Coral reefs globally are increasingly under threat from environmental and anthropogenic factors, particularly the recent widespread bleaching and mortality of corals due to the temperature anomaly recorded during the 1997/98 El Niño. The active rehabilitation of reefs maybe necessary in some locations. Different rehabilitation methods require development for use in different conditions according to the constraints of area, availability of funding and reasons for rehabilitation. A number of studies have involved transplantation of parts of adult corals at a variety of technical, financial and spatial scales. Methods have included placement of loose staghorn Acropora branches (Bowden-Kirby, 1997; Lindahl, 1998) on suitable substrates, cementing corals to natural substrates using cement or epoxy-type glues, and cementing corals to movable bases (Obura, unpublished data). Transplantation can be used for management purposes in the rehabilitation of reefs (Harriott, 1988), and in conjunction with transplants of wider reef communities (e.g. Muñoz-Chagin, 1997). The primary objective of this study is to investigate the capacity of coral transplants, covering a range of genera with different growth and life history strategies, in the repair and rehabilitation of degraded reefs. A secondary objective is to develop a suitable (efficient, economical and practical) methodology for the transplant procedure. Higher level objectives can be investigated in the long term, including three-dimensional complexity and diversity in the vicinity of the transplants. The study is conducted in the Mombasa Marine National Park, Kenya. |
