#artificial reef

[sitting-on-me-bum]

 Kuwait, 2022.

This photo was taken at the remote oil rigs site in Kuwaiti waters, east of Qaruh Island. The inactive oil rigs have come to represent an important artificial reef in Kuwait, attracting divers and fishers alike.

Photo by Suliman Alatiqi

The Prince Albert II Of Monaco Foundation Environmental Photographer Of The Year 2023

Environmental Photography Award

[lastingocean]

Bleached corals ingest microplastics.

Studies have found that reef building corals ingest microplastics when exposed to temperatures above normal.

Normally,corals rely on the photosynthetic algae on their surface to provide them with energy.

When temperatures rise, the algae are expelled (bleaching) and most corals eventually die from starvation but some corals start feeding on zooplankton in the water column and in turn also take in microplastics.

So how is this a problem? Feeding on large amounts of microplastics can result in:

Bleaching

Reduced growth as energy reserves drop since plastic has no nutritive value

Reduced feeding on nutritious prey

Tissue necrosis( a coral disease that causes peeling of tissues and death)

Reduced mineralisation of coral skeletons thus reduced growth rates

With coral reefs already facing multiple stressors ; global climate change, ocean acidification and water pollution with a short period for recovery, microplastics could worsen the situation putting the survival of coral reefs at risk.

[reasonsforhope]

“Here’s a good example of the concept of upcycling, if there ever was one.

Sportfiskarna is a Swedish sports fishermen’s association, which has come up with a unique and novel idea to reuse Christmas trees once the holidays are over. In their case, they’ve found that the spruce plants can make ideal habitats for fish, giving them a place to lay their eggs.

Every year, Sportfiskarna--together with Stroma tour operator, Stockholm City, WWF, and Skansen och Stockholms hamnar--collects old Christmas trees and lowers them in the waters in and around Stockholm. This creates new habitats for fish and fry since exploitation is threatening current habitats. The fir trees are bundled together and lowered into the water. The branches of the trees then become aquatic spaces where fish can play and reproduce with freedom and safety.

Reflecting the change in natural habitats

Christmas trees are collected in January every year. They are bundled together and a heavy stone is attached so they can sink and remain at the bottom without floating up. Then they are lowered into the water and new habitats can be formed at the bottom where fish get to use them as their new home.

The waters in Stockholm city and archipelago are today heavily affected by exploitation such as dredgings, boat traffic, quays and marinas. This affects the reproduction of fry because former untouched habitat areas are slowly vanishing...

“The fish’s natural habitat has been eradicated and there is currently not enough vegetation and structures in Stockholm’s polluted water, which is something the fish need. But by adding the spruce to the seabed we can make a kind of artificial reef that forms structures for the fish,” explained John Kärki, project leader at Sportfiskarna, speaking for the Stromma blog.”

-via The Mayor.eu, 1/20/23

[bumblebeeappletree]

Every week, Eco India brings you stories that inspire you to build a cleaner, greener and better tomorrow.

A Goa-based NGO is helping to protect the marine environment with its adopt-a-coral scheme. Climate change, overfishing and pollution are destroying the area's reefs. The NGO Coastal Impact hopes to stop the decline with coral adoption.

**********

Credits:

Supervising Producer: Nooshin Mowla

Script and Field Producer: Bharat Mirle

Video Editor: Sujit Lad

Associate Producer: Ipsita Basu

Director of Photography: Mithun Bhat

Underwater Cinematographer: Ron Bezbaruah

Voiceover: Chandy Thomas

Production Assistant: Rebekah Awungshi

Executive Producer: Sannuta Raghu

[ltwilliammowett]

The Halaveli Wreck is an artificial wreck sunk in 1991 off the North Ari Atoll, Maldives. The ship name was Razza and was a cargo vessel, now she is an artificial reef.

[frogmanbob]

Get wet.

