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V.I. Marine Biologist Growing Coral to Save Endangered Reefs

Kemit-Amon Lewis, coral conservation manager with The Nature Conservancy on St. Croix.Coral reefs worldwide may be under siege, but in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Florida, a small group of marine biologists are fighting back, taking scavenged broken fragments and growing them in man-made coral nurseries, thanks to federal stimulus money.
Since the 1980s, warmer water, damage from storms, pollution and other stresses have led to declines in coral reefs throughout the Caribbean, marine biologist Kemit-Amon Lewis said Thursday, talking about the coral nursery project as part of Earth Day observances on St. Croix. Elkhorn and Staghorn corals are listed as endangered.
Through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the joint Florida-Virgin Islands coral nursery program has $3.3 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act money to build and maintain Elkhorn and Staghorn coral nurseries. Of that, nearly $1.1 million is earmarked for the territory, Lewis said. The short-term habitat restoration goal is to enhance coral populations at 34 degraded coral reefs in eight locations in Florida and the territory by propagating these coral species in seafloor nurseries then transplanting the coral to grow upon and restore areas of dead and damaged reef.
Lewis is overseeing the St. Croix end of the project for The Nature Conservancy. A native Crucian, Lewis graduated St. Croix Central High in 2000. Inspired by Central’s marine biology and scuba clubs, he went to Savannah State University in Georgia and got a bachelor’s, then a master’s in marine biology. "The scuba club was the greatest thing at Central," he said. It was later shut down after a tragic accident, he said. While in graduate school, Lewis did all of his research projects back home on St. Croix and returned to work in the territory when he was done. He is coral conservation manager at The Nature Conservancy.
Lewis and three other biologists began setting up and maintaining the nurseries in the summer of 2009, he said. They take only "fragments of opportunity"— pieces of living coral that broke off naturally from wave or storm actions. They then use snippers to cut the chunk into small nubs.
Lewis with an example of a coral nursery built on a masonry block.For most of the nurseries, they epoxy the fragments onto a cement puck, put the puck onto short lengths of two-inch PVC pipe and epoxy 10 of these coral posts to a masonry block. As the coral grows to cover each individual puck, they can be removed and new coral chunks grown, so over the course of the project, each block may supply 40 or more coral pucks. Each such nursery is a row of 20 blocks placed on sandy bottom. There are nurseries like this at Teague Bay and Butler Bay on St. Croix and Perseverance on St. Thomas.
"It was a bit more fun setting them up than we expected," Lewis said.
Near Green Cay on St. Croix, the team has set up another sort of nursery. This time, they are using a metal frame, perhaps eight-feet square, with narrow lines strung across it. To each line, they tie several nuggets from a fragment of opportunity. The frame can be tied to hang off the seafloor at any desired depth, he said. Both types of nursery aim at removing the obstacles and menaces for the coral, he said.
This sort of approach is being used in Puerto Rico, but the whole effort is fairly new; and it is too soon to know how much coral can be grown. Some studies estimate a single piece can sprout three to four inches in a year, while others say it can be as high as five to six inches, he said.
"We will see how ours grow," he said. Along with taking quarterly growth measurements, they will be gathering lots of other scientific data, including sending fragments off for DNA analysis and putting together a map of the various genotypes (or specific gene lines) of the territory’s reefs.
The genetics are crucial, Lewis said, both because the grown coral can actually be attached to damaged coral with identical genes and because it will help figure out which coral gene lines do better under what circumstances. With that sort of data, researchers can improve the effectiveness of the nursery program, he said.
Lewis and three other biologists will build and maintain the nurseries until early 2012. In a typical week, he spends a day or two in the office and three days in the field, collecting fragments, cleaning algae off the nurseries and gathering data while snorkeling and scuba diving around the two islands. When the program is done, The Nature Conservancy will consult with NOAA and the V.I. Division of Coastal Zone Management to transplant those corals back onto reefs throughout the territory.

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