Why Dam Removal Is a Climate Solution

By providing both mitigation and adaption, dam removal can lower greenhouse gas emissions and restore carbon sinks.

As the climate crisis escalates, a huge amount of attention and money is being focused on climate solutions. These can be divided into two categories: solutions that pursue “mitigation,” which lowers greenhouse gas emissions, and those that pursue methods to adapt to climate impacts to increase human and ecological resiliency.

Dams, of course, create enormous environmental harms, many of which have already been described in scientific literature. Equally well documented is the fact that removing dams can restore seriously damaged ecosystems. But missing from almost every climate-solution story and study is how dam removal can be key for both mitigation and adaptation.

Here are 10 reasons why dam removal fights climate change:

1. Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Dam removal reduces greenhouse gas emissions, especially methane. An increasing amount of scientific evidence, including from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, indicates that dam/reservoir systems can be a significant methane emitter. In some cases, hydropower dam projects can emit as much total greenhouse gases as a coal-fired powerplant.

2. Natural Flows

Dam removal allows rivers to meander through their historic valleys, plains and forests. In so doing, rivers transport surrounding organic material, such as decomposed plants and soil, to sea. Once there, much of the material sinks to the bottom of the ocean, where it’s transformed and locked into rock formations. These river plumes, which can extend for miles into the ocean, are carbon sinks.

3. Carbon Sinks

Dam removal allows landscapes that have been flooded to regrow their native vegetation: also carbon sinks. In the United States alone, the largest 150 reservoirs submerge over seven million acres of land. In the Canadian province of Quebec, over 6 million acres of previously forested land is covered by reservoirs. Globally, there are likely over 100 million acres of land flooded by reservoirs.

Alewives returned by the millions after the Edwards and Ft. Halifax dams were removed in Maine. (Photo by John Burrows/ASF)

4. Biodiversity

One of most detrimental ecological impacts of climate change is the diminishment of biodiversity. The construction of dams and reservoirs exacerbate this loss of biodiversity by flooding riverine ecosystems that are biodiversity hotspots. Dam removal restores native biodiversity, a key climate adaptation strategy.

5. Forests

Healthy forests — especially old-growth forests — are key carbon sinks in many ecosystems of the world including the Pacific Northwest. Dam removal that restores the migration of anadromous fish, such as wild salmon, are key fertilizers for healthy forests as the fish swim upstream and die, replenishing the soil and ecosystem.

6. Sediment Transport

Climate change is causing rising sea levels that batter coasts and deplete beaches in California and across the planet. Dams block natural sediment from flowing to the sea; dam removal will allow sediment to reach estuaries and coasts where it can help provide the material to rebuild beaches. Sediment in river deltas can also help protect against salt-water encroachment, worsened by rising seas, in places like the Mississippi River Delta.

7. Fish Populations

In parts of the United States and elsewhere, dams have decimated fish populations that are a principle food source for local and Native peoples. Dam removal allows fish to naturally spawn, reproduce, and migrate along vast stretches of rivers. As climate change intensifies, freshwater river fish are increasingly important as a human food source.

Lake Mead water line — Falling levels visible in Lake Mead on the Colorado River. (Photo by Harshil Shah, CC BY-ND 2.0)

8. Water Supply

Reservoirs, large and small, allow vast amounts of water to evaporate off their surfaces, and this problem gets worse as temperatures rise. As just one example, in the drought- and overuse-plagued Colorado River in the southwest, it’s estimated that 10% of the entire flow of the river evaporates every year. Removing dams and storing water in underground aquifers makes water supplies more resilient in a warming world.

9. Climate Resilience

Climate change is intensifying extreme weather including rainfall, floods and melting glaciers. Most dams, large and small, were constructed to withstand a range of weather events that may no longer be the norm. Further, dams need an increasing amount of maintenance and repairs to withstand extreme floods. Recent massive floods in Libya and India that have caused large-scale dam collapses suggest that dam removal can increase the health and safety of downstream human settlements in the path of climate change.

10. Cooling Effect

As climate change causes the planet to warm, heat waves — especially in urban areas — cause heat stress and deaths. Not only do healthy flowing rivers provide a cooling effect to surrounding urban heat islands, but people increasingly use local rivers to stay cool on hot days. Dam removal ensures that rivers flow and stay cooler, cleaner, and healthier in a climate-changed world.

With more than 91,000 dams in the United States, it’s important to evaluate them all for removal as potential climate solutions. In many cases both mitigation and adaptation can be achieved in one single dam removal event. Few other climate solution projects of this breadth and magnitude exist.

While most other climate solutions involve building some type of structure or facility as a technical solution, dam removal involves tearing a structure down and letting natural ecological processes be restored. Such “nature-based solutions” that decrease the number of dams blocking rivers must be considered in the vast mix responses to the escalating climate crisis.

The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.

Previously in The Revelator:

Dam Accounting: Taking Stock of Methane Emissions From Reservoirs

How Low-Income Families Can Reap Rewards From Solar Energy

For families who can’t pay high upfront costs for solar energy, cooperatives offer a solution.

Rooftop solar has long been the preserve of the affluent. Solar adopters skew white and wealthy compared to the broader public, according to a report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The number of households installing solar across the country could be much higher, but millions of low-income homeowners don’t have enough capital to pay the upfront costs. While the price tag varies depending on location, incentives, and the type of solar panels, a typical 7-kilowatt rooftop solar system can cost between $17,400 and $24,000.

It can take many years to break even on that hefty investment, but since panels typically last for at least two decades and their costs are falling rapidly, homeowners can save thousands of dollars on their energy bills — if they can find that initial capital.

