[Coral-List] The Marine Biologist-Turned-Entrepreneur Restoring Coral Reefs Using 3D Printing And Clay

[Paul Muir]

Usual restoration problems:
1. scale is tiny and cost per m^2 appears v high
2. Is the rate/scope of recovery demonstrably higher than would occur
naturally?
3. if the cause of the initial loss/decline is not addressed, will this be
required again and again?
4. are just a few common species used or are the rare/endangered ones
included?

But...better than endlessly whining that we need to be net zero- clearly
that's not going to happen any time soon!

There's a strong line of argument that there's a lot of effort (press!) on
all sorts of exotic restoration methods, but very little work on basic
conservation biology, i.e. which species are most susceptible to
bleaching/loss and which are most in danger of local/regional/total
extinction. See the recent Red list revision - there is so little data on
so many of the several hundred coral species that we are probably having
extinctions of many species and don't even know. This work is relatively
cheap and would require a tiny fraction of the restoration budgets. We
could then do targeted restoration/protection at smaller scales to prevent
species extinctions.


PAUL MUIR

On Sun, 19 Nov 2023 at 22:53, Vassil Zlatarski via Coral-List <
coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> wrote:

>  Dear all,
> I expect it would be of colegial interest to hear experts' opinions on the
> Archireef technique:
> Meet The Marine Biologist-Turned-Entrepreneur Restoring Coral Reefs Using
> 3D Printing And Clay
>
>
> https://www.forbes.com/sites/zinnialee/2023/03/14/meet-the-marine-biologist-turned-entrepreneur-restoring-coral-reefs-using-3d-printing-and-clay/?sh=1a36b1cf376b
>
>
> Cheers,
>
>
> Vassil
> _______________________________________________
> Coral-List mailing list
> Coral-List at coral.aoml.noaa.gov
> https://coral.aoml.noaa.gov/mailman/listinfo/coral-list
>