The National Museum of Marine Biology and Aquarium is pleased with the development of its coral breeding program, as its corals spawned simultaneously with wild corals off the coast of Pingtung County’s Kenting Township (墾丁) on Friday last week.
The spawning proved that the corals are thriving, despite several powerful cold fronts earlier this year, which experts had feared would disrupt the captive corals’ reproductive cycle, and validates the breeding program’s methodology, museum researchers said.
The coral reef research section has raised captive corals and monitored their spawning for many years. Divers previously had to be deployed to observe coral spawning, but sensors installed in the museum’s seaside coral reef farms enable remote research into coral reproduction.
Photo courtesy of the National Museum of Marine Biology and Aquarium
Corals spawn annually in the evening on several precisely scheduled dates, such as Friday, which was the 29th evening of the third month on the lunar calendar.
In terms of the volume of eggs and number of coral species involved, Friday’s spawning was most scientifically significant, the research section said.
The timing of the captive corals spawning was “in perfect sync” with the wild corals in the seas off Kenting, and according to instrument readings, the density of coral eggs in the water was “virtually identical” with that of wild corals, the research section said.
“It was as if each polyp carried a digital watch in its body,” one researcher said.
Coral reefs are the most biologically diverse environment on Earth, and corals are highly sensitive to water quality and temperature, much like the species that depend on them for survival, the research section said.
Corals thrive in marine environments with a low density of nutrient salts, and the artificial lights used in observations must be precisely calibrated for strength and wavelengths before being deployed, according to the research section.
The average size of the eggs spawned on Friday was about 400 micrometers in diameter, and the museum extracted samples and freeze-preserved them for the research and preservation of coral species’ genetic material, the coral reef research section said.
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