This Little Robot Is Helping Deliver Baby Corals To The Great Barrier Reef
Wondering what the Great Barrier Reef Foundation actually does? Here's one thing.
The new year approaches, and right now it looks like it’ll be another year of staggering inaction on climate change. If that sounds grim to you, here’s a tiny nugget of good news: an underwater robot just completed its first-ever trip to deliver baby corals to dying sections of the Great Barrier Reef, as part of an effort to save the reef before it’s too late.
The world-first trial was run by Southern Cross University’s Professor Peter Harrison and QUT’s Professor Matthew Dunbabin, who collaborated to collect a bunch of coral spawn, nurse it until it became coral larvae (baby corals), and then send the robot out to gently deposit the baby coral onto damaged parts of the reef.
Coral spawn, fyi, is sperm and eggs. This is your friendly reminder that coral is a kind of animal and not just a wacky-looking underwater plant. The more you know.
The robot, meanwhile, is a little yellow dude that the researchers described as basically “an underwater crop duster”, working to sprinkle new coral where it’s needed while making sure to not harm the rest of the reef. “It’s like spreading fertiliser on your lawn,” is how Professor Dunbabin put it — if your lawn is actually a 2,300km long, enormously threatened ecosystem, and also the largest living thing on earth.
The project was funded by a grant from the Great Barrier Reef Foundation’s $300,000 Out of the Blue Box Reef Innovation Challenge. If some of those words sound familiar, there’s a good reason — the GBRF is the organisation that received almost half a billion dollars from the Turnbull government despite being a truly tiny organisation. Good to see that, unlike the government, it’s actually doing something to help save the reef.
You can check out a video of the little robot in action here: