Roatan’s Aquifer and Reef are at Risk from the Mismanaged Garbage Dump

The most impressive recycling operation on Roatan has not been set up by the local or central government, or by the nonprofit organization. The island’s biggest recycling operation is done seven days a week, 365 days a year, by around 120 people who work on and often live on the Roatan garbage dump. They separate and salvage metals, plastics and glass; they retrieve usable lumber, find old refrigerators and pass them on to recycling centers in Coxen Hole.

Their dignified, important work goes unnoticed and thankless. They also find themselves earning a living in the most toxic and dangerous environment on Roatan - the “temporary” Roatan Municipal garbage dump.

Maribel has sad eyes of a woman twice her age and her hands are wrinkled and covered with scars. She works without gloves so pieces of glass and metal often cut the skin of her small hands. It is late Sunday afternoon. She places bottles and containers of value into a four foot long transparent plastic bag.

The bag contains about thirty pieces of dirty, used, discardable containers most people see no value in. There are aluminum cans worth 80 Honduran centavos each, there are heavy plastic containers worth two Lempiras each and one glass coca cola bottle worth another two Lempiras.

If Maribel works hard and is lucky, she is able to buy milk for her two-year-old baby that lives with her and her parents, a hundred yards east of the garbage dump. If it is a bad day she might not even earn one hundred Lempiras.

There is an unwritten agreement that each recycler not take away, from a pile already collected. The Municipal dump is dotted with piles of old metal roofs, stacks of wooden pallets, bags of aluminum cans and heaps of rusting refrigerators and dishwashers. Nobody touches these piles but its rightful recycler and now owner. Honor system and gentlemen rules are a big part of recycling life in Mud Hole, Roatan.

Roatan Municipality employs three security guards at the garbage dump. Abiel Navarro has been a security man at the dump for seven years and makes sure nothing happens to the one key piece of equipment that moves trash and flattens the heap of trash. Navarro lives in a makeshift structure on the garbage dump itself. There are a dozen improvised mini houses on the site of the dump where people eat and sleep.

Despite the work of many devoted municipal employees the simple truth is that the local government is not competent enough to manage basic infrastructure projects. Roatan municipal government broke the desalination plant in Coxen Hole, but its biggest fiasco is the garbage dump that it has been mismanaging for two decades.

Its limits fall in the maintenance of fairly complex entities such as desalination plants, garbage dump or black water projects. Since 2013 the Municipality has run the desalination plant that has been sitting vacant ever since, perpetually waiting for some filters replacements.

It all started with a million dollars and high expectations. Back in 2000, the idea was to have one, centrally located garbage dump for the entire island. Construction and operating costs would be less; the two municipal governments could not come to an agreement where to locate such site.

The original Municipal dump had a lifespan of 10 years, but lasted 17 years without much maintenance, proper compacting and lack of proper layering of refuse. The original site of the 100 by 200 meter garbage dump in Mud Hole was opened in 2002. PMAIB (Proyecto Manejo Ambiental De Las Islas De La Bahía – Environmental Management Project of The Bay Islands) spent $850,000 to set up the site and another $600,000 to purchase garbage collection and management equipment: two garbage trucks, a compactor and a pusher.

Municipal dump is dotted with piles of old metal roofs, stacks of wooden pallets.

The equipment survived about a decade and the dump site survived 16 years. In 2018 after several outbreaks of fires and constant complaints of the public the PMAIB dump was finally covered up with a layer of dirt. This took place as Mayor Jerry Hynds took over the Municipality in 2018. The island’s refuse management problem was never solved, but only covered up and shifted to a new, adjacent site.

A new site for the growing municipality was needed and Roatan Electric Company (RECO) and Roatan Municipality worked together to secure land nearby the old dump. The site was just raw land devoid of trees yet it to serve as a “temporary” dumping site.

RECO purchased a six-acre property for around $250,000 and donated it to Roatan Municipality. In exchange RECO had promised to put a garbage incinerator on the site and use the capped dump site for a solar farm. Thus RECO has become a party to the Roatan garbage management fiasco.

Kelcy Warren, the American billionaire and owner of RECO, residing sometime on Barbareta, has focused a try-just-about-anything and see-if-it-works strategy for the power company. RECO has run its Wärtsilä generators on natural gas supplied from Warren’s US energy operation.

