The Ropes of Hope was born two months ago from the passion of a group of ocean lovers who attended a coral propagation and restoration course in the Mafia Island Marine Park, Tanzania.
Our first nurseries are up and running and corals are growing and we continue to load more and more “fragments of opportunity”!! You still don’t know what they are? These are loose, living fragments that are found lying on the bottom, usually due to unsustainable fishing practices. By placing them on the ropes we provide the coral with a fixed substrate to start growing and not to die from friction and abrasion as they roll around on the sea bed.
Once we have collected the fragments of opportunity during our dive of the day, we go back to the boat and cut them with a cold chisel into little fragments called “nubbins” (2-3 cm in length). But why do we do that? First, big fragments don’t easily fit in the coconut rope. Second, using nubbins of 2-cm seems to be the optimal size for growth in floating nurseries. Third, many fragments from the same “parent” will grow in our living gene bank and provide us with genetically identical individuals (clones) which are very useful for experiments which hopefully will provide useful information in our quest to increase the rate of success and reduce the cost of coral reef restoration attempts.
We have now built two new nurseries, with our partners Thanda Private Marine Reserve and we are placing more and more fragments in our nurseries as well as in vertical rope experiments that we will show you soon!