CNN Hero Ken Nedimyer: Revitalizing Coral Reefs

The Damage

“A sig­nif­i­cant rea­son reefs are so vital is that the struc­ture they build becomes a habi­tat for fish and inver­te­brates,” Nedimyer told Organic Connections. “A small fish liv­ing in there becomes prey for a lit­tle bit big­ger fish, which becomes prey for an even big­ger fish. Another issue is coastal pro­tec­tion. A lot of the islands have bar­rier reefs on the out­side that break up the waves. If there isn’t a bar­rier reef to break the waves up, then it’s usu­ally an
unin­hab­it­able shoreline.

“I think the harm to coral reefs started way before cli­mate change became an issue. It began with peo­ple liv­ing along the shore­line catch­ing fish, and places have become over­fished. Then we’ve pol­luted the shore­lines and the near-shore waters with all kinds of nutri­ents, from untreated sewage to runoff from agri­cul­ture to human set­tle­ment. Then you start adding other con­di­tions such as cli­mate change, and some of these reef sys­tems are in a lot of trou­ble. Some reefs are still away from civ­i­liza­tion and a lit­tle bit bet­ter off, but they’re nev­er­the­less fac­ing these threats that are on the hori­zon and some would argue are here in our laps today.”

Coral Nurseries

The work that Nedimyer is doing deals with grow­ing corals in under­wa­ter nurs­eries and then “trans­plant­ing” them to exist­ing coral reefs. First, pieces of coral are attached to frames made from PVC pipe and fiber­glass rods. “It was mostly a way to uti­lize the three-dimensional space in the water col­umn instead of just grow­ing them on some­thing at the bot­tom,” Nedimyer explained. “What we found is that the corals grow much faster when they’re sus­pended on a ‘tree’ than they would on the ocean floor. They’re less vul­ner­a­ble to preda­tors and dis­ease. We’re not entirely sure of all the rea­sons, but they do grow like crazy.

“We start with a frag­ment of, for exam­ple, staghorn coral that may be 5 to 10 cen­time­ters long (3 to 4 inches). After six to nine months it’s got 50, 60, 70 cen­time­ters of growth on it—a 500 or 600 per­cent growth. It’s then ready to be taken off and trans­planted onto a reef. There are many ways to attach it: under­wa­ter epoxy, cement, nail and cable ties. Then they nor­mally just grow down onto the reef and fin­ish the attach­ment process themselves.

“When we’ve done a large amount of mon­i­tor­ing, we’ve seen over a two-year period about an 80 per­cent sur­vival rate of the corals that we put on the reefs,” Nedimyer said. “Those num­bers even included a cou­ple of sites that were killed entirely by a cold front. So over­all the suc­cess rate is fairly high, and we found that there’s spawn­ing on the reefs after two years, which is kind of excit­ing. We still get break­age, we still get dis­ease, we still get pre­da­tion on the reef; and so part of our pro­gram is to teach peo­ple how to do some follow-up main­te­nance and help take care of the corals.”

The results have been spec­tac­u­lar enough that Nedimyer was named a CNN Hero. “We’ve got about 16 reefs that we’ve planted on,” he con­tin­ued. “We have per­mits now for sites that we’re start­ing to plan or plant; I don’t even remem­ber the num­ber, but there are over 30 reef sites in the Florida Keys, and we’re going to be restor­ing pretty much every named reef in the Upper Florida Keys. Then there’s a bunch of unnamed reefs, and there are reefs off of Key West. We have big dreams; we’ve got a per­mit that is going to allow us to put 50,000 corals on reefs over the next five years, so we’re tak­ing it up a notch from what we have done in the past. The aver­age reef now is going to get a thou­sand new corals from us over the next two years and some are going to get a cou­ple of thou­sand, so it will have a notice­able impact. If you have 80 per­cent of those living—even if you only have 50 per­cent of those living—everybody is going to notice the change.”

All of this is quite in addi­tion to the work he is doing in remote parts of the world. “My wife and I just got back from Bonaire, a lit­tle island in the Caribbean near Aruba,” Nedimyer said. “We started a nurs­ery there in April and went down to see how it’s doing, and it was doing great. We ended up cut­ting 1,150 new corals and putting them back into the nurs­ery. We also have a nurs­ery in Colombia, and are look­ing at set­ting up nurs­eries in Grand Cayman and Roatán. Somebody from Saint Lucia has called me, so I need to track that down too.”

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Passing It On

While he is per­form­ing all this work, Nedimyer is engag­ing the help of stu­dents and volunteers—who become fas­ci­nated with the pos­si­bil­i­ties. “It seems like a lot of peo­ple didn’t think it was pos­si­ble; they’ve never heard about doing this kind of thing,” he remarked. “They’re always blown away by how fast the corals grow and how well they do. They’re excited to be able to finally see some­thing hap­pen­ing and know that there’s hope. I know a lot of peo­ple, when they dive, see things that need to be fixed, and usu­ally you’re not allowed to touch any­thing. There are rea­sons for that, but there should also be a mech­a­nism to put things back together after they’ve been dam­aged by a storm or what­ever. So I’m try­ing to scratch that itch.”

The ocean attracted Nedimyer from an early age. “We lived near the beach when I was grow­ing up in Central Florida,” he recalled. “As a kid I was watch­ing Sea Hunt and then Jacques Cousteau. Especially the Jacques Cousteau stuff, for any­body my age, was just so cool. Because coral reefs were fairly close to where I was, it sim­ply became some­thing I wanted to do. People like dif­fer­ent things—rainforests or moun­tains. I thought coral reefs and the mys­tery and the unknown and ‘never been done’ were tan­ta­liz­ing. So I had to find a job that kept me in it, and it’s been great.”

Nedimyer will never give up—but he needs every­one else to get on board as well, whether liv­ing by the ocean or not. “I think that devel­op­ing these regional nurs­ery pro­grams is going to help, but we need to cer­tainly change the way we treat our oceans,” he con­cluded. “Everybody just thought they were so big and inex­haustible that we could take fish out of them for­ever and dump crap in them forever—and we can’t do either one. You have to man­age fish­eries; you have to man­age inputs into the sys­tem. I think we are real­iz­ing that even the car­bon diox­ide in the air as it dis­solves into the water is caus­ing prob­lems. Our soci­ety needs to start real­iz­ing that, even if you live in Minnesota, ulti­mately there’s an impact; your car­bon foot­print is going to be felt in the oceans first and on coral reefs in particular.”

For more infor­ma­tion, please visit www.coralrestoration.org.