To the tune of $7 million it has recycled old and obsolete wind turbines for a wind farm and it built two solar plants that destroyed island forest and leveled hills. Warren, trying to add to his hodge-podge island eclectic empire, has been eyeing methane gas from Roatan’s mismanaged dump as another source of energy.

Unfortunately the municipal dump is a disaster that could happen before RECO gets control of the site. With each passing year, the probability of a catastrophic event increases. With the mismanagement of garbage and the proximity of the site to the sea and reef there is a danger of contaminating the island’s marine ecosystem.

Another catastrophic scenario, one of several, is where garbage is carried by water in a natural gulley, passes the mangroves and is carried by the rain water onto the reef of the entire Sandy Bay. This is unfortunately quite possible and would be a truly an ecological calamity.

Just a few months ago a large part of the gully has been interrupted with a mound of dirt mixed with trash. Now the “temporary” dump has a permanent leech pond with floating trash, plastics and rusting pieces of metal.

The volume of the garbage deposited at the dump is growing by 20 percent every year. “When I left we had 18 tons of garbage a day,” says Julio Galindo, ex Roatan Mayor and owner of AKR tourist resort, about the volume of garbage picked that the Roatan Municipal since 2017. “There are probably 40-50 tons [collected] a day now.”

Strong, dangerous chemicals, pollutants and plastics are sunk into the soil below the dump site. The engine of Roatan’s tourist industry – Sandy Bay, is just a hundred meters away, down current from the garbage dump. “Everything is there: car batteries, oils,” says Galindo. “The mangrove not enough to stop the runoff”

There is another, just as scary scenario where the island’s aquifer becomes contaminated by the refuse from the dump. For the past four years chemicals, oils and other contaminants leached into the soil below the “temporary” dump. These hazardous liquids and liquefied contaminants travel dozens of meters down through soil eventually reaching the aquifer used for drinking water across the island.

RECO has become a party to the Roatan garbage management fiasco.

At least the original PMAIB dump had retention walls and polyurethane liner. The “temporary” dump site has none of that. A clear sign of the toxicity of the dump is how, after just a few months, large trees that were left at the “temporary” garbage site had died. They couldn’t handle the pollutants, and toxic chemicals in the ground that slipped in and killed their root system.

There are signals of increased amount of refuse being found all over the island. Over the last several years trash in unprecedented quantities has been washing on to the reef in Palmetto and as far as Camp Bay. The tags from the food products place the origin of the trash as made in Honduras.

The problems with the Roatan garbage dump are not limited to what we could see, or to the solid waste itself. The old garbage site that has been on fire for years has likely not been stabilized and is another disaster waiting to happen. “The dump fire is probably still burning,” says Vernon Albert, a builder with experience in water and waste management from US who has been living and working on Roatan since 2005. “The 4 mm polyurethane heat-sealed liner is probably compromised due to the fire,” says Vernon.

The surface fire that had started on the PMAIB dump in 2013 was finally extinguished in 2018. Roatan Municipality had extinguished the surface fires by bringing in masses of dirt to cover the original dump that has not solved the problem of containing the fires that likely still smolder underneath the dirt cap.

But while the smoke has kept Roatanians preoccupied, the current covering up of the problem does not. The unsightly sight and foul smell is not only a nuisance, but they are also causing diseases and lowering property values in areas close to the dump.

Strong, dangerous chemicals, pollutants and plastics are sunk into the soil.

Galindo has more thoughts on Roatan Municipalities’ handling of the dump in Mud Hole. “The garbage dump is not temporary, it’s been four years now,” says Galindo. “I sold them [Roatan Municipality] 73 acres of land I regret selling them. They haven’t done anything with it,” says Julio Galindo, whose Anthony’s Key Resort is just two miles down from the current garbage dump.

The smell from the burning refuse site has been a headache for property owners and for tourists. The few trees that have been left at the site have died. Their roots were poisoned by the toxic seepage of the garbage: the battery chemicals, the industrial oils, Freon and rust.

There are other people very concerned with what environmental hazard and environmental disaster the dump has been. Nick Bach, of Roatan Marine park also thinks that some trash has been washed from the “temporary Roatan Municipal Dump. “The majority [of trash] comes from the colonias where there is inadequate trash removal and people just throw most of it on the streets, or in the creeks,” said Bach.

Some environmental voices have been critical of the looming environmental calamity. “This temporary dump is a disaster. It doesn’t have a containment wall, and practically has no maintenance,” said Joel Amaya. “There is one or two creeks that take the garbage to the sea, to the mangroves.”

