[Coral-List] Transplanting coral fragments

[Eugene Shinn]

I read with interest the comments about viability of coral fragments for 
reef restoration.I can’t resist commenting and describing some 
observations made before 95% of those on the coral list were born.

As a young technician with a 16 ft. outboard boat I became friends with 
and provided services to Dr. Edward Hoffmister and Dr. Grey Multer who 
conducted some transplant and growth rate studies in 1959. For their 
study I did the diving, and transplanting of their coral fragments. The 
study was conducted in about 4 m of water near the lighthouse at 
Carysfort Reef off Key Largo Florida. We cemented fragments of A. 
cervicornis and small heads of /Montastrea annularis/ to 12-inch square 
concrete tiles that I pinned to the bottom with iron rebar. On 
approximately monthly intervals I would bring up the tiles so Hoffmister 
and Multer could make growth measurements and photograph the corals 
aboard my boat. The corals were out of the water for about 10 minutes 
before being replaced on the bottom. The corals remained healthy 
throughout the experiments. Most of those tiles are still there today.

Learning from and helping these two famous researchers inspired me to do 
my own growth rate experiments. What I did was conducted entirely 
underwater. I broke fairly large colonies from a parent colony that was 
part of a huge thicket of live /cervicornis/.The colonies were 
transported in seawater filled cooler to two sites closer to shore. One 
clump was placed in Hawk Channel about halfway to shore and the other to 
a hard bottom site in 2 m of water near Garden Cove a few hundred meters 
from shore. I simply jammed the latter colony into a large loggerhead 
sponge and affixed a maximum/minimum thermometer incased in a clear 
plastic tube to the bottom. A plastic ring was placed on the branches 10 
cm from the growing tip. At monthly intervals I made measurements on how 
much the tips had grown relative to the plastic ring. Measurements were 
conducted both on the parent colony and the transplanted colony. The 
details of the study can be read at (Shinn 1966). The point of this 
simple experiment was to determine why /A. cervicornis/ does not grow 
near shore anywhere in the Florida Keys.To my surprise the transplanted 
colony in shallow near-shore water grew at the same rate as the offshore 
parent colony during the months when my thermometers indicated water 
temperature were essentially the same at both sites. However, during the 
middle of summer when near-shore water exceeded 90 degrees C the upper 
surface of the colony bleached but did not die. Those corals regained 
color when temperature became lower. However, in February a cold front 
lowered water temperature to 13 degrees C the corals died. This simple 
study had determined what the experiment was intended to show. Reduced 
winter water temperature in the shallow waters near shore prevents 
growth of /A. cervicornis/ in the Florida Keys. My friend, Dr. Tom 
Goreau, then director of the Discovery Bay Lab in Jamaica encouraged me 
to publish this simple unfunded study. There was of course concern that 
jamming the transplant colony into a large sponge was an unacceptable 
way to fix a coral colony to the bottom, However, the observation that 
the transplant grew at the same rate as the offshore parent colony when 
water temperature was nearly the same suggested the sponge had little 
effect on the transplants growth rate. One needs to remember that 
outside of people like Tom Goreau no one else was doing transplant 
studies anywhere in the Caribbean. To my surprise that simple little 
paper was made lead article in the next issue of the Journal of 
Paleontology. Years later I was sent to Australia to present that that 
simple little study to the Great Barrier reef hearings that had been 
ongoing for the past 2 years. I spent 2.5 days in the witness box 
answering questions. Amazingly still no one had yet conducted such 
simple straightforward transplant studies.

There were also straightforward observations such as the coral reef 
destruction created by hurricane Donna in 1960. That storm completely 
wiped out the /A cervicornis/ thicket that supplied the parent coral for 
the transplant experiment describe above. Hurricane Donna (See Ball et 
al 1967) scattered fragments over a large area on the leeward side of 
Grecian Rocks reef. At the time we all assumed the scattered fragments 
in the back reef sand would all die.To our great surprise most fragments 
began to grow and 5 years later any diver not aware of the former 
thicket would not recognize the enlarged living A. /cervicornis/ area 
had been created by a hurricane. (Shinn, 1970) Today however, there is 
no living /A. cervicornis/ thicket at Grecian Rocks Reef. The site of 
the parent colony for the transplant study described in my 1966 paper no 
longer exists. The entire thicket of /A cervicornis/ became diseased in 
the late 1970s and died in 1983, the same year most Acroporid corals 
died throughout the Caribbean. The timing of those coral deaths is shown 
in the USGS sequence photos at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnIzLTi0HGs 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnIzLTi0HGs>__

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*References:*__

Shinn, E.A., 1966, Coral growth rate, an environmental indicator: 
Journal of Paleontology, v. 40, no. 2, p. 233-240.

Ball, M.M., Shinn, E.A., and Stockman, K.W., 1967, The geologic effects 
of Hurricane Donna in south Florida: Journal of Geology, v. 75, no. 5, 
p. 556-591.

Shinn, E.A., 1976, Coral reef recovery in Florida and the Persian Gulf: 
Environmental Geology, v. 1, p. 241-254.

I would be the first to admit that these unsophisticated self-funded 
studies would be unacceptable in today’s technical world. However, no 
one was attempting this kind of work at the time and no funding agency 
would fund such work. This was a time when diving related work barely 
existed and computers were far in the future. However, as simple as it 
was these studies answered the questions we were asking.Gene