For those who can’t, there are some emerging alternatives. A growing movement of solar cooperatives is helping low-income households access those financial benefits, while decarbonizing the power sector.

Solar co-ops are groups of property owners who band together to build small solar projects for their communities. “It’s like putting panels on your own roof, except you put them somewhere else with a bunch of other people,” Dan Orzech, general manager at the Oregon Clean Power Cooperative, tells The Revelator.

Once installed, the electricity produced by the panels is injected into the grid and utilities pay for that power using a system called “net metering” that allows co-op members to slash their energy bills. Solar co-ops members own the solar arrays and can therefore take full advantage of federal and state incentives.

Building a solar co-op can be a daunting process that is often facilitated by organizations like Orzech’s and others including Co-op Power and the People’s Solar Energy Fund, to name a few.

One of the largest solar co-op organizers is Solar United Neighbors, which has helped 8,400 people across the United States install over 70 megawatts of solar capacity since 2007.

Solar doesn’t just come in handy during storms! We’ve seen how power can go out during extreme heatwaves, which is why a reliable resource like solar is especially important in hotter parts of the country! https://t.co/OMFhZODshK

— Solar United Neighbors (@SolarNeighbors) August 3, 2023

The nonprofit is seeing increased interest in solar co-ops because people want to lower their energy bills and “they’re concerned about the climate and the legacy they’re going to leave to their children and grandchildren,” says communications director Ben Delman.

But that’s not all. “Some people are also worried about the micro impacts of climate change, like what happens when a hurricane hits and the power goes out,” he says. “We’re seeing a lot of interest in Florida, because you can pair solar with batteries and keep the lights going when there is a blackout.”

Different Approaches

Solar co-op organizers follow different models, but they typically get a few dozen families together and help them negotiate a contract with solar installers that often offer bulk discounts. They also advise them on federal tax credits, as well as state and county-level solar incentives, and help them secure loans, grants, and other forms of funding from local governments and investors.

They also try to ensure that low- and middle-income families can gain access to solar energy. To that end, Cooperative Energy Futures in Minnesota doesn’t require credit checks or income verification “because that’s a barrier preventing a lot of low-income households to participate,” says Timothy DenHerder-Thomas, the organization’s general manager.

Their approach seems to be working: Between 38% and 50% of the approximately 700 people who subscribe to their solar projects are economically disadvantaged.

“Paying $25 or $30 less in your energy bill every month may not sound like much, but it’s money that you can use for groceries or medications,” he says. “It helps people who are struggling to make ends meet.”

The benefits spill over to nonmembers, too. For example, Cooperative Energy Futures tries to hire minority-owned companies to install solar panels. “There are also subcontractors and workforce development partners who are providing employment for Black and Brown workers,” DenHerder-Thomas adds.

Oregon Clean Power Cooperative follows a different approach based on community-based stock offerings that typically allow people who “want to see their money do something positive for the community” to invest around $7,000, Orzech says. The organization combines these investments with grants, tax credits, and donations to finance community solar and co-ops. Community solar projects are small solar farms owned by a third party and tend to offer fewer economic benefits but be ideal for renters.

The cooperative is now working on a solar project consisting of a 75 kW solar and battery system that will cut the power costs of low-income groups in the city of Talent, which was partially destroyed by the 2020 Almeda wildfire.

“This will allow them to lower their power bills by between 50% and 75%, but they will also be having some, albeit small, positive impact on the planet as a whole,” says Orzech. “I think it really gives people a new sense of power.”

The organization has also helped churches, libraries, schools, and at least one farm finance and develop solar projects. Its Oregon Shakespeare Festival Community Solar project was selected as a Sunny Awards winner by the U.S. Department of Energy for its efforts to increase access to clean energy among disadvantaged communities.

Ultimately solar co-ops could potentially help lower electricity prices for everyone because they tend to be in urban areas and don’t require expensive transmission infrastructure to distribute their power, says Crystal Huang, the cofounder of Oakland-based People Power Solar Cooperative.

The organization argues that the current system, under which utilities produce power and distribute it to households hundreds of miles away for a fee, is “inefficient, overpriced and unreliable” and has a huge environmental impact.

Instead, the People Power Solar Cooperative envisions using solar co-ops to create a not-for-profit decentralized energy system.

“Our relationship with energy doesn’t have to be just as consumers,” says Huang. “We can be part of cooperatives that own the energy and completely redesign what the energy system looks like.”

Boosting Efforts

Stakeholders say demand for solar co-ops is increasing rapidly, in large part thanks to efforts by the Biden administration to boost community solar generation from 3 gigawatts in 2020 to 20 gigawatts in 2025 and provide clean energy to five million families. This goal is part of the Justice40 Initiative, which seeks to ensure that disadvantaged communities receive 40% of the overall benefits of climate and clean energy investments.

Brown stucco house with rooftop solar panels — Rooftop solar in California. Photo: Thomas Hart, (CC BY-NC 2.0)

In addition, the Inflation Reduction Act passed last year provides community solar projects with a 30% tax credit and bonus benefits for projects based in low-income communities or Tribal lands.

“The Inflation Reduction Act is a game changer for solar in the United States,” says Orzech. “Before we had to find tax equity investors and sign Power Purchase Agreements. The same model that large solar investors were using but downsized to a community level. It was a lot of work, but this legislation makes it simpler to leverage tax benefits for community solar.”

Growing Threats

States like New York, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Illinois are also helping solar co-ops, thanks to net-metering rules that pay a fair price for surplus power generated by solar projects that gets put back into the grid, stakeholders say.

