Dr. David Vaughan of the Mote Marine Laboratory in Florida has found a way to make coral grow 40 times faster than coral currently does in the wild.
The Good News Network describes his accidental breakthrough:
“He had been trying to remove a coral from the bottom of a tank when it broke into a dozen pieces. To his shock, all of the pieces regrew to the same size in just three short weeks, as opposed to the three years it had taken to grow the original coral.”
It typically takes coral 25 to 75 years to reach sexual maturity. Instead, through a process of ‘breaking up’ the coral, Doctor Vaughan has seen the timeline shrink to three years and seen results that will lead him to share the information with conservationists all around the world, with the hopes of planting 100,000 pieces of coral around the Florida Reef Tract by 2019 and millions more around the world in the years to come.
At worst, the method led by Vaughan is something that will buy conservationists more time. At best: this is the beginning of a solution. A former intern of Vaughn’s commented on Reddit, adding a very useful note to indicate that Vaughan “has been essentially adjusting the coral frag[ments] to more acidic and warm water to better prepare them for our changing climate.” This appears to be what makes the process Vaughan describes unique, as the process of fragmenting coral to encourage growth has been around since at least the 1960s. “This is now a new discovery that can give real hope for our coral reefs that has never been there before,” Vaughan said to BBC One. “We tried [this process] with all the other species of corals in the Florida Keys and it works for them all.”
Visit the original article here: https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/fast-growing-coral-discovery-could-revitalize-oceans
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