Spent this fine Sunday learning about coral restoration for a specialized dive certification. Through this program, I will be taught the different techniques used here on Bonaire to restore Elkhorn and Staghorn corals. These two species are endangered species and are not commonly found. Through the Coral Restoration Foundation, nurseries were developed to grow these coral species to transplant onto natural coral reefs.
Today we talked about all the different methods and what we would be doing on our first dive. During the first dive we went to clean the tree structures that coral fragments are hung on. By cleaning the structure, algae and other species are removed to reduce competition. Once the structures were cleaned, we got to hang coral fragments on the structure. We took finger length pieces of coral and attached filament to them. The first piece I worked on, I cut through the little clamp that was use to secure the filament to the coral. I misjudged my strength. After we attached the filament to the coral fragments, we took another clamp and threaded the filament through holes on the tree structure using the clamp to hold the filament in place. After we hung all the coral fragments, we went into the rebar structures to remove snails and fireworms from the coral. There can be a lot of snails in one location because they stack on top of each other. We didn't do this for very long because this was just an introduction to what we will be doing on our second dive. It sounds like our second dive will be out on the restoration site on Klein Bonaire.
Check out the Coral Restoration Foundation Bonaire website to learn more about their efforts here on the island.
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