“You basically get a one-to-one credit. The value of one electron is equal to what utilities compensate producers for,” says Delman. “But some utilities are essentially monopolies. They don’t like competition from rooftop solar.”

That’s what’s happening in California, where investor-owned utilities recently lowered the price they pay for the solar power that residential solar projects inject into the grid by around 75% and introduced a monthly charge for rooftop solar owners. The discounted rate will only apply to future projects.

The changes effectively slash the incentives that drive solar growth and will likely put solar power out of reach for low-income people in the Golden State, Huang says.

“Utilities are stopping community solar, or local solar as a whole, because it threatens their very lucrative business model. It threatens their existence,” she says.

California isn’t alone. Scores of other states are reviewing their net-metering policies or adding charges and fees that effectively undermine the economic benefits of residential solar, and by extension solar co-ops.

The Carolinas, Indiana, Michigan, Arizona, Utah, and Louisiana have implemented these types of policies, while Arkansas, Idaho, Virginia, and Washington state are considering similar measures, says Autumn Proudlove, associate director for policy and markets at the North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center.

“I think ultimately residential solar isn’t going to stop growing, especially with these incentives from the federal government, but these state policies are eroding the value to customers in the compensation that they receive,” she says. “It makes solar less accessible for low-income communities because it’s not as valuable under these new structures unless you add battery storage to your system.”

Luckily the costs of battery storage are also decreasing, thanks in part to tax benefits in the Inflation Reduction Act, while states such as Illinois, New Hampshire, and Maryland offer additional incentives.

As a result, residents and co-ops are both more likely to install batteries to use all the power produced by their panels, instead of injecting it into the grid at a discount.

“That’s my prediction,” says Orzech. “But let’s see what happens.”

Previously in The Revelator:

Solar Sovereignty: The Promise of Native-Led Renewables

‘Like a Dead Zone’: Undoing Decades of Environmental Harm on a California River

A major restoration effort by a coalition of Tribes and government agencies could help imperiled fish and other animals on the Trinity River.

In late September 2023, a one-mile stretch of the Trinity River in northern California looks and sounds like a construction site. Large yellow machines crawl across bare ground, the steady growl punctuated with warning beeps. Behind pyramids of stockpiled materials — mulch, gravel, logs — the river flows serenely.

Aldaron McCovey manipulates his excavator, using the back of the bucket to deftly smooth out fine material on a bare new bank.

“It was a little overcut, so we’re filling it in so that there’s no standing water,” he explains.

A fisheries restoration technician for the Yurok Tribe, McCovey is working on an ambitious restoration project called Oregon Gulch, just east of Junction City, Calif. Here, crews from the Yurok Tribe Construction Company are rerouting a straightened stretch of the Trinity River into a newly sculpted meander to help restore the river’s form and function.

Getting to a clean slate required moving mountains of cobbles and gravel — the legacy of 20th-century dredge mining. Seventy years ago, monstrous machines chewed through river and valley, funneling rocks, mud, sand and water into a sluice, extracting the gold and dumping the spoils behind in pile after pile after pile.

“This time last year we’d be standing on 30 feet of tailings,” says McCovey. “It was like a dead zone.”

In August 2022, a procession of trucks began transferring the tailings to a quarry half a mile down the road. In total, they have removed 580,000 cubic yards of material from the site — a staggering 30,000 truckloads.

Aerial view of river with tailings piles — Prior to restoration, the Trinity River at Oregon Gulch ran in a straight line and mountains of mining tailings blockaded the bank. Photo: Aaron Martin, Yurok Tribal Fisheries Department

Now large machines are once again moving through the valley, this time with the aim of creating floodplain habitat that will sustain young salmon before they migrate to the ocean.

“We have this nice meander, some deep holes and some off-channel habitat,” says McCovey. “I think it’s going to be great for fish.”

The project is part of the Trinity River Restoration Program, a long-term collaborative effort involving the Yurok Tribe, Hoopa Valley Tribe, and state and federal agencies to restore 40 miles of the Trinity River below Lewiston Dam. Oregon Gulch is the partners’ 40th project; it’s also the largest, and the first to take on the legacy of dredge mining at such a scale.

A River Turned Upside Down

The Trinity River originates in the granite Trinity Alps, flowing 165 miles before joining the Klamath River in Weitchpec, Calif. For thousands of years Indigenous peoples — ancestors of today’s Hoopa River and Yurok Tribes — fished the river.

Gold seekers first arrived in 1848; before long, they had set up mining operations on every bar of the river, using water wheels, diversion dams, water cannons and finally, large dredges to extract every ounce of precious metal.

The massive floating platforms worked the Trinity and its larger tributaries, chewing through valley bottoms down to bedrock. The operation literally turned rivers upside down, and while much of the sediment washed downstream, some of the finer material lay trapped underneath gravel and larger cobbles.

In 1955 mining was supplanted with another catastrophe when Congress concluded that excess water in the Trinity River that was “wasting to the Pacific Ocean” could be diverted to the Central Valley “without detrimental effect to the fishery resources.” By 1963 two dams had been built and the Trinity River Diversion began transferring water to the Sacramento River watershed.

The dams blocked over 100 miles of habitat for salmon and steelhead, and in the early years, 90% of the water impounded by the dams was diverted to the Central Valley Project. What little water was sent downstream was artificially managed. Flows flatlined, and the river no longer ebbed and flowed with the seasons and storms.