Environmental group such as Bay Islands Conservation Association (BICA) on the other hand have placed the blame of the unfolding environmental disaster on bureaucratic hurdles. “The process of a technical landfill requires an environmental license, which requires the respective studies, which don’t happen overnight,” said Irma Brady, founder of BICA.

“The dump fire is probably still burning.”

The reason why the garbage dump site has been mismanaged for over two decades is also a question of priorities. Roatan Municipality spent millions of dollars to fix national roads while leaving their “temporary” garbage dump with practically no attention. While Roatan Municipality under Jerry Hynds (2018-2022) has embarked on a campaign of building new roads and rebuilding national roads network on the island, the building of a new dump has been placed on the back burner. Also RECO has spent millions of dollars on new solar projects while the site of the temporary garbage dump is a chemical wasteland.

There are few things more important than air and water and earth that we plant our food crops in. The Roatan municipal garbage dump has been affecting all of these issues.

It is also the issue of legacy. Neither municipal government nor any person is entitled to endanger or squabble resources passed onto him by prior generations. Sadly, now islanders find themselves allowing the destruction of the very environment that raised them.

Diving to Reach the Summit Near Cayos Cochinos

Seamounts are extinct volcanoes that, when active, created piles of lava that sometimes break the ocean surface and come in a mixture of shapes and sizes which makes for beautiful abundant reefs.

Geologically speaking, the word ‘seamount’ has a narrow definition. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) states a seamount is any underwater peak that rises more than 3,280 feet from the seafloor without breaking the water’s surface. Otherwise it would be an island if the top of the mountain broke above the sea level. Most scuba divers however define a seamount as any underwater mountain, pinnacle or reef.

A series of underwater mountains rise between Roatan and Cayos Cochinos forming separate mountains and peaks at around 60 ft in depth. The Seamounts are more suitable for advanced divers, as the currents can be strong.

The Cayos seamounts can even be dangerous. Weather there changes quickly, and sudden squalls can make it difficult for the boat captain to retrieve surfacing divers. Four years ago, Nicholas Bach of the Roatan Marine Park, who is in charge of the marine infrastructure around Roatan, ended up floating alone in the ocean for 11 hours. Bach and three other divers were rescued just before sunset.

While some of the bigger seamounts are miles round others are just a few dozen meters in diameter. The most visited ones are about seven kilometers from Cayo Cochino Grande and can be circumnavigated in one dive. These underwater mountains are perfect for less experienced divers because their tops are flat and at a depth of 40 feet. These guyots are made by repeated wave action eroding the summit of the underwater island eventually forming a flat surface.

With all the currents moving through the area, temperature fluctuation and the rich nourishing water that come from the depths, make the coral at the Cayos Cochinos seamount very healthy and active. There is also a great opportunity to see lots of different schools of Atlantic spade fish, blue tangs, horse eye jacks, hammerheads or pelagic fish and a battery of barracudas just hanging out off the reef as they feed. Most of the time the nurse sharks are swimming around with their curious eyes. There is plenty of marine life to be seen.

Bach marked six mounts on Roatan Marine Park’s google map. “A lot more dive shops offer these trips. Ten years ago, you felt like a pioneer if you took a dive group there. Now there are almost ten moorings,” said Bach.

Several Roatan dive shops offer a day trip to the seamounts with a two-tank dive. Between dives you can explore the rustic Cayos Cochinos. Honduras has been ranked in the top three diving destinations in the Caribbean Sea for biodiversity and Cayos Cochinos is the leader in biodiversity in Honduras.

The two small main islands of Cayos Cochinos in the chain offer a variety of surrounding coral reef structures. One of the two is called ‘Chachahuate, a small Garifuna fishing village.

The chain of 13 cays to the south are coral islands, with shallow coral reefs to the north and sloping walls to the south. These little pure, deserted cays are perfect to go for snorkeling.

A diver cuts off the lionfish’s 18 venomous spines. (photo by Lori Kunzelman)

Invasion of the Lionfish has Damaged the Roatan Ecosystem

“The lionfish has a voracious appetite, eating everything in the Caribbean except the conch. We found lobsters, shrimp, crab, fish and octopus within their stomachs,” said Nic Bach who runs the Lionfish Invasive Species Containment Program at the Roatan Marine Park (RMP). The diverse life on the island’s reef isn’t equipped to fight back and lionfish have been known to target shrimp cleaning stations, leaving a few small fish to keep the algae growth in check and subjecting entire sections of vibrant coral vulnerable to other stresses. Bach calls it the “largest, widespread invasion since man.”

