BBC News Brazil
“This part of the world is very special,” says marine biologist Taryn Foster from the Abrolhos archipelago in the Indian Ocean, 40 miles west of the coast of Australia.
“There are no palm trees, no lush vegetation,” she continues. “But when you go into the water you can see all these types of corals and tropical fish.”
Corals are animals known as polyps that are found primarily in tropical waters.
The polyps have soft bodies and form a hard outer shell that draws calcium carbonate from the sea. Over time, these shells accumulate and form the foundations of the reefs we see today.
Although coral reefs only cover 0.2% of the ocean floor, they provide habitat for more than a quarter of the world’s marine life.
These creatures are sensitive to heat and acidification. As the oceans have become warmer and more acidic in recent years, corals have therefore become more susceptible to deadly diseases.
Sick corals turn white. And Foster witnessed the whitewashing process firsthand.
According to the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network (GCRMN), a 1.5°C increase in water temperature could lead to losses of 70 to 90% of the planet’s reefs. And some scientists believe that by 2070 all reefs will be gone.
“Climate change is the biggest threat to coral reefs around the world,” warns Cathie Page from the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS).
“Severe bleaching events caused by climate change can have very negative impacts,” she continues, “and we don’t have good solutions yet.”
Coral restoration often involves transplanting tiny nurserygrown corals onto damaged reefs. This work can be slow and expensive and only a fraction of threatened reefs receive help.
But it’s in the shallow waters of the Abrolhos Archipelago off the coast of Australia that Foster is testing a system that she hopes will revive the reefs more quickly.
In this process, coral fragments are grafted onto small supports that are inserted into a larger shaped base. These bases are grouped into parcels and placed on the seabed.
Foster was the one who designed the base in the form of a flat disk with grooves and a handle made of limestone concrete.
“We wanted it to be something we could mass produce at a reasonable price,” explains the biologist. “And that it could easily be launched by a diver or a remotely operated vehicle.”
So far the results have been encouraging. “We have developed several different prototypes of our coral skeletons,” explains Foster. “And we also tested it with four different species. They’re all growing beautifully.”
“We eliminate several years of calcification growth necessary to reach the size of this base,” she says.
Foster founded a startup called Coral Maker to handle the project. And it hopes its partnership with San Franciscobased engineering software company Autodesk will speed up the process further.
Autodesk researchers have trained artificial intelligence to control collaborative robots (“cobots”) that work with humans.
“Some of these coral propagation processes are simply repetitive pickandplace tasks that are ideal for robotic automation,” explains Foster.
A robotic arm can graft or glue coral fragments onto growth substrates. And another arm places the supports on the base and makes handling decisions using vision systems.
“Every piece of coral is different, even if it comes from the same species. “So robots need to recognize coral fragments and know how to deal with them,” says Nic Carey, senior research scientist at Autodesk.
According to her, “they are currently very good at dealing with the variability of coral shapes.”
The next step is to remove the robots from the lab, which Foster said will happen within the next 12 to 18 months.
But the real world presents many challenges. Wet live corals must be handled carefully, possibly on a moving boat. And salt water can damage electronic circuits.
“We need to make sure we can protect the most vulnerable components,” emphasizes Carey.
Another difficulty is the high cost of the technology. Coral Maker is banking on demand from the tourism industry and plans to issue biodiversity credits, which work similarly to emissions credits.
For Cathie Page, “Staying ahead of the competition and enabling coral reefs to survive in a warming future will require significant investments of time, money and human capital.”
The text was originally published here.