Fieldwork, Underwater: Saving Ocean Life From Within

Coral is kind of like the trees of a forest. They're just the backbone of a whole tropical ecosystem, and if they disappear, we're in a lot of trouble. My name is Ken Niedermeyer. I'm the founder of the Coral Restoration Foundation. The reason I'm doing this, I've been growing up diving, spent a lot of time in the water. One, two, three. I basically watched the coral reefs dying. As the reefs died, the fish didn't come back, and I realized I'm tired of watching it die. I need to do something about it, and so I developed this whole idea of growing corals in an offshore nursery and replanting them on the reef. So you're kind of like a farmer? I'm a farmer. Yeah, we grow corals just like a farm. There's a good time of the year to plant, and there's a harvest time, and we have five offshore nurseries in the Keys. Each tree can hold a hundred corals. We start with little fragments that we collect, and after six to nine months, maybe a year, that fragment has turned into a colony that might have a hundred centimeters of growth on it. We cut that off, and then we plant it out on the reef. So we just harvested some corals, and we're going to take them out to Pickles Reef right now and plant them. We've got a couple thousand of them out there that we've already planted, and we're going to add some more. It is a bit of gardening. When you put the corals back out on the reef, you're saying, I think that would look nice over there, and that would look nice over there, and some of it's based on what used to be there and what should be there, and that's how we do our planting. We planted 20,000 already this year. We'll plant 25,000 next year. Those corals will probably spawn next year. Part of the long-range goal is to get the reproducing on their own. I'm excited every time I get in the water, whether I'm going to work in the nursery, or whether I'm planting corals, or just looking for new areas to plant. A lot of people said, oh, you can never do that. It'll never work. Can't do it on a big enough scale, and I think I've proven that it can be done, and if we can train enough people and teach enough people in other places, I think we can really see a significant turnaround. Another day, another coral. Well, when you buy from local guys, it comes back to you, and you know you're getting a local fish. It's sustainable, you know. That's an honest thing. Sometimes we forget that we are part of the ecosystem. We are animals, too, and we are very ignorant, very ignorant. I kind of compare it with being at a giant dog park. Some of them love it. Like, you start giving them armpit scratches, and they're just like giant dogs. They just start rolling around, and they're flying all around you, but these animals are huge. People are intimidated by them, but once you learn their behavior, they're just right into you right away. They just look at you like a big chew toy. I could never see myself living anywhere other than the Pacific Northwest. I could literally spend every single day of the rest of my life and never travel anywhere other than Vancouver Island, and I would still never have enough time to see this whole place. My first introduction to the ocean would have definitely come from my mom. She's me with the sea lion right there. Later on in life, I realize it is a pretty unique experience to get to go out and spend time with these animals on a regular basis. Sea lions are a large, intelligent animal, and they're very sensitive of what your intentions are and how they choose to interact with you. It's totally their choice. If you're comfortable and they're inquisitive, they'll come and they'll chew on your fins, or they come up and they chew on the edge of your mask, or give you big kisses on the lips, or big hugs. They wrap their fins around you and give you a big hug. People get sketched out about it. I've had lots of people contact me and be like, don't you think those things are aggressive? Just because an animal's putting its mouth on you doesn't mean it's doing it in a harmful way. They don't have hands. They can't explore their world with anything other than their mouth. There's people that spend a lot of money to travel to the other side of the planet to watch a group of large migratory animals in Africa or something, and here I can just go out on my boat. It's not something I take for granted at all anymore, having the opportunity to do this. I recently told somebody that getting attacked by a shark was the greatest thing that's ever happened to me. They're like, that's absurd. You know, why would you say that? I've had incredible opportunities. I've been able to visit some really cool places, meet some incredible people. All these things have been nurtured from the shark attack. I think it's really made me who I am today. My name is Mike Kootz. I live in the island of Kauai in Hawaii. I'm a surfer, photographer, and shark attack survivor. There's some really great surf spots out here. I was 18 years old surfing here on Kauai with some friends, and it was early in the morning, and I paddled out and thought I was going to have a surf session like any other day, and it was a lot different. I got attacked by a tiger shark. As soon as I hit it, it let go and disappeared back underwater, and I remember passing out basically as soon as we got to the hospital, and I woke up a day and a half later an amputee. I got my first prosthetic six months after the shark attack. Early on, you think you can't do this. You think you can't do that. There's these physical limitations on life, and I didn't think I could drive a truck with a stick shift, and you learn how to drive a truck with a stick shift, and you're like, wow, that was cool, and you build up these little things day to day to day. After a while, it's like, bring it on. What can happen that I can't figure out how to do? I was in college, and I remember class got out. I was like, you know what? I'm going to take a longboard. I'm going to get the biggest board I can find and take my prosthetic in the water and see what happens. I caught a wave, and I was screaming pretty loud. I was like, what? This is cool. This is amazing, and I think that was the best wave I had ever caught in my life. From then on, I started figuring out, okay, what's going to break? What can I make that's a foot that'll help me surf even better and trying to basically make the ultimate surfing foot? I think I'm doing it because it's fun, but I'm also, it's this learning experience, and it's taking this information and passing it on to people that want to surf with a prosthetic. The ocean has taken a lot for me, but what it's given back to me has been immeasurable. I've lost nearly my life to a shark, yet I really believe sharks are one of the, if not the most important species in our marine ecosystem. At the rate that they're being killed off, they're not going to be around in 10, 15, 20 years. Why not use something that could, I guess, be set as a negative and turned into a positive? The shark attack's been the greatest thing that's ever happened.