By: Victor Bonito, Director, Reef Explorer Fiji

Over the last three years, coral reefs worldwide have suffered unprecedented damage to coral communities from abnormally warm seawater temperatures. When the US National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced the third global coral bleaching event in October 2015, shallow reef areas along Fiji’s Coral Coast had already experienced two back-to-back years of widespread coral bleaching. Before we received the depressing news about our local reefs, we decided to take action and incorporate lessons learned from previous bleaching events and seawater temperature monitoring efforts.
In late 2015, our  Reef Explorer project team and local youth clubs established five new coral nurseries across our local reefs. We stocked the nurseries with a good diversity of coral species propagated from numerous donor colonies that we suspected had good thermal (heat) tolerance due to their size and placement on the reef. …