Chinook and coho salmon and steelhead plummeted. As the consequences of the diversions, compounded by mining and logging, became clear, the Department of Interior began amending its management strategy, and in 2000, the agency called for the restoration of Trinity River anadromous fish populations. The Trinity River Restoration Program was set up to carry out the directive by actively restoring the 40 miles below Lewiston dam and managing the timing and volume of water released from upstream.

Letting the River Decide

The Yurok Tribe has been implementing those restoration projects for years; in 2020, the Yurok Tribe Construction Company officially formed as a separate entity. The company occupies a specialized niche, with operators like McCovey who have years of experience operating heavy equipment specifically for restoration work.

Man stand on an excavator on sand next to river — Heavy equipment operator and Yurok Tribal member Aldaron McCovey has been involved in restoration work since 2009. Photo: Juliet Grable

To help fund the $12.5 million project, the Yurok Tribe captured a $4 million grant from the state of California. The Tribe also led the design, though, like all of the program’s projects, all of the partners were involved.

The most engineered aspect of the project is a constructed landslide, called the “plug,” designed to prevent the river from routing back into the straight channel.

“The bulk of cost was material moving,” says Chris Laskodi, fish ecologist for the program. “It’s one of our simplest designs because we’re basically telling the river to do what it wants to do.”

A newly created floodplain is designed to sit just above the river level.

“That’s the exciting part,” says Wes Scribner, executive director of the Yurok Tribe Construction Company. “Any time you have increased flows, it will basically turn into a lake.”

The inundated valley will host an abundance of aquatic insects — a banquet for young Chinook salmon to feast on before heading out to the ocean. An area like this will also be warmer in spring, an ideal nursery when the mainstem of the river is still frigid from snowmelt.

Eventually the river will find its own route, depositing trees, brush and rock along the way.

The partners have seen a four-fold increase in juvenile salmon on the 40-mile “restoration reach” since 2005, but this hasn’t translated into an increase in adults returning to spawn just yet. Poor ocean conditions, prolonged drought and perennial water-quality issues on the Klamath River have taken a grim toll. Last spring, in anticipation of woeful returns of adult salmon to California’s rivers, the state canceled commercial and recreational Chinook salmon fishing for the year.

There is hope: By the end of 2024, four dams on the Klamath River will be completely removed. This monumental act of restoration should help improve water quality and hopefully reduce fish diseases, eventually translating into more fish on both the mainstem and tributaries like the Trinity. In the meantime, project partners on the Trinity are using adaptive management to improve their projects, such as making sure floodplains are low enough to be regularly inundated.

They’re making other tweaks, too, like ensuring that the floodplain banquet is available when young fish need it most. Today the Trinity River is allotted about half of the water that’s captured by the dams, and springtime flows are managed to mimic surges from storms and snowmelt.

In 2023, for the first time, the partners increased flows earlier, from February to April. Though it’s hard to draw solid conclusions from a single year, the partners observed that the inundated floodplains grew more fish food and increased the physical space where young fish can be. Fish also grew measurably larger.

This timing is critical.

“We need to start using the water [we have allotted to us] earlier in the year,” says Mike Dixon, executive director of the Trinity River Restoration Program. “In any given year, 60 to 80% of Chinook have left the reach once we start putting water onto floodplain habitat we’ve created.”

The Hoopa Tribe has opposed the winter flows out of concern that the practice won’t leave enough water to keep the river from becoming lethally warm in summer. The Trinity Management Council voted against implementing variable flows this coming winter. However, new biological opinions for both the Central Valley Project and for the operation of the Trinity River dams are being developed, which could impact both the timing and volume of water the restoration partners have to work with.

“The trend has been to send more and more water down the Trinity River,” says Laskodi. “This will hopefully be the next step towards a better fishery.”

Green and Fuzzy

For half a century, the flows in the Trinity River were essentially flatlined. This meant that narrow-leaf willows, which grow closest to the riverbank, were not subjected to regular scouring. The willows grew in thickly, outcompeting other plants and creating narrow berms that prevented the river from spreading out into its floodplain.

Person holds seeds in hand over bucket — Native seed mixes are carefully prepared so that a crew from the Hoopa Valley Tribe can revegetate the site. Photo: Juliet Grable

During construction, a crew from the Hoopa Valley Tribe began planting clusters of willow stakes and cottonwood trees, which readily take root, in the bare banks. They are using several different native species, since each thrives at slightly different elevations above the river.

On October 15 when the dumping, spreading and scraping of material ceased, the crew began the quiet work of seeding and planting the raw banks and floodplain. The Tribe has been vegetating the program’s restoration projects since 2015. Under the direction of riparian ecologist Veronica Yates, they are working with 45 native species, planting shrubs and trees and using seed mixes tailored for each location. The vegetation will help support a variety of birds and wildlife while reducing erosion.

Over much of the site, they’re planting in a layer of fine material mixed with fragrant wood chips — a “luxury” compared to the substrate they usually work with, says Yates. The fine material was recovered from the tailing piles; the chips from fire-killed trees processed by the California Department of Transportation.

“Next spring we’ll come back and it will be all green and fuzzy,” says Scribner. “That’s the neat thing about our projects; over time, it’s getting harder and harder to tell what it used to look like.”

Previously in The Revelator:

A Lifeline for Winter-Run Chinook

We’re Taking a Break

…but we’ll be back soon, rested and ready to take on the biggest environmental and conservation challenges of the day.

“Keep close to Nature’s heart…and break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.” —John Muir

I don’t remember where I first came across that quote, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately ever since I re-encountered it a few weeks ago — scribbled in a reporter’s notebook, buried beneath strata of ancient papers on my desk.

