Coral, the most colorful and silent existence in marine documentaries, always presents a stretching and colorful landscape for the underwater world. Coral reefs are also known as the "tropical rainforest" of the seabed, providing a living environment for nearly 30% of the world's marine species. This is a common rhetoric on television.
And on the bottom of the real world, the corals below the surface silently break, bleach, and die. In some areas, divers are faced with even the seabed where there is "nothing". To bring the ocean back to glory, some have embarked on a sustained "coral planting" campaign.
Text | Qi Jiani
Edit the | Lu pillow
Operational | Tsukimi
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Cheng Keke sat on the side of the boat with his back to the sea, and with a back-to-back roll into the water, he sank into the sea on his back. After a few seconds, she opened her eyes, OK, this is the underwater world she saw on her first dive.
This is a day in February 2021, the sea area of Dapeng Bay, Shenzhen, the sea weather is clear. Cheng Keke underwater, but happened to catch the brown cystic algae outbreak, after waking up, the gray-green sea water was full of spherical brown planktonic algae and impurities of unknown things, she was a little stunned. Under the surface of the sea, where the visibility was only about 1 meter, she stretched out her hand, and in the turbidity, she couldn't see her five fingers clearly.
She backed off. When she started her postdoctoral research work, Cheng Keke's research direction changed from forest ecosystems during her doctoral years to coral microorganisms, and this was the first time she decided to dive into the sea to see the true face of corals in the six months since studying literature.
She slowly sank in the sea, and the world wrapped in water gradually became quiet, and no noise could be heard. In front of her, some strange small fish and shrimp swam by, she was no longer afraid, and began to patiently search for her research subject, a colorful coral group she imagined.
The results were somewhat discouraging. There are not many corals in the sea, and occasionally a few palm-sized corals lie sparsely on the rocky reef, one here and two there, which are particularly small in the boundless sea. The corals seen are basically brown antler corals, shaped as their name, and the antlers generally open Y-shaped branches. It's a different place from the diverse and colorful world of coral seen in documentaries. The only consolation was that it was the New Year, the sea temperature was low, and the corals were still healthy, with only slight bleaching. However, if the sea temperature rises in summer, these small corals may gradually bleach and eventually face the threat of death.
▲ After removing the fishing net cover, the dead corals are whitened. Figure / Courtesy of respondents
After returning to the boat, Cheng Keke was still shocked by everything he saw underwater. She went snorkeling in Thailand, and she could see the underwater landscape ten meters below when she floated on the water. In Shenzhen, visibility is 5 meters when it is good, and more often it is only 1 meter. What we have seen with our own eyes about the coral condition is also more shocking than the figures and conclusions in the paper.
But back in the eighties, the Dapeng Peninsula actually had 76% coral reef coverage, almost the same level as that of tropical countries. Unfortunately, in the process of rapid urban expansion, the original ecological environment once gave way to land reclamation, and the coral reefs growing in the shallow coastal waters were the first to be destroyed, and the coral reef coverage rate was reduced to 20% of today's level.
In the late eighties, five garment printing and dyeing factories were built in the Guanhu village of Shenzhen, and the sewage from the factories was directly discharged into the sea.
Cheng remembers a video of a coral survey on Australia's Great Barrier Reef, where the once magnificent coral colony is now white bones, with well-defined branches sticking out in the direction of the sky. She continued to look at the data and found that about one-third of the world's coral reefs are threatened by degradation, but not much research and conservation is being done to address them. Scientists predict that if nothing is done, all corals will disappear by 2050.
That's when she made up her mind to study and protect corals.
▲ Fishing nets on the bottom of the sea. Figure / Courtesy of respondents
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In June 2020, Cheng Keke, who graduated with a doctorate, came to Tsinghua University Shenzhen International Graduate School for further study. After establishing the research direction of coral microbes, she made a difficulty. As a native of Shaanxi, she rarely had the opportunity to see the sea as a child, and she had never touched marine surveys during her master's degree, and now she suddenly comes into contact with such a complex and unfamiliar ecosystem as corals, and she does not know how to conduct research for a while.
