Hana Pūkoʻa

Working Together for Coral Restoration

A member of the Ledcor Maui team enjoyed an educational and informative Hana Pūkoʻa coral restoration workday at the Maui Ocean Center. The Hana Pūkoʻa was hosted by Restore with Resilience in collaboration with Coral Resilience Lab and the Maui Ocean Center Marine Institute along with other local environmental based groups, working together to create thermal resistant and more resilient coral farms off the coast of Maui.

Since 2019, Restore with Resilience has been helping to conduct coral research around Maui including tagging coral, documenting bleaching and ocean warming effects. They have helped host hands-on coral restoration activity. The April 3rd workday was a continuation of this work.

The workday included taking biopsies of collected coral fragments, documenting them, getting samples ready for out planting and testing for thermal resilience. The biopsied pieces of coral will undergo a heat stress test to determine which corals can withstand heat above 28C (82.4F) which is the estimated threshold for corals in Hawaiʻi. The corals that are more thermal resistant will be planted near reefs near Oluwalu. Oluwalu was chosen as a coral restoration location for Maui Nui as this area is known as a “mother reef” due to the potential for coral and fish larvae to seed both south and west facing reefs. What is encouraging about this coral restoration work is that the outplanted thermally resistant corals have the ability to breed with other corals helping to create more resilient reefs in ocean warming conditions.

Mahalo to the organizations and volunteers who are participating in this work including: Restore with Resilience, Coral Resilience Lab, Maui Ocean Center Marine Institute, Maui Nui Marine Resource Council, DAR (Hawaiʻi Division of Aquatic Resources), NOAA, Kuleana Coral Restoration and Malama Maunalua.