How We Are Protecting Our Reef from Sponges.

Hello everyone, it's Yudi from Mossy Earth and in this video I will do a wrap-up of what we've been doing for the past months in the project site. On the last update we show you how we found the natural coral recruitments in Area 1. So we do a thorough swim and we found all of these coral natural recruitments but also at the same time we saw that there are a lot of coral killing sponges on Area 5. We were leaving Area 1 and 2 for some sort of times that the coral killing sponges they start to grow even like spreading in some areas. So after finding about this we did, we set a week of cleaning in Area 1 especially to remove the impacted coral from these coral killing sponges. These sponges are very easy to remove. We just need to brush them off the corals or in this case they are also spreading through the structures. So the structure connect each other and sponges they use this to link to the next coral and to the next and spreading, killing the corals that we planted. Most of the impacted coral are the Porites being the slower growing corals and they have more surface for these sponges to spread. So we had to remove them and we end up with two full of buckets of impacted corals. To better understand their behavior we collaborate with Indo Ocean Project on their research about the competitor taxa in coral restoration. This includes the coral killing sponges, the zinnias of corals and the Duprella snail and also the cyanobacteria. Last month we dive with Gita and Ilham from Indo Ocean Project to survey our area for them to put transects for this research purpose. They put two by two transects in the project sites and each of the transect will be divided into four with each different treatment. The data will be taken for every month for the next 13 months and yeah I can't wait to see what we can learn from this research. Thank you all for watching and if you want to support this coral restoration project and other Mossy Earth project around the world you can do so by becoming a Mossy Earth member. Find more detailed information on our website mossy.earth. Cheers!