post cute animals

Coral: It's technically an animal

I was looking at tyre recycling on Wikipedia for writing reasons and learned about the ecological disaster that is/was Osbourne Reef, where they tried bundling discarded tyres off the coast of Florida in the futile hopes marine life would settle down on it.

Coral in particular is really finicky for a living stone superstructure, and substrate's about the only thing you can manage on a local level when there's all this other bullshit like source+sink population dynamics, global warming and ocean acidification. A dude called Wolf Hilbertz discovered if you run a low-voltage electrical current through seawater, you get a chemical reaction and a concrete-like accretion around the current.

Professor Hilbertz was planning to use this to create cheap building materials, until (with a Dr. Thomas J. Goreau) he discovered that the resulting accretion (now trademarked as Biorock) was a really good substrate for corals and other hard-shelled marine life.



By making a cage of conductive materials, hooking it up to some kind of electrical generator (solar, tidal, and wind all work just fine, and make this process accessible even in remote areas), you've got a frame to "seed" damaged corals on. As long as the current keeps running, the bedrock grows about two inches a year and the resulting structure will eventually become a habitat for reef fish.

In conclusion, enjoy this picture of a sea noot I webtrawled from a Biorock reef in the Gili Islands, Indonesia: