Nearly 11 years of coral growth in West Hawaii waters was successfully relocated to reefs and coral nurseries last week.
According to a state Department of Land and Natural Resources news release, a team of divers from several agencies — including the DLNR’s Division of Aquatic Resources, The Nature Conservancy and Arizona State University — worked for three days to remove hundreds of coral heads from a decommissioned offshore fish farm pipe ring.
The ring was used to raise fish since 2013 in a farm near the Ellison Onizuka Kona International Airport. Since then, coral has naturally accumulated on the structure for more than a decade.
“These structures are fantastic areas for these corals to settle on,” said Zachary Craig, DAR’s Hawaii Island coral restoration coordinator. “Great in the short run, but in the long run, they need a proper reef home to survive. This is one of the largest mature colony collections that I’ve ever heard of on Hawaii Island.”
As divers chiseled corals free from the pipe, more divers retrieved the freed corals from the bottom of Honokohau Small Boat Harbor, where the operation took place.
The larger corals were relocated to natural reefs, where they will be secured using special marine epoxy this week, while smaller ones were taken to the ‘Ako‘ako‘a Coral Restoration Nursery at the National Energy Laboratory of Hawaii. The nursery opened in May and is the first large land-based coral nursery on the Big Island.
“In the nursery, we can give them a kind of an intensive care unit for those corals that we’re rescuing and know that we’re giving them the absolute best conditions,” said ASU restoration scientist Grace Klinges. “We can also use that nursery to do other types of research to address the causes of coral stress.
“It’s great to be responding to something in a positive way where, you know, these corals would die otherwise,” Klinges continued. “We think that we can save a fair number of them by working together. This is such a massive effort. I don’t think we even knew how big it was going to be until we got in the water and saw it. But I think we’ve made a monumental impact. The coral that we’ve been able to move to the nursery so far, they’re doing pretty well, and we hope they’ll continue to thrive over there.”