⁉️ Here’s a question we’re always asked during spawning season: What do you do with all the corals at the National Sea Simulator (SeaSim) once they’ve spawned?
Answer: We take them back to their home reefs! 🪸💙
Having been collected from the ocean several weeks previously, and with their offspring now being reared in our coral aquaculture facilities, each coral colony is returned to their original reef on the Great Barrier Reef. This is important because each reef has its own special set of characteristics suited to the corals that grow there (for example, the types of fishes, microbes, and environmental conditions).
We return and record them in such a way that we know where each coral colony is located. This gives us the option of bringing the corals back to the SeaSim to spawn again in subsequent seasons. That’s useful for our science, because we’ve already recorded a lot of data about these specific corals.
But for now they’re living their best coral lives in the waters they grew up in.
👀 Learn more about our reef spawning research: https://www.aims.gov.au/research-topics/featured-projects/reef-spawning-research-aims
🙏 And a big thanks to the team from Marine Services Asia Pacific and the crew onboard Toanui for their help getting the corals back safely!
