A pyramid of pear trees in the Wadden Sea is proving to be a successful way to make an artificial reef that can support marine life.
Most people think of a reef as a place where scuba divers go to gaze at exotic fish, but it is more than that — much more. A reef is to the ocean what a forest is to dry land. It is a place of refuge from predators, a spawning ground, and a way to protect coastlines from powerful storms. Scientists say that 25% of all marine life begins in the world’s reefs., most reefs are an underwater ecosystem characterized by reef-building corals.
Researchers in the Netherlands have a different approach. They are creating pyramid-shaped structures from pear trees and dropping them into the Wadden Sea along that county’s northern coast. Jon Dickson, a Ph.D candidate at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, told, “We have fossil records of sunken wood communities dating back to the Jurassic period. We are trying to simulate what it used to be like.
He added, “I’d love to do [this experiment] somewhere with clearer water where we can actually visually observe how these reefs are providing habitat for fish and other organisms, as well as elsewhere in the Netherlands and North Sea. The flora and fauna vary even 200 km down the coast, so I’d be fascinated to learn. You also have different [types of] trees in different places.
Now, with nearly half of all reefs in the world dead or dying, researchers are busy experimenting with ways to devise an artificial reef structure that will replace the one nature created. That is laudable. Change is inevitable and adaptation is an essential part of life. But perhaps we need to look a little deeper into the problem to identify why a reef dies and what we can do about it.
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