Scientists in Bonaire capture coral spawn mid-reef using a canopy-style Multi-Colony Collector, gathering eggs and sperm from dozens of colonies at once without touching the coral. This breakthrough method reveals how scaling larval propagation through smarter collection tech may be humanity's fastest path to saving dying reefs.
foreign [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Applause] [Music] supporting our technology development and ultimately just helping to get the technologies that we want and would like to have to our implementation partners and to further our research getting that into the hands of the scientists so that they can do the work that they want to do and be able to focus on the science side of things at Secor I am the Caribbean restoration coordinator I am heavily involved in the daily restoration work [Music] so when Coral spawned they release these little bundles like packages of sperm and eggs and because the eggs are all packaged in one bundle they are positively buoyant so they float up to the surface which is really nice for us because that means we can capture those gametes without having to touch the coral we can do that with these uh self-made corresponding collection Nets place these nuts on top of the coral and then it says there there's a little float at the top so that it stays up we place this little tube [Music] all the spawn of the coral goes up into the net and they float up through the funnel so in the end all the gametes end up in the in the top of the tube and when the when the tube is full or when the coral stops spawning we take off the tube put a cap on it and then this is what we bring back to the lab and we can do this for many many corals on the reef so that we can bring as many parents as possible together in a lab setting [Music] foreign so we have the uh it's the multi-colony collector or MCC for short the idea behind it is basically trying to remove as much diver work as possible from the equation of the collection process so it's less divers able to collect more so rather than focusing on a single individual colony with this we can collect from many different colonies at once [Music] well here on Bonaire we we've got the Jeff Davis Memorial Reef where we're setting up the MCC and testing it right now this is a pretty excellent spot to be able to set it up they pretty consistently see spawning within this window and with such a gigantic patch of coral and so many different genotypes it's pretty ideal for us to be able to continue to test and improve in this device if you think of a shade canopy a four posted shade canopy but rather than the fabric being on the outside of the frame it's on the inside of the frame and then we've placed sand anchors at Four Corners of this Reef patch I mean it absolutely is a challenge doing that at night well I think we figured out a pretty good uh process of how to set it up in a safe way and in a way that we're able to you know pretty effectively and quickly set this thing up and and and deploy it foreign [Music] we can't talk uh we use a lot of flashlight signals so giving oks it's a big circle on the ground or in the coral with your flashlight foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] if there's something going wrong we'll tap on the poll like any sort of audible noise everyone on the team knows hey stop what you're doing you know we need to reset there's something going wrong um let's let's take a second let's figure it out and then we'll get going again [Music] I have to admit that the first time they talked about making this Frame I was a little bit skeptical about it I thought you know wave action uh how are we going to do this but I really like the way it works it was really easy to set up it stayed in place quite nicely I think it performed well so yeah so with the multi-county collector we saw spawning two nights which was awesome you know weird that was part of our goal was to see spawn collect spawn with it foreign and we did collect some not as much as we were hoping for it probably is going to need to be some adjustments to the design so it's able to collect it better another design that we're testing right now in Florida um with our our partners there is a collector that could be installed on a nursery tree [Music] then it's just funneling all of that those Coral that would spawn straight upwards in a chimney and we have a collector at the top to do the exact same process and um so you know we're working on all different angles of how we can apply this you know just in Mass collection at scale to to help us utilize existing infrastructure um to be able to recognize how we could scale and improve larval propagation techniques when new technologies are developed of course we need to test it and testing can go by trial and error and we can because you know we're we're kind of running out of time with when it comes to Coral Reef restoration we need to move fast however when something doesn't work we definitely need to do some research and make sure that it works better the next time so we need to figure out what's going wrong so really what's nice about working for Secor is that research and Technology development go hand in hand and we do a little bit of research here and a little bit of trial and error there and hopefully the two can come together so we can move forward as fast as possible [Music] thank you [Music]