The difficult thing here is these appear to need planting by hand. The problem with coral planting is not a lack of corals to plant, it's finding people to give up their time for boring, repetitive work that can often feel like shoveling snow while it's still snowing.
While I don’t have any formal marine biology training, I have extensive dive experience and certification. I would readily do this for a year if someone paid all my living and working expenses in some remote tropical island somewhere.
There is some demand for it; resorts with a house reef will sometimes hire someone to maintain it. You would need training; not a marine biology degree, but at-least a month of on the job experience. Also should be comfortable mixing concrete in 40 humid degree heat.
Not really interested in doing it for a resort (where you are essentially the underwater equivalent of their handyman), I meant on a large scale in a marine sanctuary where I can help preserve the wonder and awe I experienced on my first dives for future generations.
I don’t think the world at large truly understands how bad it is for coral reefs these days. I’ve only been scuba diving for a bit over 20 years and many of my favorite dive sites are virtually unrecognizable from 10-15 years ago.
The building of artificial reefs has been tried before for marine biologists. Since 60-70's at least if I remember correctly. They are super effective to increase fishing at short term.
The problem is that they are expensive and dissapear really fast. The sea buries everything, rusts everything and eats everything. Alive corals play in a different league. They autoclean and grow.
If someone where paying a decent salary, then I could see someone being interested in getting to live in the tropics and SCUBA dive all day; even if it probably isn't the most interesting SCUBA diving in the world. Maybe they could convince some water sports companies to fund it as community service/publicity?
I understand that it might make sense to use 3D printing for this experiment given the small scope.
However wouldn't we realistically use a cheaper and faster method of production? Are those materials only usable for 3D printing?
I’ve seen a number of similar research projects but the issue is economic incentive and scale. Until those are addressed this is continental shelfware.
Really interesting project with lots of potential. Printed corals should decrease survival of the fishes (they arent corals and will be colonised by algae), but some fish refuges is better than none even if non perfect.