Those papers have now been cleaned up, and it’s time to wash my spirit clean too. Next week The Revelator goes on a short break. We’ll start publishing again in mid-December.

We’ve spent the past few months quietly planning this sabbatical, with the understanding that 2024 will be an eventful year for democracy and the planet. But you don’t need me to tell you this; just look at what we’ve already experienced in 2023. Expect more of that, with a force multiplier (or three) thrown in for good measure.

We’re going to have to work all the harder to find effective solutions, have critical conversations, promote the wonder of life on Earth, and support each other.

Look for us again in December. We already have a lot of great stories and commentaries in the works, so make sure you don’t miss any of them: Sign up for our newsletter, which will let you know the latest headlines as soon as we start publishing again.

You can also follow us on social media (Facebook and Twitter/X, with potentially more platforms to come), where we’ll keep promoting our archival stories over the next few months.

And if you can take your own opportunities to journey into the woods or mountains, well, maybe we’ll all be a bit stronger for it.

“The environment we create will determine what prevails. In other words, what we nurture and encourage wins.” —Jane Goodall

What Can We Learn From Jaguar Poop? A Lot

Molecular and isotope analysis of scat can help researchers study elusive wild cats without disturbing, capturing or handling them.

Poop is fertile ground for research.

Scientists have found that analyzing the DNA of a predator’s scat, for example, can reveal the kind of prey they’re eating. And that’s not all. “Fecal samples are commonly used for disease and hormone studies, which reveal information on animal health, reproductive status, stress levels, and other physiological processes,” says Claudia Wultsch, a wildlife biologist at the American Museum of Natural History.

Wultsch has used these methods for years to better understand jaguars (Panthera onca) in Belize, which is an important stronghold for the wild cats in Central America. But a recent collaboration with Brooke Crowley, a professor of geosciences at the University of Cincinnati who specializes in stable isotope biogeochemistry, has provided even more insight.

What they learned was important — but even more important was how they did it.

Hands-Off Methods

Jaguars have suffered from a depletion of prey, habitat loss and fragmentation, and conflict with people. The cats are now listed as near threatened by the IUCN and have disappeared from parts of their historic range, which stretched from South America to the United States, where they have been largely extirpated.

Belize may play a key role in restoring those populations. “Belize is part of the Mesoamerican Corridor Initiative, which aims to conserve jaguars and maintain connectivity between different jaguar populations,” says Wultsch.

But studying the elusive animals there isn’t exactly easy. Some scientists have turned to radio or GPS collars to track jaguar movement, but capturing and tranquilizing wild animals to attach a collar can stress them severely.

Jaguar face up close and cut off on the lower part. — A jaguar caught on a camera trap in Belize. Photo: jmeerman, (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Wultsch’s work there, which began more than a decade ago, took a different tack. With the aid of a conservation detector dog, she gathered fecal samples across several protected areas to learn more about the genetic diversity and connectivity of the country’s jaguars.

“Our research methods provide insights into their space use, and also provide information on how much and if they use anthropogenic resources in some areas,” she says.

A few years ago she teamed up with Crowley to include isotope analysis. Examining the values of carbon, nitrogen and strontium in scat samples, they hoped, could help reveal where an animal’s prey spent their time and therefore where the predators had foraged. That information could guide conservation initiatives.

In a recent study, published in July in the European Journal of Wildlife Research, they collected 80 jaguar scats, most of which belonged to four males, to help determine where the animals ranged. Unlike radio or GPS collars, all of their methods were noninvasive.

“We used fecal samples combined with genetic and isotope analysis to learn more about the spatial ecology of several free-ranging jaguars without ever disturbing, capturing or handling the animals,” explains Wultsch. “Spatial ecology studies based on noninvasive data such as fecal samples are rare, and we hope that our study will encourage more researchers to apply these techniques together.”

The research focused on the Mountain Pine Ridge Reserve in the Maya Mountains. “I wanted to see if the jaguars regularly utilized adjacent protected areas in Central Belize, and I also wanted to determine if they regularly hunt in agricultural areas to the west of the reserve,” says Crowley.

Analyzing the DNA of poop, also known as molecular scatology, doesn’t provide as much spatial detail as GPS collars, but it does provide genetic and health information. Adding isotopic analysis is also a key complement.

“It can extend the spatial information provided by the location and genetic composition of a specific scat by clarifying where the individual that produced the scat consumed its meal — for example, [whether it was] within or beyond the bounds of a particular geographic area with a specific set of habitats or geologies,” she says.

Looking at carbon, nitrogen and strontium values can help researchers know what an animal’s diet consists of and even the environment where it’s foraging. The methods help the researchers “learn more about the complex feeding ecology of elusive wildlife species such as the jaguar,” says Wultsch.

Far-Ranging Findings

Their findings revealed the four male jaguars had some overlapping ranges, varying in size from about 50 to 60 miles — about three times larger than estimates from home ranges of other males in a neighboring wildlife sanctuary. But they also used areas distinct from each other. None appeared to have spent time in the western or southwestern parts of the reserve, which are areas disturbed by wildfire and military activities.

“This could mean that the effective size of Mountain Pine Ridge may be smaller than its demarcated boundaries,” says Crowley. “Data like these should help inform decisions about how to manage protected areas. I am hopeful that [it] will be useful for park managers in Belize and elsewhere in Central and South America.”

She also hopes the research contributes to broader conservation goals and efforts to better understand how people have affected rare and elusive animals like jaguars.