2022 Aug 27

[kp777]

Installation underway of 15 acres of 3D-printed artificial reefs in coastal North Carolina - ABC News

Several acres of 3D-printed artificial reefs are currently being planted in coastal North Carolina to bolster the region's biodiversity and promote new growth of natural reef.

[roboticsappreciationsociety]

Coral restoration efforts usually involve transplanting tiny corals, cultivated in nurseries, on to damaged reefs.

However the work can be slow and costly, and only a fraction of the reefs at risk are getting help.

In the shallow waters of the Abrolhos Islands, [Marine biologist Taryn Foster] is testing a system she hopes will revive reefs more quickly...

It involves grafting coral fragments into small plugs, which are inserted into a moulded base. Those bases are then placed in batches on the seabed....

Ms Foster has formed a start-up firm called Coral Maker and hopes that a partnership with San Francisco-based engineering software firm Autodesk will accelerate the process further.

Their researchers have been training an artificial intelligence to control collaborative robots (cobots), which work closely alongside humans.

"Some of these processes in coral propagation are just repetitive pick and place tasks, and they're ideally suited to robotic automation," says Ms Foster.

A robotic arm can graft or glue coral fragments to the seed plugs. Another places them in the base, using vision systems to make decisions about how to grab it.

"Every piece of coral is different, even within the same species, so the robots need to recognise coral fragments and how to handle them," says Nic Carey, senior principal research scientist at Autodesk.

"So far, they're very good at handling the variability in coral shapes."

[thequakersguide]

Water adventures

[holeforgrace]

driving your ~~um~~~ MACHINE

[elbiotipo]

It's kind of hilarious like, for example, when Serial Experiments Lain introduces all those conspiracy concepts and the main cast is a bunch of average teenage girls. I do honestly wonder why is anime/manga like that sometimes. All sorts of weird, fascinating, esoteric concepts, but it's always with high-schoolers. High school is an undeniable fact of life.

[quotesfrommyreading]

Biologists in general, and the people who study platform wildlife in particular, often argue over whether a specific habitat feature (in this case an oil platform) actually increases the population of a species or whether it simply acts as a meeting place for creatures that would otherwise gather somewhere else.

Love began to think of ways to investigate whether platforms were aggregating or actually producing more fish. “When you see 150,000 baby bocaccio rockfish at a platform, it looks like a good nursery ground. But if you pull out the platform, would the drifting larvae find another reef to shelter in?”

If yes, then the platform would be superfluous as far as the rockfish are concerned.

Love and his team began looking at ocean currents. A collaborator created a computer model that could reflect prevailing weather patterns and added in the drifting bocaccio larvae. A lot of them hit the platform. Then Love’s team removed the platform from the model and watched the rockfish drift again. They assumed that bocaccio carried inshore would find their usual nursery sites and survive, while those that drifted out to sea—where there are few natural surfaces to provide shelter and food—would die. Over a three-year period, Love’s team concluded that 70 percent of the juveniles would die if the platform were removed.

“This doesn’t mean it’s true for all platforms, all species,” he cautions. “But it lends credence that maybe these platforms are pretty good nursery grounds. And if that’s true, then it’s very hard to argue that platforms are not helping to produce fish.”

  —  Oil Rigs Are a Refuge in a Dying Sea

[poke-entomology]

Fakemon idea

Corsola (artificial variant), Reeflotilla

Types: (Rock/Ground), (Grass/Ground)

Abilities: Water Absorb / Rain Dish

Signature move: Kasploosh: Power 140. Accuracy 100. PP 1. (Many pokemon living within Reeflotilla fire off water guns all at once. The splash from this powerful battery of attacks to fall down as rain for several turns.)

-This artificial Corsola was created as an attempt to undo the harmful effects of coral reef destruction due to climate change. Being made of tires and cement, it is several times larger than the average Corsola. It was constructed in a way that greatly resists water, but not native sea life. Despite it’s body breaking down due to the presence of sea faring plants this pokemon feels no discomfort and greatly enjoys tending to it’s “backpack garden”.

