How Hungry Baby Urchins Are Saving Hawaii's Reefs
They helped eat through invasive algae that was suffocating corals in Kāne’ohe Bay
(NOAA)
By Brigit Katz
SMITHSONIAN.COM
AUGUST 17, 2018 9:45AM
For decades, Hawaii’s Kāne‘ohe Bay was plagued by an invasive species of algae that covered the bay’s reefs in knotted clumps and starved its corals of light. But as Alejandra Borunda reports for National Geographic, a team of researchers may have found the ideal solution to Kāne’ohe Bay’s algal overgrowth: voracious baby urchins.
The tiny critters could bring an end to a problem that began in the 1974, when a university researcher introduced a foreign red algae of the genera Kappaphycus and Eucheuma to the bay. According to Joseph Bennington-Castro of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, scientists were very interested in aquaculture in the 1970s, and these types of red algae are particularly intriguing because they can be harvested for carrageenan, a substance that is used in the medical, agricultural and food industries.
In their native habitats, predators that don’t exist in Kāne‘ohe Bay keep the invasive algae in check. So when they were introduced to the bay, the algae went haywire, growing quickly over the reefs and suffocating the coral. Fittingly, Kappaphycus and Eucheuma are sometimes referred to as “smothering seaweed.”
Brian Nielson, an aquatic biologist at the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources in Honolulu, tells Borunda that experts initially cut the algae back in an attempt to tame it so the coral can get the sunlight that it requires to survive. But this often felt like a Sisyphian task.
Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-hungry-baby-urchins-are-saving-hawaiis-reefs-180970059/#x6y2BIIMPiueUxv4.99
= new reply since forum marked as read
