If you had any doubt about how fast and colorful corals can grow in the ocean, here’s a time delayed video to natural growth rates in context. This segment of coral gardening is an exerpt from tne BBC film “Fragile Paradise”, from the “South Pacific” series of programs. It’s really neat to see free divers fragging, harvesting and replanting their coral branches on the reef in very much the same way that we home aquarists would for our own reef aquarium, except that we get considerably less wet. The breakneck growth of their broodstock corals is simply amazing and it goes to show how long we have to go to approximate the natural growth rate. Although these corals are being aquacultured primarily for replanting on the real reef, it’s neat to see how the damaged and replanted reef looks very much like our own fruit stand style aquascaping before the corals grow out to significant size.
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This thing has 7 Comments
WOW ! Amazing Video… thanks for posting it!
JG
AMAZING!
Sonny, you took the words right out of my mouth!!! Amazing!
very cool
Incredible colors and AMAZING growth! I should give up the tank at home and move to the South Pacific and coral farm like that
Maybe then I’d have some success
South Pacific series, I knew I seen that before. But regardless it was fun to watch again. Even that huge brown/tan colony at the end of the clip looked amazing for its sheer size!
Although the claim was they were removing crowded corals, it looks like they planted them even closer together.
The maldives government are doing something a bit similar, called electro plating, to rebuild reefs.
Its great to see people rebuilding what humans did a great part in damaging in the first place.