In this field, there are many unsolved puzzles and unknown challenges. There are not many teachers who conduct coral research in China, and even fewer study coral microorganisms. In addition, the biggest problem in coral research is the development of experiments, and corals living on the bottom of the sea are no more easily sampled than plants in forests. What's more, the opportunity to go to the sea to investigate is very rare, for a long time, Cheng Keke can only know coral from textbooks, like talking on paper.
Soon after the start of school, the school's Global Competency Association organized students to visit Qianai, also known as Shenzhen Dapeng New Area Coral Conservation Voluntary Federation, a non-profit organization engaged in coral conservation. Cheng Keke, who studies corals, naturally also participated in the event. She never imagined that social non-profit organizations would still have the ability to carry out coral conservation.
As the first and only coral conservation public welfare organization in China, the establishment of Qianai was actually accidental. At the end of 2011, Shenzhen Dapeng New Area was established, as the only functional new area in Shenzhen that does not assess GDP, Dapeng New Area mainly promotes mountain and sea tourism. At that time, Wang Xiaoyong, secretary general of Qianai and one of the co-founders, was still working in a brand planning company, and was invited by the government to plan activities with the founder of the outdoor activity forum mill network to attract people to travel to the new district.
Several people, including Wang Xiaoyong, happen to be divers, thinking that since Dapeng New Area is also a tropical climate, why not go into the water to do a theme trip such as coral observation? They went into the water and did some simple investigations, only to find that the corals in the sea were severely damaged. After going ashore, everyone came up with the idea that coral conservation was more urgent than coral sightseeing.
In 2014, with the support of the government, several promoters who had never done public welfare came together to form the Dapeng New Area Coral Conservation Voluntary Federation. Since its establishment 8 years ago, Qianai has gathered nearly 4,000 volunteers, planted more than 6,000 corals and rescued more than 300 coral stump trees on the Dapeng Peninsula, and is active in the practical action of coral conservation as a grassroots organization.
Cheng Keke was shocked by the work done by Qianai. She started her coral survey in the lab, which has been conducted by thousands of volunteers for years. In addition, there are regular activities to pick up marine debris, and the friends who preached during the visit told her that the volunteers of the dive love salvaged a ton of marine debris from the bottom of the sea in just 20 working days in the form of a "morning diving marathon".
She immediately decided to join Love Love, "I also want to do something meaningful with them."
Coral conservation is not easy, and the first step to becoming a volunteer who can work in the sea is to certify. Cheng Keke took three days to obtain an OW diving certificate and become a junior open water diver. But that's only the minimum entry threshold, and more people in the volunteer team have AOW (Advanced Open Water Diver) or DM (Divemaster) certification. To become a mature diver, Cheng Keke still has a long practical road to go.
Somewhat afraid of water, she encountered danger twice while working on the seabed. Once because of seasickness, her companions advised her not to stay on the boat, and her symptoms would be relieved in the water. She endured the dizziness and went down to the bottom of the sea, but her symptoms worsened. The feeling of nausea came up, and she kept vomiting while biting the secondary head used for breathing, and the salty taste of the sea water would enter her mouth from time to time. After twenty minutes at the bottom of the sea, she still did not carry it, climbed into the boat, and after that, she always had seasickness medicine when she went out to sea.
▲ Volunteers in the water. Figure / Courtesy of respondents
Another time, not long after Cheng Keke got his diving license, when he went down to ten meters, his body did not float like before, but sank to the bottom, stretched out his hand, and only touched a sticky silt. Even if you hold up a flashlight, you can't see anything. She thought she had touched some unknown creature, and instantly panicked. She groped in the mud for two minutes, but fortunately, her partner was experienced, and she was about to be pulled out.
Diving into the deep sea is dangerous every time, and the seemingly ambitious coral conservation program is ultimately just a matter of volunteers going into the sea again and again to do small things. Cheng Keke participates in the diving activities organized by Diving Love every weekend, and volunteers usually go out to sea in the morning, go into the water in groups of two, explore the 133-kilometer coastline along the Dapeng Peninsula, take a large number of coral photos on the bottom of the sea, and finally present a coral reef ecological report. This is a coral survey.