“Lionfish are aliens here and predators such as a groupers and snappers that would eat them [in areas where they are native] do not identify them as prey,” said Chris Willey, a PADI Master SCUBA Diver Trainer who helps educate divers to responsibly aid in lionfish containment through spearfishing.

Lionfish most likely entered the Atlantic through a release of aquarium individuals beginning in the mid-80s in Florida. Although there is also a theory that the fish may have traveled in the bilge pumps of large tankers making their way from Asia through the Panama Canal to ports in South Florida. They spread through the warm coastal waters at a geometric rate, reaching Roatan in 2009. By 2012 they made it all the way to the eastern edge of the Caribbean. Now they can be found all the way down the coast of Brazil, covering almost the entire Atlantic coast of South America. Lionfish have succeeded here on Roatan like they have everywhere else.

Lionfish have been proliferating, killing everything on the reef

Answering the challenge posed by these invasive predators, the Roatan Marine Park first partnered up with the National Fisheries Department in 2009 to issue spearing licenses to professional diver instructors and dive masters. Today, these licenses can be obtained by anyone after completing a training course through the RMP so even the general public is on the lionfish snorkel patrol.

Thus far in 2018 the Roatan Marine Park has issued more than 200 lionfish permits, a number Bach sees increasing to something like 350 for the whole year, which would be on par with last year’s total and slightly lower than the high of 400 in 2014.

Willey, creator of the PADI Lionfish Hunter distinctive specialty program, which builds on the Roatan Marine Park invasive species containment course, stresses that divers need to ensure that they do not feed lionfish to other marine life. “If we are acting as predators we must act like predators and must remove lionfish for consumption,” Willey said. Otherwise the divers affect fish behavior, teaching groupers, eels and other large predators that “divers give out free food,” which isn’t a smart, safe or sustainable practice.

Roatan recreational divers spear a lionfish. (photo by Lori Kunzelman)

Another key component to successful lionfish containment on Roatan is in doing no harm to the reef. Often it is those trying to do the best for the reef, photographers looking to document new behaviors, spear fishers desperate to bag the biggest catch, and other distracted divers who end up doing the most damage, often exceeding whatever good they hoped to accomplish.“By you hitting a piece of reef that took two years to just grow one inch is doing a lot more damage than that lionfish will ever do,” Bach said.

Some have come up with more creative ways of fighting lionfish. “I was thinking about building some little castles and palaces around the reef, see if we could attract lionfish. You can spear that all you want, you aint gonna hurt anything,” said Jack Mitchell, the longtime chef who has been a passionate advocate for consuming lionfish since being asked to serve them for a marine biologist’s wedding back in 2012.

Tournaments like the first ever Roatan International Lionfish Tournament being held from October 12-14, organized by Buck Beasley, hope to expand recognition of the problems that lionfish present to the vital heart of the tourism industry on Roatan. Beasley decided to put on the tournament “to help locals gain awareness. The goal is to put the lionfish front and center for the local population.” With a top prize of $1,000 for the most lionfish caught from a 4-person team using spear-poles, the derby style tournament hopes to attract attention from crews throughout the Bay Islands and the Caribbean. The tournament also hopes to raise enough funds to help some local free divers get certified and outfitted as professional divers. “We hope to raise funds that will allow us to train and certify local watermen on SCUBA. We want to give these guys opportunities for better livelihoods,” said Beasley, who is licensed by Roatan Marine Park to issue lionfish hunting certifications and has lost count of the number he has issued over the years.

“If you are what you eat, then I’m a lionfish,” said Mitchell, who runs Lionfish Louie’s, which will be hosting a big lionfish cookout the day after the tournament when cash prizes will be awarded in several categories.

Zoe Kunzelman, an eleven-year old girl from Utah, who was recently certified by Beasley and issued a spear-pole, knows she’s doing something good for the reef when she hunts for lionfish. She proudly cuts off the spines and fillets the lionfish before she gets to the surface, but her favorite part of hunting lionfish is when she brings her catch back to the kitchen where they prepare the yummy tasting flaky white fish anyway she likes. Her favorites ways are grilled with barbeque, then mango butter.

