Today was our first day in Grand Cayman arriving from the airport and to get used to being in the water our group went out for a shore snorkel. From looking at the reef I could see it was in fairly healthy by noticing the biodiversity of life on the reef and the presence of big predators such as the barracuda. The corals were mostly sea fans and fire coral, but among this I did see some hard corals such as encrusting star, brain corals, and the endangered elk-horn coral although it did not look in great shape. The presence of hard corals including an endangered elk-horn is another factor that led me to believe the reef was decently healthy. One thing I want to elaborate on though is when I came across 2 different brain corals side by side; one was completely dead and the other healthy with no bleaching or disease. Why I find this interesting is the corals were roughly the same size and in the same location but one was able to survive better than the other which led me to thinking whether this coral is resistant to higher temperatures and pollution which is a threat to our coral reefs today. The origin of this thinking comes from an article I read on scientist in the Great Barrier Reef who were studying “super corals” that were able to survive the major bleaching in 2016 because they had genes that made them more resistant to things such as rising ocean temperature. Taking that idea and applying it to these brain corals led me to think up a solution to help restore hard corals in the area such as brain corals by fragging healthy corals in parts affected by rising ocean temperature/pollution in hopes of making lots of coral colonies that could survive human impacts on the ocean. I have no data to backup whether this could work because I have not run experiments on coral but am just illustrating an idea I had after seeing these 2 corals and thinking how could this healthy reef be even healthier. Throughout the week I will continue to monitor the coral in the shallow areas and deeper areas and draw conclusions on why the coral looks the way it does and maybe some ideas I have to help restore the coral reefs in the Cayman Islands and around the world.
-Henry Hallam 2019