Other times they do marine litter removal, which is known as habitat maintenance in latent love. Volunteers walked from the shore to the sea and dived into the sea from different directions, with garbage everywhere they looked. Cheng Keke has seen strange marine debris at the bottom of the sea, old mobile phones, mahjong, fishing hooks, and countless plastic bags and fishing nets. She wrapped the garbage in a bag and finally fished it ashore together.
In addition to harming the marine environment, marine litter can also have irreversible effects on corals. If coral bleaching can be attributed to some extent to climatic causes, fishing nets are purely man-made. When fishing nets cover corals like linen covers, blocking sunlight, zooxanthellae, which supply energy to corals, cannot photosynthesize and "have no way to breathe." Rough fishing nets constantly wear down coral branches, just as human fingers are cut by knives, and pathogenic bacteria can also take the opportunity to enter coral tissue. At first, the corals only looked white to the naked eye, but over time, the departure of zooxanthellae and the attachment of other macroalgae made the corals wrapped like cobwebs, "at this time, the corals are equivalent to completely dead", and there is no possibility to save them.
Therefore, whenever they encounter coral entangled in fishing nets while working on the seabed, Cheng Keke and other diver volunteers will use the special diving knives they carry with them to cut the nets and take them away in time. After returning to the same place after a while, you will find that the white spots on the surface of the coral have disappeared and it has returned to normal growth.
The inseparable symbiotic relationship between corals and zooxanthellae, the fragile vitality, and the strong self-healing ability all made Cheng Keke surprised this species. Mystery is their greatest charm. In the lab, she has become more adept at coral research, using plate separation to give coral microbes a monoclonal form on the medium—they usually appear in milky white circles, with occasional purple and black colonies. The microbial diversity contained in this small creature is much richer than the forest system she studied before, and it is more like a black box full of unknowns.
As the largest coral in the coelenteral phylum, there are more than 7,000 types of corals, even core volunteers like Cheng Keke can not identify a wide variety of corals, and it is difficult to distinguish the small differences between different coral species with the naked eye. The most common antlered coral in the waters of Shenzhen alone contains 382 specified species and 34 fossil species, and it is almost impossible to identify them by man.
▲ Figure / provided by interviewee
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Species identification is not Cheng's problem alone. As a non-governmental organization, the bottom-up force can always bring volunteers together to work together, but at the same time, the technical threshold also makes coral conservation naturally have technical barriers.
Of the nearly 4,000 volunteers, one-third dive and photograph, but very few have species identification skills. The inability to "identify" corals is like "traveling to ancient sites, if you don't know its history, you will see mountains and buildings; But if you know history, you see art and stories."
Coral identification is very important for coral surveys, and volunteers take photos of corals underwater meter by meter, meter by meter, so as to make coral ecological reports in the area and promote the government's decision-making on ecological protection. For a long time, this kind of work could only be done by volunteers with identification capabilities, "one person in the water, one person work", the process is time-consuming and laborious.
In 2021, just when species identification became a common problem for the team, the promotion and application of AI recognition technology broke this technical barrier, and with the help of Tencent Public Welfare, Qianai has completed the recruitment of developers for AI recognition programs. Wang Xiaoyong compared that this is like a flower recognition APP that identifies flowers and plants, and the coral photos taken at the bottom of the sea can be directly handed over to the computer for identification, which greatly reduces the workload of volunteers.
After a period of machine learning, the computer has initially had the ability to identify individual antler corals, cross peony corals and other corals with obvious indications. Wang Xiaoyong said that the advantage of this technology is that "the volunteers are liberated, and after AI recognition for species screening, we only need to check, which allows everyone to participate in the project, otherwise the threshold is too high."
In costly public welfare initiatives, financial support is just as important as technology. In 2017, after a sperm whale ran aground in Daya Bay due to entanglement of fishing nets, volunteers went to sea to remove fishing nets and salvage corpses, realized the serious harm of marine debris such as fishing nets to the ecological environment, and immediately applied for the launch of the project "Seabed Clean Waste Net Weaving" on Tencent's public welfare platform. In Wang Xiaoyong's view, this can be regarded as a "marriage union" between the latent love team and Tencent.
Since 2017, the fundraising projects on Tencent's charity platform have been pushed on the homepage many times and have received financial support from all walks of life.