There is no limit to how many lionfish a diver can skewer. Even if every last one would end up on a Roatan plate more will drift in on the currents from farther east. “We are never going to eradicate them. We’re simply educating people and creating a demand for the lionfish,” said Bach. Willey notes that spearing a lionfish is one of the most rewarding, exhilarating, adrenaline-producing moments of diving because when “we remove lionfish we are helping the ecosystem and saving a lot of juvenile native fish.”

Two lionfish display their colorful spines. (photo by Robert Herb)

If programs like the one being run by the Roatan Marine Park are ultimately going to be successful, it’s through systematic cooperation between disparate groups among the many nations in the Caribbean. It’s only by working together, pooling resources, data, and best practices that anything resembling fundamental change will ever be fully realized.

“Below recreational [SCUBA diving depth] limits the reef is still filthy with lionfish,” Beasley said, speaking of his concern for what lionfish are doing at depth. He notes that they have been seen by subs at depths of one-thousand feet. “What are they eating at depth that will affect future fisheries? Are they eating the juvenile snapper, grouper, or even the tuna stocks?” Beasley asks before concluding that we cannot imagine the ecological disasters that await from the actions of the lionfish at depth.

There have been some ingenious and exciting trap systems, like the one designed by Dr. Steve Gittings, Chief Scientist of NOAA’s Marine Sanctuary System, made to use technology and behavior to target lionfish in deep water specifically while minimizing by-catch,. Having the commercial fleet on Roatan utilizing these kind of deep water traps “would be a natural fit between lobster seasons and keep those boats and fishermen busy year round,” said Beasley, who hopes to have one of Gittings’ traps on display at the Roatan International Lionfish Tournament in October to help educate locals on how the traps function.

“I dream of the day a local can spend a day hunting lionfish for a return of $6-$10 per pound,” Beasley said. He sees the tipping point coming “when the nutritional value is realized and we can provide a steady supply to market.”

La Ceiba built ‘Pirate Ship’ Black Pearl and Gulf King resting in Oak Ridge.

 Old Ships Come to Rest in oak Ridge

And as nature would have it, time and wear & tear take their toll on all creature and creation, and these two unrelated boats, the Black Pearl and the Gulf King, are no exception.

Built in 2008 solemnly to serve as a tourist ship on the island of Roatan, the 88 feet long by 27 feet wide Black Pearl spent her short-lived heyday as an entertainment venue. She transported tourist around the island of Roatan sharing some of the secrets and fantasies of the island’s history, while delighting her guests with music and dancing all the way from the docks of Fantasy Island to the harbor of West End.

As part of the entertainment, her crew, including the captain, would dress in full pirate attire, bringing to life century-old scenes of pirates battles and pirates schemes. It seems like, as with her predecessors from hundreds of years ago, luck was not on her side.

Some locals believe that the deteriorating ship that has been parked in the same spot for the last three years, could be fixed and used as some type tourist attraction. “She is in bad condition but she is fixable if you could find someone that has the money to invest,” said a local business man. “She would make a great tourist attraction.”

The Gulf King 2, on the other hand, may have had a longer run as a fishing boat, but no history of glory here on the island. Hailing all the way from some port in the USA, he made his way to the island towed by another vessel, but he has never once made a fishing trip in his new and unfamiliar home. Made of aluminum and steel, he must have indeed conquered the deep sea while leaving behind a trail of triumphant conquest. With the absence of details or descriptions of past travel, one can only speculate about the Gulf King 2’s spectacular journeys around the Atlantic Ocean and beyond.

Authorities have not turned a blind eye on the disintegrating vessels that could disintegrate polluting the water and causing damage to passing boats. Jonathan Lainez, Roatan’s port captain, said that he has made a report about the Oak Ridge boats and six others abandoned boats on the island.

“The dive community should get involved and go to the owner. Sponsors could get involved and clean up the boat and sink it at a dive site,” says Shawn Hyde, a Roatan salvage operator with 20 years experience. “We would need SERNA and others to give us permits in order to sink them as a wreck,” says Nick Bach, of Roatan Marine Park.

Devoid of mast, winch and anchor, the essential equipment of a fishing boat, the Gulf King 2 is in a state of slow decay with iron rusts and flaking paint his most noticeable characteristics. After making stops at different shipyards around the island with no apparent solution to his ailment, the King has finally made his longest stop while awaiting his fate. “The fishing boat has a good steel bottom that could be recycled and used on other boats” said Norin Williams a former seaman who works as a taxi dorie captain.

