EL PAÍS offers the América Futura section for free for its daily and global informative contribution on sustainable development. If you want to support our journalism, subscribe here.
In Puerto Rico, coral reefs are a blank canvas after hurricanes hit the Caribbean. But marine biologists armed with 3D printers decided to paint over this desolate area and explore their creativity. Pink and orange hues were on the palette, but so was neon green. The printer made it possible to decorate the reef with blue, yellow and, back to basics, bright white – colours not often seen on a natural reef.
In Puerto Rico, biologists are installing thousands of artificial corals made from corn starch using 3D printers to restore reefs in the US territory. Scientists from the Marine Environment Society have already installed more than 10,000 artificial corals around Culebra, an island in the archipelago where coral life was devastated by hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017. The island is famous among tourists for its crystal-clear beaches and expeditions to see colorful reefs, which have been severely affected by coral bleaching, exacerbated by climate change.
The printed corals measure no more than 60 centimeters, a characteristic that distinguishes this project, started in 2021, from others that have also used 3D printers, in which the structures are usually the size of a moving box. Their goal is to attract fish and other organisms to revitalize the reef more quickly than natural corals, which can take up to a year to grow enough to become a suitable habitat for marine life. For now, the artificial corals are only found in specific spots on Culebra, such as Punta Tampico and Punta de Maguey, two picture-postcard paradises.
For Alex Mercado Molina, the project’s principal investigator, and his colleague Samuel Suleimán Ramos, the idea was to recreate as accurately as possible the coral environment that existed before the destruction caused by the hurricanes.
The results are promising
“The biodiversity of the reef has increased since we introduced the artificial corals,” says Mercado Molina, who is also a professor at the University of Puerto Rico at Bayamón. “It’s not just attracting more fish; it’s attracting more types of fish.” The team analyzed the reef ecosystem under different scenarios and found a significant increase when the transplantation of natural and artificial corals was combined.
The striking colors of corals also have an explanation. As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention, and biologists did not stop when, at one point, the only renewable filament available was in bright, neon hues. Previously, they managed to print them in more neutral colors like brown, white, and gray. Still, the brightly colored corals piqued the curiosity of fish.
Edwin Hernández Delgado, the researcher in charge of monitoring the fish in this project, said that the number of fish more than doubled after the transplantation of artificial corals. This contrasts drastically with the sectors studied without intervention and also without natural corals, where they observed a reduction in the fish population. Hernández Delgado assured that it is not only the structure of the corals that attracts the fish. “As the structure attracts juveniles, it also attracts predators,” said the scientist.
The attraction of different types of fish also creates a domino effect in the fishing industry. According to Hernandez Delgado, corals have increased the amount of commercial fish that Puerto Ricans usually consume, such as the arrayao fish, grouper and snapper.
Before a team of divers dives onto the beaches, biologists collect the cornstarch corals in different laboratories more than 120 kilometers from the work camp, in the urban sector of the U.S. territory. Once placed on the reef, the corals do not pollute the area because their components are renewable and natural. With thousands of artificial corals transplanted, biologists hope to recover the efforts made before Category 4 Hurricane Maria hit the island seven years ago.
“Once the fish arrive, they perform different types of ecological functions such as grazing, eating algae, keeping the reef clean and releasing nutrients when they are disposing of their metabolic waste,” said Mercado Molina. In less than a month, the brightly colored coral is transformed by the algae that cover it and begins to reflect the more natural colors of a coral.
The disastrous impact of Hurricane Maria
Before the hurricane, the organization had managed to grow and transplant 75,000 corals to the reefs. When the hurricane hit on September 20, strong currents destroyed these efforts. Suleiman Ramos said only 200 fragments remained from that initiative. Of the 18 nurseries and coral farms they had, none survived.
“Irma struck 80% of the time and Maria wiped out the storm,” said Suleiman Ramos, founder of Sociedad Ambiente Marino. “I literally cried. It was like being in a war scene, where everything looked wilted. You knew that no matter where you looked, there were going to be dead things,” he said.
Reefs not only serve as habitat for diverse species, but also protect against coastal erosion. Corals are crucial to reducing the intensity of breaking waves, and they work together with mangroves, dunes and seagrass beds to protect the coast. But as climate change intensifies hurricanes, scientists in Puerto Rico consider their efforts more essential than ever.
The idea to restore Puerto Rico’s reefs using 3D printers came about when an undergraduate student of Mercado Molina proposed the concept for her thesis. This idea won her an award from the Caribbean Marine Laboratory Association in Mexico in 2017, just a few months before Hurricane Maria hit. Two years later, Mercado Molina submitted a proposal with preliminary results to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, and the marine organization received grants from the U.S. agency to start the project. However, like many initiatives globally, the pandemic affected the start of the project on the coast of Culebra. In addition to the impact of Covid-19, many other factors are halting progress to restore reefs.
“Add to that global warming and the different types of bacteria that are affecting the reefs,” said Luis Torres, founder of one of the laboratories printing 3D corals, Engine-4 Foundation. In addition, Various diseases have been harmful to coralsincluding the black band and the white band.
“And you have to factor in the human factor, which is destruction by passing by on boats or jet skis and not respecting the marine habitat,” Torres added. An ongoing problem for coral reefs in Puerto Rico is coastal development and the privatization of beaches, which only exacerbate the damaging conditions in the archipelago’s marine environment, a phenomenon that has fueled the “Playas Pa’l Pueblo” movement.
The Government of Puerto Rico has implemented measures to mitigate coastal erosion and protect the marine environment from climate change, such as allocating funds and disseminating plans. However, the lack of a moratorium on construction in coastal areas and lax permitting have made effective implementation of these measures difficult. Construction projects in coastal areas, driven by investors who benefit from Act 22, which grants tax exemptions to wealthy individuals who move to Puerto Rico, are contributing to the problem, increasing the vulnerability of coastal communities and ecosystems.
Faith drives the search
It wasn’t until 2021 that the team started the project on the coast of Culebra. The project caught the attention of private companies that also wanted to collaborate, either monetarily or through labor and printers, such as mobile network operator T-Mobile and local beer company Medalla, which ironically produce cans that often end up polluting the island’s beaches. The School of Plastic Arts and the School of Architecture of the University of Puerto Rico also contributed their labor and printers. Even the POTthe US space exploration and aeronautics research agency, became involved in the project.
But funding has dwindled. While the corals are still being printed, Mercado Molina is currently writing proposals to secure more funding to install them. So far, over the past three years, the corals have been made possible by $1.6 million awarded by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, not the local government of Puerto Rico. For Torres, at the lab where the corals are printed, the initial money helped jumpstart the initiative as part of a special project within a larger annual budget, but over the years, other projects have taken priority. Torres said that where he would like to see more responsibility is from the government of Puerto Rico.
“This is not a whim, this is a social and environmental impact,” said Torres. “The local government has to invest more money in resources and help these groups of marine biologists who graduated from their universities and are giving you recommendations like doctors and saying that the coasts of Puerto Rico are being affected.”
Still, Sociedad Ambiente Marino and the labs, like many other entities in Puerto Rico, continue to push forward with their efforts despite the economic precariousness the island faces following the largest public debt restructuring in U.S. history. For Torres, 3D printing opens up new possibilities for coral reef restoration, but his ambitions don’t stop there. His new project, still in its early stages, explores creating experiments using pineapple crests.
“We could use it as a base to develop another type of coral, but we could also grow crops to plant seeds and grow vegetables in them,” Torres said, as he continued to reflect on the sea of ideas that occurred to him.
#printed #artificial #corals #solution #save #reefs #Puerto #Rico