developed a new solar panel design to make coral accretion even more efficient. With the old accretion system, coral would start re-growing within three months. “Now, perhaps it will grow faster,” Jain says. The team also creates diverse natural habitats under each artificial reef using rocks, shells and aquatic plants. “Consequently, we see an immediate uptick in marine life as soon as the artificial reef is set up,” she says.

In the long term, ReefWatch plans to develop a replicable model for coral reef regeneration which involves local stakeholders. Some of their work involves education: through workshops in schools, colleges and elsewhere, they are spreading awareness about how coral reefs protect the fragile local ecology and bulwark these islands against tsunamis and high tides. “We’re also employing local divers to salvage broken coral and maintain our new reefs,” she says. “Hopefully, this will encourage them and others in their community to look after their habitat.” Jain plans to make the project volunteer tourism-driven and hopes to entice divers and beach enthusiasts to spend some time in these picturesque islands and help build artificial reefs. “If protecting their biodiversity could generate higher tourism revenues,” she says, “the programme could eventually be taken over by the local community entirely, leaving us free to replicate this project elsewhere.”  

ReefWatch has built nine reefs so far, all positioned near natural coral formations. In time, these will mature, merge and support diversity of marine life. Each reef costs around US$2,000 and requires regular maintenance in the first few years of its installation. On World Oceans Day in June 2020, ReefWatch launched the first edition of its Adopt A Reef programme, inviting people to sponsor part of an artificial reef for US$470 per year. Within six weeks, all their existing reefs found sponsors. “The government has now allowed us to work in other areas in the Andaman Islands,” says Jain. “We want to build more reefs now…”

Images Credit: ReefWatch Marine Conservation
Author: Geetanjali Krishna, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves

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