Divers are restoring coral reefs back to life

These divers are breathing life back into this coral reef.   Watch how they restore and replant them to save the coral reef ecosystem.

Transcript

00:00It is indescribable the feeling when you see a recovered area,

00:28of how it was before, to see it with the corals broken, almost dead and a lot of accumulated waste.

00:36Many people think that coral reefs only exist in tropical areas,

00:40however, the reefs of cold waters, and especially those of the Mediterranean,

00:45are very important because they constitute the basis of the ecosystem.

00:59This population is in danger because hundreds of corals, sedals, nets,

01:03nassas and even neumatics accumulate in the reef,

01:08covering, fragmenting and strangling the corals.

01:12The fragments that fall to the bottom are buried, isolated and, little by little, die.

01:17We are now recovering the reef by parcels,

01:30we are making sectors in which we remove the fishing equipment entangled in the corals,

01:36and we collect the corals that are broken and we stick them back in the reef

01:41to give them an opportunity to continue living.

01:48We can already see the results, in a short time the corals, when you stick them back in the habitat,

01:55a few days later the polyps that were dead have recovered,

01:59the fish come to them and begin to live again,

02:03and reef cover is created in areas that were totally dead.

02:17For us it is very important to give the opportunity to live again to a coral that is hundreds of years old.

02:45These species are so important in the Mediterranean because they are bio-indicating species,

02:49and since they are sessile and very sensitive, they quickly reveal to us any change or effect that can occur with climate change.

02:57Many species depend on them because they are the place where they take refuge, where they feed and where they reproduce,

03:03and their survival depends directly on the state of the reef.

03:15www.fisheries.noaa.gov