In addition, the venture capital program initiated by the Tencent Charity Foundation is also importing technical resources for charity teams like Qianai to help non-profit organizations better provide public services and serve the society. On November 20, the 4th Tencent AND Service Innovation Conference ended in Shenzhen, where the second phase of Tencent's Technology Philanthropy Venture Capital Program was officially launched, and 30 outstanding projects will be selected from the charity team for incubation.
A few years ago, when exploring projects such as snow leopard protection and bird protection, Tencent discovered that species identification technology could actually be reused in other species protection work. 30 project managers, including Wang Xiaoyong, will form a community to share technology within the same type of community to promote the sharing of ideas, technology and experience.
Chen Yan, founder of Tencent Technology Philanthropy, believes that "helping to make the life cycle of charity projects more robust through my own experience, allowing more people to participate in them, and connecting people with ability, resources and services is the core value of Tencent." ”
Since its establishment, Qianai has been seeking the direction of digital development. This is somewhat influenced by the promoters. While one director worked as a website developer, Wang Xiaoyong was good at sharing pictures through online platforms. Building an information platform is important for any expanding organization.
The "iHidden Love" WeChat mini program, promoted by Tencent Venture Capital's plan, provides more people with the opportunity to register as volunteers and sign up to participate in reef protection operations. After Cheng Keke joined Qianai, she found that the volunteers had different occupations and ages, ranging from the financial industry to the Internet, from the post-90s generation who were similar to her age, and middle-aged people who were close to retirement. Everyone gathered here because of their common hobby and passion, and when she had just learned to dive before she could balance well, a partner inflated her buoyancy adjustment device underwater and corrected her movements and postures little by little. In Cheng's view, "this relationship is much better than that of friends or colleagues at work."
▲ Love volunteers. Figure / Courtesy of respondents
Dive love has a slogan: "Plant coral, plant people's hearts." Today, the meaning of coral planting is richer, and it has been expanded to the concept of "diving into the reef". After each typhoon or rainy day, volunteers go to the bottom of the sea to pick up coral residues that have been interrupted by wind and waves, fishing nets or anchored boats, put them in nurseries for a period of time to recover, and then reseed them to the reef, which is called "coral reseeding". Salvaging marine litter, recycling waste nets and weaving them belong to "habitat maintenance", and focused coral surveys are similar to "censuses", and only by investing a lot of manpower in field investigations can people's understanding of corals go one step further.
Planting the human heart is actually part of nature education. The growth rate of corals is too slow, staghorn corals belong to the faster growth group in corals, taking frost antler corals as an example, their annual growth rate is 2-3 cm, ten years later, in the case of climate can only grow 20-30 cm, become a member of the marine ecology. Where is it enough to sow a little coral by artificially?
Wang Xiaoyong asked rhetorically: "If we really do a good job of public education, the public no longer takes tourist boats to catch nets, and goes to the beach to make less plastic bottles and cans of garbage, will the ocean become a little better?" "Public-facing marine education can start with even the smallest questions," a person asked him, are corals animals or plants? Maybe someone will say it's plants."
Or, perhaps, it's not simply a question of plant or animal, it's about perception. Cheng Keke also had an intuitive feeling of the animal attributes of corals only after doing experiments. In the lab, whenever the ambient temperature isn't comfortable or exposed to unfavorable chemicals, the coral will start spitting white slime, which is its "stress response" and envelops itself like a protective layer. In the sea, the sunscreen and cosmetics worn by humans when participating in sea-related activities will always put corals in a state of stimulation and stress, affecting the normal survival of corals.
In the face of such fragile creatures, Cheng Keke always has a sense of responsibility to care for the growth of seedlings. After another typhoon, volunteers re-tied small coral stump branches that had been scraped off to the nursery. When she looked back every two or three months, the coral, which was once the size of a button, now had obvious bones, and the growing end continued to grow larger little by little.
It may take a year or two to see what the corals really look like. But what does it matter if you spend more time? "At this time, I feel like I can really save them," she said. "Such a small achievement may be enough.
▲ Plant corals on nurseries. Figure / Courtesy of respondents
The article is original by Daily People, and infringement must be investigated.