-Having the majority of it’s body broken down and becoming a home to native sea life has only made the pokemon far stronger than it ever was alone. The  seaweed on it’s back forms a natural barrier to erosion and home to a diverse array of native fish. When this pokemon is in danger the fish living within it’s body come out to defend their home, no matter the opponent.

[scientificinquirer-blog]

DAILY DOSE: Global Coral Bleaching Crisis Now Fourth Event; Brexit Exacerbates UK's Growing Drug Shortages.

NOAA REPORTS FOURTH GLOBAL CORAL BLEACHING CRISIS BEGINS. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Coral Reef Watch has announced the onset of the fourth global coral bleaching event, signaling a dire phase for the world’s corals and the communities dependent on them. Triggered by a consecutive ten-month streak of record-breaking global air temperatures in 2024, ocean…

[jcmarchi]

Artificial reef designed by MIT engineers could protect marine life, reduce storm damage

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/artificial-reef-designed-by-mit-engineers-could-protect-marine-life-reduce-storm-damage/

Artificial reef designed by MIT engineers could protect marine life, reduce storm damage

The beautiful, gnarled, nooked-and-crannied reefs that surround tropical islands serve as a marine refuge and natural buffer against stormy seas. But as the effects of climate change bleach and break down coral reefs around the world, and extreme weather events become more common, coastal communities are left increasingly vulnerable to frequent flooding and erosion.

An MIT team is now hoping to fortify coastlines with “architected” reefs — sustainable, offshore structures engineered to mimic the wave-buffering effects of natural reefs while also providing pockets for fish and other marine life.

The team’s reef design centers on a cylindrical structure surrounded by four rudder-like slats. The engineers found that when this structure stands up against a wave, it efficiently breaks the wave into turbulent jets that ultimately dissipate most of the wave’s total energy. The team has calculated that the new design could reduce as much wave energy as existing artificial reefs, using 10 times less material.

The researchers plan to fabricate each cylindrical structure from sustainable cement, which they would mold in a pattern of “voxels” that could be automatically assembled, and would provide pockets for fish to explore and other marine life to settle in. The cylinders could be connected to form a long, semipermeable wall, which the engineers could erect along a coastline, about half a mile from shore. Based on the team’s initial experiments with lab-scale prototypes, the architected reef could reduce the energy of incoming waves by more than 95 percent.

“This would be like a long wave-breaker,” says Michael Triantafyllou, the Henry L. and Grace Doherty Professor in Ocean Science and Engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. “If waves are 6 meters high coming toward this reef structure, they would be ultimately less than a meter high on the other side. So, this kills the impact of the waves, which could prevent erosion and flooding.”

Details of the architected reef design are reported today in a study appearing in the open-access journal PNAS Nexus. Triantafyllou’s MIT co-authors are Edvard Ronglan SM ’23; graduate students Alfonso Parra Rubio, Jose del Auila Ferrandis, and Erik Strand; research scientists Patricia Maria Stathatou and Carolina Bastidas; and Professor Neil Gershenfeld, director of the Center for Bits and Atoms; along with Alexis Oliveira Da Silva at the Polytechnic Institute of Paris, Dixia Fan of Westlake University, and Jeffrey Gair Jr. of Scinetics, Inc.

Leveraging turbulence

Some regions have already erected artificial reefs to protect their coastlines from encroaching storms. These structures are typically sunken ships, retired oil and gas platforms, and even assembled configurations of concrete, metal, tires, and stones. However, there’s variability in the types of artificial reefs that are currently in place, and no standard for engineering such structures. What’s more, the designs that are deployed tend to have a low wave dissipation per unit volume of material used. That is, it takes a huge amount of material to break enough wave energy to adequately protect coastal communities.

The MIT team instead looked for ways to engineer an artificial reef that would efficiently dissipate wave energy with less material, while also providing a refuge for fish living along any vulnerable coast.

