Reef Rebuilding Madness…

Woke up to windy weather, to windy to be out in the water. Never wanting to waste a moment, John (the principal investigator) had us build structures that can be put out into the reef for the coral to grow on. They increase the rugosity (it is a real word, look it up!), which is important for the health of the reef. Given that we are on a small island in the middle of the Bahamas we could not run over to Home Depot and buy what we needed so we improvised. We worked with some squares of chicken wire, a few “apartment for rent” signs, two old plastic placemats, and a few pieces of plastic cardboard…oh and the ever present Gorilla Tape (like duct tape).

We built our forms in the sand at the beach and used Marine Grout (like grout you would put between tiles) to fill them. This took us the morning. The forms should harden by later today but I think they will be underwater (high tide). We will find them later (How many hours from low tide to low tide?). I will let you know tomorrow how we did!

We will deploy the forms to one of the three reef study sites tomorrow. Try as I can, I cannot visualize moving concrete type objects into the water and gently placing them in the reef. How might you move something that weighs 40 pounds out into the water? This would be a great lab at school.