UOG Marine Lab leads forum on coral reef restoration - KUAM.com-KUAM News: On Air. Online. On Demand.

UOG Marine Lab leads forum on coral reef restoration

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 by Allyson Chiu

Guam - The University of Guam Marine Lab is once again taking on the task of restoring and protecting Guam's coral reefs, but this time with a bit of international help.  

For the past ten days the lab in partnership with Underwater World and the Secore Foundation have been hosting activities and lectures as part of the 2nd Annual Coral Spawning and Reef Restoration Workshop.

The Secore Foundation aims to promote worldwide coral reef conservation through education, research, outreach and restoration. UOG marine lab director Dr. Laurie Raymundo said, "Basically the organization Secore Foundation is designed to bring aquarists from various aquaria around the world to teach them about coral reproduction with the purpose of these aquaria being able to rear their own corals rather than take them from the wild and also to foster collaborative efforts between these aquaria."

The public was invited to observe the evening workshops and sit in on lectures. Dr. Raymundo said, "We just want to get people involved with what's going on. There are conservation issues we'd like to address. We'd like people to understand their reefs better, local people, and also we've had a major bleaching episode and we're having another one right now, so just getting the public informed and getting them to feel a little more involved with local resources."

Raymundo along with University of New South Wales professor Dr. James Guest led the lectures. Both have participated in coral restoration in the Philippines and Southeast Asia, but still enjoy working on Guam. "It's such a great place to do this work because we have access to really nice field sites, really good lab space and then with this workshop we don't just have scientists we have aquarists and they have all this expertise in understanding how to manage organisms in captivity and it's just a great collaboration and really productive," Dr. Guest stated.

Although the continuation of this program depends on available funding, Dr. Raymundo remains confident that there will be another workshop next year.

For more information visit www.secore.org.  

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