“Humans have done an excellent job of colonizing and modifying even the remotest regions of our planet,” says Crowley. “I think it’s our responsibility to determine if animals are able to cope with these modifications or if they’re in trouble. If they are in trouble, we need to act quickly to ensure they have a future.”

Previously in The Revelator:

7 Exciting Ways Researchers Study Elusive and Endangered Wildlife

Species Spotlight: The Chinese Three-Striped Box Turtle

Illegal wildlife trade has made these beautiful animals one of the most endangered turtle species in the world.

Species name:

Chinese three-striped box turtle (Cuora trifasciata)

Description:

Chinese three-striped box turtles are quite colorful, of relatively small size (about three-quarters the size of a football), with a yellow head and three dark stripes running the length of the shell.

Their habitats include freshwater ecosystems and surrounding tropical and subtropical forests, and they’re omnivorous, eating a variety of invertebrates, small frogs and fish, with some fruits and mushrooms.

Females usually lay 1-3 eggs per clutch and can lay 1-2 times per year.

A colorful turtle pokes its head out of the water — Photo courtesy San Diego Zoo.

Where it’s found:

Smaller creeks and river tributaries throughout more densely forested habitat on the island of Hainan, as well as Hong Kong. It is extirpated from the mainland provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Fujian.

IUCN Red List status:

Critically endangered. It is one of the most endangered turtle species in the world, according to a 2003 assessment by the IUCN, and remains listed among the Turtle Conservation Coalition’s 25 most endangered tortoises and freshwater turtles.

Major threats:

Unsustainable harvest for use in traditional folk medicines, including a Chinese medicinal dessert, has pushed this species toward extinction. The pet trade and habitat destruction are the other primary threats to the species, often a target of illicit wildlife trade.

My favorite experience:

I’m passionate about helping to combat the illegal trade in wildlife. This led to San Diego Zoo’s involvement in helping rescue confiscated wildlife, and in particular turtles. The group of turtles from the genus Cuora, which includes this turtle, are some of the most highly sought after and most frequently smuggled turtles. It has been very rewarding to be able to work with our partner agencies to help combat wildlife trafficking, in part by collaborating when confiscations occur and animals are rescued from the trade. We can place the turtles here at the San Diego Zoo or send our experienced staff to the field to help provide triage care and rehabilitate the animals.

We also conduct education and outreach to help reduce the demand for these species. We partner with the Wildlife Trafficking Alliance, are an active member of the Southern California Confiscations Network, and support other turtle conservation organizations such as the AZA-accredited Turtle Survival Alliance.

One day, if demand goes down, I hope not to have the need to help as much. Until then some of my most meaningful time caring for wildlife comes from helping animals who have been part of confiscations.

What else do we need to understand or do to protect this species?

We need more fieldwork and monitoring of remaining populations in the wild in China, along with more regional protections of habitats and long-term critical protected areas with stronger enforcement. We also need to implement best care practices for confiscated turtles and repatriation methods — plans to safely return them to the wild when possible.

Lastly, better understanding the turtle’s genetic diversity is critical for us to help zoo populations form assurance colonies. These can act as source populations for wild reintroductions — if their habitats are preserved.

Previously in The Revelator:

A Virus Wiped Out 90% of This Turtle Species. Can It Recover?

A Promise to a Utah Prairie Dog

On the 50th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act, looking back to look forward.

Excerpted with permission from the introduction to A Wild Promise: An Illustrated Celebration of The Endangered Species Act by Allen Crawford, published by Tin House.

As a child, I watched the men I loved in my family lift their high-powered rifles and shoot one prairie dog after another and another for fun, and then walk away. They called them “pop-guts.” On the way back to our camp, I stepped over their small blood-soaked, blown-apart bodies left in the matted grasses of their prairie dog town. And then, a single prairie dog raised her head out of a burrow and stood up and faced me. I froze in place, unable to avoid her gaze. She disappeared underground.

On that day, I made a vow, short of standing in front of my father’s rifle, that I would be their ally. I have tried to keep that vow.

I graduated from high school in 1973, the same year the Endangered Species Act was signed into law. At that time only 3,300 Utah prairie dogs remained in 37 isolated colonies. Due to political pressure from ranchers and developers, they were not listed on the original endangered species list. Prairie dogs were seen as vermin.

In 1977, I lobbied the Utah legislature as a graduate student in education from the University of Utah. I had created a Utah Prairie Dog curriculum for the Salt Lake City school district. At the State Capitol, I was met with incredulity and disdain by representatives who insisted on calling prairie dogs “varmints,” the Speaker of the House handed me a recipe for “Prairie Dog Stew.”

Finally in 1984, the Utah prairie dog was added to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife’s Endangered Species List and remains on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

But in 2000, in a special millennial issue of The New York Times Magazine, the Utah prairie dog was featured as one of 10 species most likely to become extinct by the next millennium. Their fate was to become a ghost species. I wrote a book on prairie dogs. Every month I sent a picture of prairie dogs in different poses (one with a helmet and bazooka) to friends at The Utah Nature Conservancy, a playful nudge for protection. Did any of these gestures make a difference? It made a difference to me. This was my wild promise that became a vow I made to the lone Utah prairie dog who survived my family’s massacre.

What is the difference between a promise and a vow? A promise is “a specific declaration or assurance that one will do a particular thing or that a particular thing will happen.” A vow is “a solemn promise” — a deepening gesture that one makes with one’s whole being. Both are nouns. But what if we see them as verbs, as actions that grows out of a commitment?

