Rescue a reef encourages the community to get involved in coral restoration by tabling, screening movies, offering community dives and partnering with UM’s own scuba club for special trips.
on Staghorn restoration in particular may be especially helpful in overall reef restoration. “If we replace it, it will produce a bigger change on the reefs in a shorter amount of time than boulder corals that grow extremely slowly,” Langdon said. “We are now taking actions to recover it. The numbers are still low, but increasing.” The University of Miami launched the Rescue a Reef program in 2015 with a purpose to propagate threatened coral species and help regrow the
dwindling population. According to their website, the organization has planted over 25,000 coral species since they began. “Rescue a Reef is our local effort,” Langdon said. “There are many throughout the Caribbean trying to do the same thing.” While Rescue A Reef does help raise and replant coral, they also focus on community outreach. By having people plant young coral from a nursery themselves, they’re educating community members about the importance of coral reefs
and the effect of their decline in underwater ecosystems. “Rescue a Reef is really the citizen science component of our lab, where we bring members of the public out on coral restoration trips to witness the problem hands-on, to be tangibly part of the solution and to learn from scientists in the process,” said Madeline Kaufman, a team member of Rescue a Reef. To re-propagate the Coral reef populations, Rescue a Reef typically uses a nail or cable tie to hold the corals in place. But
they’ve also been working on other ways to replant the coral. “There is pretty exciting stuff going on,” Kaufman said. “One of our master students has been experimenting with how to use cement to plant coral. It has gone really well and it’s way cheaper. You use piping bags, like to ice a cake, and fill them with cement to attach a coral to the reef. Then, it will grow onto the reef.” Those who can’t dive can still help their coral restoration effort. Rescue a Reef hosts many events on land to raise awareness of the endangered species they are trying to protect. “We do the trips, but we also reach out with tabling events and movie screenings,” said Kaufman. “We want the community to participate, but mostly we want them to learn about coral restoration.” People can also engage in individual actions such as wearing coral safe sunscreen, choosing seafood from sustainable fisheries and volunteering for costal protection organizations.
Winter 2020 DISTRACTION 39
