Daily Archives: April 12, 2017

April 11, 2017 Credit: Paul Selvaggio

With the Global Coral Restoration Project, SECORE International, the California Academy of Sciences and The Nature Conservancy seal their commitment to help rehabilitate coral reefs and preserve them for future generations. This project aims to study and apply coral restoration techniques and practices on a larger scale, integrating coordinated conservation, education and outreach efforts. By "seeding" reefs with sexually reproduced coral offspring, this project aims to help maintain corals' genetic diversity which in turn maximizes their ability to adapt to future conditions. Furthermore, working with sexual coral restoration has the great potential to produce huge numbers of coral offspring from one coral spawning event. The project includes training for partners from island nations and territories, including organizations capable of translating their efforts into local management plans that support this large-scale coral restoration initiative. The Global Coral Restoration Project starts in the Caribbean and is planned to expand into the Pacific region after its initial phase.

"Alarmed by the catastrophic state of their coral reefs, people have made various attempts to restore coral cover with restoration measures," says Dr. Dirk Petersen, Executive Director and Founder of SECORE. "However, outcomes have often been short-lived and lacked an integrated concept. Moreover, the true capabilities of coral restoration have not been exhausted yet. With our joint Global Coral Restoration Project we aim at changing that."

A Caribbean start

Coral reefs are hotspots of diversity that host countless plants and animals. They are a source of livelihood for millions of people and function as essential coastal protection against the frequent tropical storms. Today, coral reefs are on the decline worldwide and doomsday scenarios of their fate have been spreading broadly in the media. In the Caribbean, coral reefs have been seriously degrading over the last three decades, with hurricanes, disease outbreaks and mass die-offs taking their toll. Key reef-building species, such as the elkhorn and staghorn corals, are critically endangered?one focus of this collaborative project is to assist in the rehabilitation of those species.

The first phase of the Global Coral Restoration Project will focus on the Caribbean. Scientists of the three key-partner organizations have gathered profound knowledge about coral reproduction and how to restore and conserve corals of the Caribbean, and plan to use a wide array of tools to implement coral restoration on largerscales.

"The Nature Conservancy has been working throughout the Caribbean for over 40 years, helping to establish millions of acres of marine protected areas and learning from multiple coral restoration efforts including our own," says Dr. Luis Solorzano, Executive Director Caribbean Division, The Nature Conservancy. "Through this collaboration with SECORE and the California Academy of Sciences, we will accelerate the science and innovation required for scaling up coral restoration efforts. Our efforts can help to ensure healthy and resilient Caribbean reefs."

Within the frame of the Global Coral Restoration Project, hands-on practices will be shared with local stakeholders, in turn enabling a more comprehensive approach to assist in the rehabilitation and active restoration of coral reefs. During the past few years, the project partners have studied how to raise large numbers of delicate coral larvae of several Caribbean species, practiced less labor-intensive ways of seeding coral recruits on reefs, developed protocols to choose suitable restoration sites and learned how to efficiently monitor ongoing restoration success.

How to restore reefs on larger scales

Over the last decade, SECORE and partners have pioneered the study of sexual coral restoration applications, a relatively young research discipline. Taking advantage of the corals' sexual reproduction has the potential of producing huge numbers of genetically unique coral recruitsmillions, if done correctly. Those coral recruits could be raised from one spawning event: coral gametes are collected in the wild or at the laboratory and fertilized in vitro. The resulting larvae are cared for and provided with settlement substrates when they are ready to metamorphose into a coral polyp.

SECORE is currently developing and testing techniques to raise and handle large amounts of coral offspring. The time and manpower required to handle coral offspring and plant them onto wild reefs often limit restoration efforts. Accordingly, SECORE and partners have designed coral settlement substrates that self-attach to the reefs, enabling seeding coral recruits to join the reef in meaningful numbers. SECORE and partners are currently conducting pilot projects for larger-scale sexual coral restoration on Curaao and in Mexico.