“Remember, natural coral reefs are only found in tropical waters,” says Triantafyllou, who is director of the MIT Sea Grant. “We cannot have these reefs, for instance, in Massachusetts. But architected reefs don’t depend on temperature, so they can be placed in any water, to protect more coastal areas.”

MIT researchers test the wave-breaking performance of two artificial reef structures in the MIT Towing Tank.

Credit: Courtesy of the researchers

The new effort is the result of a collaboration between researchers in MIT Sea Grant, who developed the reef structure’s hydrodynamic design, and researchers at the Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), who worked to make the structure modular and easy to fabricate on location. The team’s architected reef design grew out of two seemingly unrelated problems. CBA researchers were developing ultralight cellular structures for the aerospace industry, while Sea Grant researchers were assessing the performance of blowout preventers in offshore oil structures — cylindrical valves that are used to seal off oil and gas wells and prevent them from leaking.

The team’s tests showed that the structure’s cylindrical arrangement generated a high amount of drag. In other words, the structure appeared to be especially efficient in dissipating high-force flows of oil and gas. They wondered: Could the same arrangement dissipate another type of flow, in ocean waves?

The researchers began to play with the general structure in simulations of water flow, tweaking its dimensions and adding certain elements to see whether and how waves changed as they crashed against each simulated design. This iterative process ultimately landed on an optimized geometry: a vertical cylinder flanked by four long slats, each attached to the cylinder in a way that leaves space for water to flow through the resulting structure. They found this setup essentially breaks up any incoming wave energy, causing parts of the wave-induced flow to spiral to the sides rather than crashing ahead.

“We’re leveraging this turbulence and these powerful jets to ultimately dissipate wave energy,” Ferrandis says.

Standing up to storms

Once the researchers identified an optimal wave-dissipating structure, they fabricated a laboratory-scale version of an architected reef made from a series of the cylindrical structures, which they 3D-printed from plastic. Each test cylinder measured about 1 foot wide and 4 feet tall. They assembled a number of cylinders, each spaced about a foot apart, to form a fence-like structure, which they then lowered into a wave tank at MIT. They then generated waves of various heights and measured them before and after passing through the architected reef.

“We saw the waves reduce substantially, as the reef destroyed their energy,” Triantafyllou says.

The team has also looked into making the structures more porous, and friendly to fish. They found that, rather than making each structure from a solid slab of plastic, they could use a more affordable and sustainable type of cement.

“We’ve worked with biologists to test the cement we intend to use, and it’s benign to fish, and ready to go,” he adds.

They identified an ideal pattern of “voxels,” or microstructures, that cement could be molded into, in order to fabricate the reefs while creating pockets in which fish could live. This voxel geometry resembles individual egg cartons, stacked end to end, and appears to not affect the structure’s overall wave-dissipating power.

“These voxels still maintain a big drag while allowing fish to move inside,” Ferrandis says.

The team is currently fabricating cement voxel structures and assembling them into a lab-scale architected reef, which they will test under various wave conditions. They envision that the voxel design could be modular, and scalable to any desired size, and easy to transport and install in various offshore locations. “Now we’re simulating actual sea patterns, and testing how these models will perform when we eventually have to deploy them,” says Anjali Sinha, a graduate student at MIT who recently joined the group.

Going forward, the team hopes to work with beach towns in Massachusetts to test the structures on a pilot scale.

“These test structures would not be small,” Triantafyllou emphasizes. “They would be about a mile long, and about 5 meters tall, and would cost something like 6 million dollars per mile. So it’s not cheap. But it could prevent billions of dollars in storm damage. And with climate change, protecting the coasts will become a big issue.”

This work was funded, in part, by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

[girltravelfactor]

Apo Island is an island located in the Apo Reef in Occidental Mindoro, Philippines. It is part of the Apo Reef Natural Park, which is the largest coral reef system in the country and the second largest in the world.