As everyone and everything in the world has a purpose and could be of service to the world, so could the Black Pearl and the Gulf King. The former could possibly be a stationary pirate theme restaurant near the shore of Oak Ridge harbor where she now lays. The Gulf King could be sunk and serve as haven for marine life and a mooring for a dive spot.

“It would be nice if they could be re-purposed somehow. Otherwise, perhaps tow them out to the reef and sink them to make more reefs and a dive spot…, said Robert McNail. “To me, the way they are now, they distract from the quaint beauty of Oak Ridge,” he added.

The two boats that sit quietly in Oak Ridge Harbor, with a little creativity and effort, could play a more appropriate role as part of the landscape of the municipality of Santos Guardiola.

Diver inspects the corral tree in Sandy Bay Area (Photo by Jennifer Keck).

Island Divers Plant Underwater Trees to Give Coral a Chance

Thankfully there are a group of passionate environmental scientists leading the charge to preserve, protect and defend the coral reefs of the Bay Islands. As Tripp Funderburk, who runs the coral restoration program at Subway Watersports in Turquoise Bay explains, “we had the worst bleaching event in the history of Roatan last year.” Jennifer Keck, who works as the Education and Research Coordinator for the Roatan Institute for Marine Sciences (RIMS) at Anthony’s Key Resort in Sandy Bay says, “we can’t afford to have another bleaching event.”

Coral Restoration initiatives are a planned scientific response that, as Executive Director of the Roatan Marine Park, Francis Lean says, “give hope to the reef.” Both of the restoration programs in Turquoise Bay and Sandy Bay use the same coral trees, the same record keeping and naming conventions so they can work together and collaborate in the future.

A piece of staghorn coral used in the restoration program. (Photo by Jennifer Keck).

The coral restoration programs on Roatan revolve around coral tree nurseries. The nurseries are composed of big, 30 foot tall PVC pipes. Like an underwater Christmas tree fragments of two critically endangered species coral, staghorn and elkhorn, hang from thin filaments of wire attached to the thicker PVC branches. To harvest these fragments, they take 10% of viable, healthy specimens of staghorn and elkhorn coral, cut them into little pieces and try to preserve as much of the genetic diversity of these keystone species as possible.

Funderburk, who previously worked as policy director in for the Coral Restoration Foundation setting up restoration programs across the Caribbean says “I am convinced these are important corals. We can grow them and plant them and we can get better at it. I’ve seen it work in Bonaire, Curacao, Mustique and in the Florida Keys.”

Starting in early 2016, the Bay Islands Reef Restoration program installed ten coral trees in Turquoise Bay and another ten in Mahogany Bay. Once the fragments of coral have sufficiently grown, they are planted back onto the reef, tagged, and monitored at regular intervals. Since January, the program in Turquoise Bay has out-planted more than 260 corals onto the reef with a success rate of more than 92%. Funderburk says that the program relies on volunteers, using an “ecotourism” model that doesn’t depend on “government grants or charity,” but provides their guests with “unique opportunities to learn about coral.”

Tripp Funderburk talking to a group of students at Turquoise Bay Resort. (Photo by Robert Herb).

Renee Setter, who recently completed her PADI Dive Master internship at Turquoise Bay, explains what makes working on the restoration program so special, saying, “ it’s such a unique and fulfilling experience to be able to give back to the reef. It makes divers feel satisfied and rewarded knowing that they gave back to the beautiful underwater world.”

Keck, who oversees a coral restoration program with 24 coral trees with more than 2,000 corals on them agrees that, “the whole idea of citizen science is just growing. People want to be more useful. There has been so much interest among recreational divers.”

While the programs in Sandy Bay and Turquoise Bay have been successful, the ultimate goal as Keck understands it is to “get the techniques down so we can start another nursery in the West End/West Bay area that the Marine Park will manage that would allow local dive shops to get involved and engage the community and make everyone feel like they are contributing.”

Lean agrees that cooperation is critical, saying “communication between all projects is essential to improve the effectiveness of coral restoration.”

While these coral restoration programs are not a fix for the rising temperatures and acidity in the ocean, they do help point the way forward towards a better future. Funderburk stresses that we need to “do as much smart conservation as we can on a local level” with programs that are “effective but also educational.”

Keck also ultimately sounds a positive note, saying that, “We might not have the answer today, but we might next month. We have a seed bank in Norway. We need a coral bank and that’s sort of what these nurseries are becoming.”