Education and sharing knowledge

Through this partnership, three capacity-building centers will be established in the Caribbean: in Mexico, Curacao, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. At each location, a local team of experts will test and refine sexual reproduction techniques, and share these through capacity-building trainings and workshops with coral reef practitioners around the world. In addition, local communities will be actively involved in the process, providing local partners with outreach tools to facilitate community engagement. Integrating the communities that are impacted by this work is critical to making any restoration and conservation efforts successful in the long-term.

"Our capacity building centers will foster research and technology development, exchange of knowledge and expertise, and provide training courses and outreach", says Dirk Petersen. "We will host annual training workshops for Caribbean stakeholders. The centers will function as bases to expand our network and to guide local restoration practitioners who have been fighting the decline of their reefs on their own. By joining forces and coordinating efforts in many places around the Caribbean, we can make a real change for the survival of coral reefs."

The first task of the new alliance will be the kick-off workshop entitled "New techniques for coral restoration in the Caribbean" on Curaao this May. Representatives of stakeholders throughout the Caribbean and scientists from various disciplines will meet to learn hands-on practicesincluding collecting and fertilizing coral gametes and practicing the handling of larvae to be seeded onto degraded reefsand share theoretical background knowledge. Each workshop will build on the last, incorporating lessons learned and refining the techniques that enable lasting, larger-scale coral restoration.

Explore further: Laboratory-bred corals reproduce in the wild

Provided by: SECORE international

Researchers of SECORE International (USA, Germany), the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands) and the Carmabi Marine Research Station (Curaao) have for the first time successfully raised laboratory-bred colonies of a threatened ...

Dr Pim Bongaerts, a Research Fellow at The University of Queensland's Global Change Institute (GCI) and ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, and lead author of the study, said deep reefs share coral species with ...

Coral populations in the Florida Reef Tract have declined in the last three decades due to extreme-temperature events and other stressors that cause bleaching and disease. Scientists are now working to save the reef by transplanting ...

A large-scale study of Caribbean coral has yielded discoveries on the pairing process between an endangered coral and the microscopic symbiotic algae they rely on for survival.

Reef-building corals have a symbiotic relationship with Symbiodinium algae, and environmental stressors that cause algae to be expelled from reefs can give rise to the phenomenon known as coral bleaching.

Feeding juvenile corals prior to transplantation into a new reef may increase their survival, according to a study published June 4, 2014 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Tai Chong Toh from the National University of ...

The extent to which climate change impacts the vital marine food web - which feeds the already pressured global fisheries is revealed through a new, innovative study.

When it comes to greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide tends to steal the spotlightbut new research in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) reveals how scientists have developed a new, predictive ...

A recent study of natural groundwater storage reservoirs in New England by hydrologist David Boutt at the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that upland aquifer systems dominated by thin deposits of surface till - ...

Researchers have found signs of fault displacement at well-known rock outcrops in Colorado that mark the end-Cretaceous asteroid impact that may have hurried the extinction of the dinosaurs. They will present their results ...

(Phys.org)An international team of researchers has found possible evidence of life ten kilometers below the sea floor in the Mariana Trench. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, ...

Between October 2011 and September 2015, California saw its driest four-year period in the instrumental record, which dates back to 1895. Parts of the state lost more than two full years of precipitation during the prolonged, ...

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Global coral reef restoration effort launches in the Caribbean - Phys.Org

In early May, Weight Watchers International is hosting a seven-night, wellness-themed Caribbean cruise aboard the 4,300-passenger MSC Divina , sailing from Miami.

Yes, a company dedicated to weight loss is joining forces with a purveyor of expansive buffets to offer cruising as a viable vacation for those aiming to shed pounds. And many, many people are battling bulges unsuccessfully, with more than a third of Americans medically obese, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

As Weight Watchers transforms from a pure weight-loss enterprise into a health-and-wellness company, the idea of embarking on its first cruise was a logical thing to do, said Ryan Nathan, the company's vice president of products, licensing, and e-commerce.

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"We did a lot of research, and we looked at our member base, and our member really is the cruising base," Nathan said. The typical Weight Watchers member is female, 40 to 60 years old, with an average household income slightly above the U.S. average. The cruise "is not slim-down camp," he said, and the company is setting no goals for members in terms of whether the trip is aimed at losing weight, maintaining weight or keeping any gain from the cruise to a minimum.

