Southern Cross University’s Professor Peter Harrison has some exciting news to report from a brief field trip late last year to Heron Island where the Foundation pioneered the first ever trial of the coral IVF technique to rebuild damaged reefs.

This healthy new coral is one of the thriving new colonies discovered where a high concentration of coral larvae was settled following the 2016 mass coral spawning on the Great Barrier Reef.

This promising result from the first trial on the Reef is a positive sign for the latest mission to restore coral reefs off Cairns in far north Queensland. During 2019’s coral spawning, a team of marine scientists led by Prof Harrison successfully reared many tens of millions of coral larvae in new inflatable spawn catchers and larval rearing pools funded through the Foundation’s Out of the Blue Box Reef Innovation Challenge supported by The Tiffany and Co. Foundation.

Prof Harrison said the tiny coral babies were delivered back onto reefs using various techniques including the Reef RangerBot and new LarvalBoat developed by QUT roboticist Prof Matt Dunbabin.

The field trip culminated with around 28 million larvae being released in a larval cloud over degraded reef area to help restore the ecosystem. The team is hopeful they will see signs of new healthy growth when they return, just like the Heron Island site revealed.

In 2018 and 2019, this extraordinary project was supported by The Tiffany & Co. Foundation and the pioneering trials in 2016 and 2017 were enabled through the support of the Fitzgerald Family Foundation. 

Professor Harrison’s Great Barrier Reef research builds on the success of his team’s work in the Philippines in an area of reef highly degraded by blast fishing which had similar positive results.

 “Our previous studies in the Philippines funded by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research, showed that corals can grow from microscopic larvae to dinner plate sized adult colonies within three years and they were able to sexually reproduce. This work at Heron Island is the first step towards proving we can apply these techniques on the Great Barrier Reef,” Professor Harrison said.

He sees great promise in the mass larval restoration approach and says it has the potential to make a difference to reef recovery on a larger scale using natural coral spawn slicks that contain many millions of larvae from different coral species.

The team worked closely with the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority to implement this ground-breaking pilot project.

“Innovative science like larval reseeding is one piece in the puzzle of protecting the Reef into the future,” Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority Chief Scientist Dr David Wachenfeld said.

“In recent years, the impacts of climate change on the Great Barrier Reef have undoubtedly accelerated, as we saw with back-to-back years of coral bleaching.

“It is vital everyone keeps working to address climate change and build the Reef’s resilience, and for restoration strategies to be developed that can work over large areas.

“We need to be more proactive and intervene to give the Reef a better chance and that’s why supporting leading-edge research like this is a priority for the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority.

“The success of these first trials is encouraging – the next challenge is to build this into broader scale technology that is going to make a difference to the Reef as a whole.”