A promise becomes giving one’s word — “assuring someone that one will definitely do, give, or arrange something; undertake or declare that something will happen.” A vow is an open-ended commitment over time that moves into the realm of a sacred obligation — “dedicated to someone or something, especially a deity.” If one believes, as I do that the Divine resides in all living things, then there are many gods among us, in a myriad of shapes and sizes and forms.

What Wild Promise Will We Make?

Artist Allen Crawford has created A Wild Promise, an illustrated celebration of the Endangered Species Act, vibrant and instructive by featuring 80 vulnerable species. He is a visionary artist who not only cares about the survival and sustaining grace of the “more than human world” but has chosen to put his gifts to use with the intention of inspiring us to care more deeply and act more consciously on behalf of these vulnerable creatures.

Perhaps as you come to know their stories, and others like them, you will be moved to seek out an endangered or threatened species that lives close to you, learn their natural history and give them not only your attention, but your devotion. Or maybe you know of a species in your state or a particular ecosystem that needs federal protection. You can support a specific species campaign addressed to the Fish and Wildlife Service to nominate newly threatened plants and animals to be concerned for protection under the endangered species list.

The Endangered Species Act is an act of love that asks for our engagement, each in our own way with the gifts that are ours in the places we call home. Learn their names. Speak their names. Remember their names. Act.

Eels, Cocaine and Climate Change

Forget ‘Cocaine Bear’ and ‘Cocaine Shark.’ To really understand the environmental threat of illicit drugs, look to eels.

This summer many media outlets smelled blood in the water and went on a feeding frenzy, publishing sensationalized reports about sharks getting high on cocaine off the coast of Florida.

The story originated with a Discovery Channel “Shark Week” program, which posited that odd, manic shark behavior observed off the Florida Keys originated after the predators consumed bales of cocaine dropped in the water by smugglers.

Shark scientists quickly debunked this theory by pointing out that sharks would only be attracted to cocaine if it smelled like meat, and that cocaine has never been found in wild sharks’ systems.

Still, the damage was done: The media had drummed up one more excuse to be afraid of sharks.

But cocaine in the water — that’s something we should still be afraid of. Only it’s not coming from bales of drugs dropped from the sky. It’s coming from human urine, the same way antidepressants and other pharmaceuticals end up in our sewers and waterways.

And it’s not causing the animals who consume it to get high or stoned. New research published in the journal Fishes reveals that this human-excreted cocaine could cause a host of health problems for wildlife — and people.

Cocaine’s a Hell of a Drug

To understand this potential threat, researchers looked to the critically endangered European eel (Anguilla anguilla), a species known to science for its usefulness in studying environmental pollutants.

“Eels are excellent biomonitors,” says Anna Capaldo, a biology professor at the University of Naples Federico II and the study’s senior author. “They are very sensitive to aquatic contaminants, live in the same place for many years, and have a large percentage of fat that promotes the accumulation of many contaminants. They also represent a source of food for humans.”

European eel by Lorenz-Seebauer via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Eels regularly swim in waterways where cocaine has been detected, like the Thames River in London. Previous studies have detected the drug in eels’ systems, but Capaldo and her team wanted to find out exactly what that meant. They exposed young eels to levels of cocaine equivalent to those found in the environment (20 ng/L⁻¹) for 30-50 days. (All experiments were conducted under ethical guidelines for animal experimentation.)

The result: The cocaine accumulated at various levels in — and caused damage to — the eels’ brains, muscles, livers, kidneys, digestive tracts, gills, skin, spleens and gonads.

“That cocaine could cause damage to a living organism, such as an eel, was somewhat predictable,” Capaldo says. “However, the fact that this damage was also induced by a chronic exposure to very low concentrations of cocaine (20 ng of cocaine per liter of water equals 20 billionths of a gram of cocaine per liter) surprised us.”

The study concluded that even this relatively low concentration of cocaine could put European eels further at risk in the wild. “[T]he alterations in nervous and endocrine systems, and in peripheral tissues, induced by cocaine, could decrease its ability to survive and its reproductive fitness,” the authors wrote. “Moreover, the presence of cocaine in the muscle, which is the edible part of the animal, can be a problem not only for the eel, which needs a healthy muscle to complete reproductive migration, but also for human consumption of this fish.”

As for the “Cocaine Shark” effect? That remains to be seen.

“Drugs are particularly dangerous because they affect mood and behavior of living organisms, and this in turn can interfere with their survival skills,” Capaldo says. “In this regard, there are many studies concerning the effects of antidepressants on behavior of aquatic fauna. The effects of cocaine on eels’ behavior are a topic that we’d like to explore with further studies.”

They also hope to repeat the study using more than one contaminant, so they can better understand the compound effect of multiple pollutants or drugs on animals’ health.

The eels in this study were actually lucky. They were weaned off the cocaine, and many of the health effects receded. But eels encountering illicit drugs in the wild would remain exposed to environmental cocaine throughout their time in a polluted habitat — a situation that’s likely to worsen as the world gets hotter.

The Climate-Cocaine Connection

Capaldo points out that pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs are just one threat to European eels; climate change poses a danger to all eel species across the world. But the two threats remain linked, as temperature fluctuations can cause chemical interactions to change and become more toxic.

“All these findings would suggest that climate change, and in particular the rise in temperatures, could pose a problem for eels’ survival,” she says.

Meanwhile the study cites research that points out how cocaine poses its own threat to the climate — and a major one, at that:

“It is estimated that 1982 tons of pure cocaine were produced in 2020, an increase of 11% over the previous year. The carbon footprint … of cocaine, related to cultivation of coca plants, processing of cocaine, disposal of waste generated in the manufacturing process and land-use change, is 4500 kg CO₂e per kg of cocaine produced. Therefore, referring to the 2020 data, we obtain a mean value of the total emissions per year of 1.9 million tons of CO₂e, a value significantly higher than that of other crops, as sugar cane or cocoa beans.”