Despite the abundance of food, drink, and sloth that mass-market cruise lines sell, a week in the Caribbean also offers the opportunity to take the opposite approach: Sleep well, exercise more, and peruse more menu options, with more relaxed lunches and dinners than most people face at home. The ship also offers members an exercise bicycle that faces the sunrise and a jogging track on the open deck, said Rick Sasso, chairman of MSC North America.

"It's a natural for us to go on this endeavor to show our members: Hey, you can have fun and eat great food," Nathan said. "And you don't have to feel like diet is deprivation."

The company, of which entertainer Oprah Winfrey owns nearly 15 percent, reformulated its business focus in late 2015 with a " Beyond the Scale " campaign that aims to help customers "shift their mindset" from weight loss to overall fitness, encouraging everything from becoming less sedentary to eating better. New York-based Weight Watchers said its members lost 15 percent more weight in the first two months following the new program, compared to results with the prior program.

Cruising is also an effective marketing tool for a publicly traded company that has repeatedly sought to reinvent itself amid the vicissitudes of both the equity and weight-loss markets. The new efforts to broaden Weight Watchers' market appeal started in late 2015, several months after the former talk show host acquired her stake and became a director, with plans to promote the company via her celebrity and her personal weight-loss efforts. Weight Watchers has credited Winfrey with helping spur new enrollments and stronger financial results; its stock has gained 39 percent this year.

Prices for the MSC cruise began at $945, and all of Weight Watchers' 500-cabin bloc on the cruise has been sold, a spokeswoman for Weight Watchers said. MSC was stunned by how quickly half the Weight Watchers' bloc sold out, Sasso said. A second MSC-Weight Watchers cruise is planned for November, with additional sailings likely.

MSC is also offering menu options that will list Weight Watchers' points values to help cruisers know whether their selections fit within their personal weight-control plans. "I've asked the entire organization here to embrace this," Sasso said in a telephone interview. "Every aspect, from our master chefs down to the waiters."

On board, Weight Watchers staff will host meetings for "real-time guidance and support" and present customized fitness programs, cooking demonstrations, and seminars from wellness experts. The week-long voyage will also have four ports of calls at which passengers can hike, snorkel, dive, and pursue other physical activities, Sasso said. The May Divina itinerary has stops stop in Jamaica; Grand Cayman; Cozumel, Mexico; and the Bahamas.

"I think this is more a perfect scenario than the other type of vacation that one can take," Sasso said, calling the cruise "a controlled environment" for Weight Watchers' members. "We're making our cruise products already have this wellness aspect." The May wellness-themed cruise, he said, "is just an enhancement."

For Geneva-based MSC, and for such larger U.S. peers as Carnival Corp., Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd., and Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., shifting the public's notion of cruising as an oceangoing gallery of gluttony to one of an upscale holiday that embraces fine dining and active lifestyles is critical to attracting a younger, more affluent demographic. The cruise industry of the 1980s, for example, is nothing like today's cruise lines' offerings. The industry has been working feverishly to tout that message and to increase its customer base, with an estimated 25.3 million people expected to cruise this year, up from 15.8 million a decade ago.

Cruise ships also offer no more dietary vice than the average U.S. city, given an abundance of food and drink choices that are far from healthy, Sasso argued. "That temptation is everywhere you go," he said. "Unless you go to an isolated place in the jungle, you're going to have temptation everywhere."

The newer ships also devote increasing real estate to their spas-a revenue source, to be sure-and most have extensive gyms stocked with equipment, Sasso noted. "When you have 20,000-square-foot spas on a cruise ship, that is unparalleled in the hotel industry, unless you're in some huge resort."

For cruise lines, affinity groups of the wellness sort that Weight Watchers is heading also tend to mean higher revenues, and margins. The $945 minimum fare on MSC, for example, is higher than the company would otherwise command for many of its berths for the same week. That's one reason for the proliferation of theme cruises, from Star Trek to country western music to a Holland America Line Alaska cruise focused on O, The Oprah Magazine, Winfrey's monthly lifestyle periodical.

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A Weight Watchers Caribbean cruise aims to prevent overeating ... - Chicago Tribune