Tourism operators and reef industry professionals team up during Great Barrier Reef coral spawning

Tourism operators and local reef industry professionals in Queensland, Australia worked through the night during the most remarkable coral spawning event on the planet.

The event served as a hands-on opportunity to learn cutting-edge restoration techniques to help boost healthy coral numbers.

The annual coral spawning event, triggered by the November full moon, sees the Great Barrier Reef’s magnificent corals burst into life in an underwater ‘snowstorm’ by releasing trillions of eggs and sperm into the water in a mass breeding phenomenon, which Sir David Attenborough describes as ‘one of the greatest of all natural spectacles’.

This event is also the most important day of the year for coral scientists as they explore innovative methods to scale up reef restoration to protect this natural icon from the increasing impacts of climate change.

Great Barrier Reef Foundation managing director Anna Marsden said: “This collaboration between scientists and tourism operators known as Boats4Corals, was successfully piloted in the Whitsundays through our Reef Islands Initiative and is cracking through one of the biggest bottlenecks in reef restoration: scale. Off the back of this success, with support from Qantas, we’re taking the same approach to other areas of the Reef. By empowering eager tourism operators and locals to add this technique to their current conservation toolkit, we’re hoping to expand a local reef restoration movement that is grounded in science and scalable.”

What happens during coral spawning?

To boost the numbers of coral babies produced from this year’s spawning, a team from the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) is for the first time training Cairns and Port Douglas tourism operators and marine industries on how to use the innovative coral larval seeding technique known as Coral IVF. 

This overnight mission to capture millions of coral eggs and sperm in specially designed floating larval pools set up in two different locations in the region, aims to support the Reef’s natural regeneration process.

The delicate spawn bundles will stay in the nursery pools for up to a week as they develop into coral babies. 

Once ready, they will be placed onto reefs, which includes locations that have been impacted by recent bleaching events, where they can grow into healthy young corals and help bring new life to the Great Barrier Reef.

Scientists estimate that Coral IVF boosts successful coral fertilisation rates by 100-fold — raising the chances from one in a million in natural settings to one in 10,000 through this innovative technique.