Climate change is threatening the world’s corals, but removing seaweed—like weeding a garden—can give some reefs a boost
in 2021 estimated that half the world’s coral have died since the 1950s. Removing seaweed from reefs is labor intensive but not complicated, making it an ideal project for citizen scientists eager to help restore degraded reefs.
“We’re connecting people to the critical issue of our time—climate change,” she says. “Action is the antidote to this almost existential crisis.”Magnetic Island—nicknamed Maggie—is 19 square miles of island national park, floating in the Coral Sea five miles from the coast of Queensland. Across from Maggie on the mainland sits the city of Townsville, at the end of a river and home to a major port.
To test whether removing seaweed cover made any meaningful difference to the reef, Smith and her colleagues applied their weeding process at 12 underwater plots of about 270 square feet each, ranging from nine to 16 feet deep. On average, volunteer snorkelers and scuba divers removed more than 190 pounds of seaweed, comprising 90 percent of the large algae growing over the reef plots.
But now, “It’s all looking really positive for the reef,” she says, adding that not-yet-published data show that new coral continues to increase. “I think you could really look at the reefs in Florida as almost a window into the future of the Great Barrier Reef,” says Jason Spadaro, a coral reef ecologist at the MOTE Marine Laboratory and Aquarium in Florida, who was not involved with the Queensland coastal study.
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