Influence of fragment size on post transplantation growth and survival of domed scleractinian corals

Transplanting Coral Fragments in Close Contact Enhances Their Survival and Growth on Seawalls

“…The latter growth rate was more comparable to that of the adjoining transplants in our study (3.74 ± 1.58 cm 2 mth −1 ). Although the mean initial sizes of fragments used in Toh et al [17] were greater by approximately five times, recent work by Sam et al [30] showed that there was no significant influence of initial fragment size on the post-transplantation growth of P. sinensis. The differences in growth rates could be influenced by varying local environmental conditions such as water motion and sedimentation as previous studies have reported the negative influence of high water motion [68,69] and high sedimentation [70,71] suppressing coral growth.…”

“…scenarios were formulated to predict the estimated cost of live coral area generated when fragments were transplanted based on two hypothetical scenarios: adjoining and separate. Each scenario entailed the collection of 1000 cm 2 of coral material, fragmentation into 100 fragments of 9 cm 2 each with the assumption of up to 10% of coral material lost as wastage see [30], transplantation of fragments in adjoining and separate designs respectively, as well as monitoring and maintenance of the transplants for a year. The projected coral tissue area after one year was computed:…”

“…Thus, although massive corals are more resilient to physical impacts [22][23][24] and thermal stress [25][26][27], most transplantation efforts disproportionately focus on branching coral species [22] such as acroporids and pocilloporids, which are fastgrowing and can be easily propagated to generate large areas of coral cover [28,29]. Among coral species that were transplanted on seawalls, branching and plating corals did not seem to survive well [17,19], while transplants of massive species on both subtidal [17,30] and intertidal seawalls [19] were observed to survive better than their branching counterparts. Greater fluctuations in environmental parameters such as temperature [31,32] and wave motion [33,34] in the vicinity of seawalls appear to be more stressful to branching corals.…”

“…There are, however, few studies projecting or comparing cost breakdowns between alternative strategies in ecological engineering [17,[44][45][46]. For example, it was demonstrated that labour cost was substantially reduced through volunteer-driven coral nursery maintenance [17] and that transplanting only small coral fragments (2-4 cm) could result in greater return-on-effort given limited coral source material [30]. These thought experiments can aid in identifying strategies that represent the best use of limited resources [45] and are increasingly crucial given the growing acceptance and implementation of ecological engineering techniques in coastal development see [15][16][17][18]45,[47][48][49].…”

“…This study seeks to evaluate the feasibility of histoincompatible coral fusion as a technique to improve the success of transplanting fragments of Platygyra sinensis (Milne Edwards and Haime, 1849), a massive species frequently found on seawalls [8] and commonly used in reef restoration and ecological engineering initiatives [17,30]. Here, we compared the survivorship and growth of fragments of P. sinensis transplanted in close contact ("adjoining") with those transplanted apart ("separate").…”