And the problem is only going to get worse. Cocaine production increased another 35% between 2021 and 2022, according to a recent United Nations report. Meanwhile a commentary published this July in the Journal of Addiction Medicine predicts that climate change — and its resulting human suffering — will worsen the opioid epidemic and increase abuse of fentanyl, cocaine, and other legal and illegal stimulants.

Embed from Getty Images

Which just goes to show: It’s all connected.

“We are all linked by our environment,” says Dr. Emily Einstein, chief of the Science Policy Branch at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, who was not affiliated with either study. “The idea that the behaviors of humans end up in the water and impact our ecosystems and endangered species is an important one to keep in mind. Much like we share a water supply, we also share a drug supply. I think this idea that humanity is kind of linked by these shared resources is an important one to remember. We all have to care about each other, the impact we’re having on each other, and on our environment as well.”

Previously in The Revelator:

Endangered Wildlife Are Getting Dosed With Rat Poisons

Time to Dance the Salmon Home

This summer a Tribal ceremony celebrated the return of sacred fish, lost for generations.

Late in the morning on July 12, a helicopter landed in a field near the entrance to AhDiNa, a campground on the McCloud River in Northern California. Children ran ahead to greet the craft, and soon the road was lined with spectators waiting to witness the delivery of precious cargo: an insulated bucket containing 25,000 fertilized winter-run Chinook salmon eggs.

These eggs would not only bring the Winnemem Wintu Tribe one step closer to bringing salmon, or Nur, back to their ancestral waters, but could also help save the species from extinction.

Winter-run Chinook spawn in summer, but the spring-fed McCloud River runs cold all year round, buffering eggs and young salmon from even the worst summer drought. For 80 years the formidable Shasta Dam has blocked Chinook from the McCloud. Now fish are stuck in California’s Central Valley, where sizzling temperatures and water withdrawals make the Sacramento River lethal.

An adult winter Chinook salmon at the Livingston Stone National Fish Hatchery. Photo: Laura Mahoney/USFWS

Winter-run Chinook eggs were first brought to the McCloud River last summer, as part of an emergency plan spearheaded by NOAA Fisheries, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Winnemem Wintu to help the fish survive a third straight year of drought.

“We were flying by the seat of our pants,” says Cathy Marcinkevage, assistant regional administrator for NOAA Fisheries West Coast Region. “We had no idea what was going to happen last year. We had no idea if any of them would survive.”

The young salmon released into the McCloud River not only survived — they thrived, growing larger than those that reared in the Sacramento River below Shasta Dam.

Late last year the California Department of Fish and Wildlife captured and trucked 1,600 of the fry downstream so they could continue their journeys to the ocean. This year — with a new juvenile collection system, a novel streamside incubation system designed by the Tribe, and agreements in place that recognize the Winnemem Wintu as co-equal decision-makers — the partners hoped to build on their success.

Together Marcinkevage and Marine Sisk, fisheries supervisor for the Winnemem Wintu Tribe, carried the bucket to the ceremony grounds, a caravan of children and adults in their wake. Later in the afternoon, the partners would deliver the eggs to incubators on the riverbank.

First, it was time to dance the salmon home.

Warriors and Eggs

AhDiNa is at the end of a bone-juddering road south of the town of McCloud. On that July day, the campground was full of Winnemem Wintu, agency folk and their families, and people with Run4Salmon, a movement and prayer journey started by Winnemem Wintu Chief Caleen Sisk in 2016 to call salmon home to the McCloud River.

The ceremony took place in a circular arbor made from wood poles and conifer boughs. A fire in the center burned throughout the day, and as the sun rose higher, the circle had to be sprayed with water before the barefoot dancers could enter.

Between dances Chief Sisk invited partners from the agencies and organizations to join her in the circle. While a tribal member blew sage on each person, Chief Sisk asked the partners to open their hearts and minds and pressed for her two most urgent goals: building a “fishway” around Shasta Dam and bringing salmon, or Nur, from New Zealand back to the McCloud River.

Chinook eggs from the McCloud River were exported to New Zealand in the early 1900s, where runs formed in streams on the South Island. In 2010 Māori tribal members invited the Winnemem Wintu to come to New Zealand and see the fish, who Chief Sisk believes are the true relatives of McCloud River Nur.

In their agreements NOAA Fisheries and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife have vowed to work with the Tribe to determine whether Nur can be safely imported from New Zealand to California and reintroduced in the McCloud River. Both the state wildlife department and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would have to sign off on the plan. Some of the questions they will need to answer: Would the fish bring new pathogens to the McCloud? Would they compete with the other reintroduced Chinook for the same resources?

“Bringing the fish back to the U.S. doesn’t necessarily fulfill the recovery objective that we have for winter-run because, to our understanding, [the New Zealand fish] are not genetically the same as the winter-run Chinook that we have now and are trying to recover,” says Marcinkevage. “But we understand they are culturally significant fish for the Tribe and there’s probably a feasible opportunity to have a dual reintroduction that would support both of these species.”

Chief Sisk says that if it weren’t for regulatory barriers, the Māori could deliver 20,000 fertilized eggs as early as next year.

“Some of the rules are wrong for salmon, and they need to be changed,” she says.

For now the eggs come from U.S. Fish and Wildlife’s Livingstone Stone hatchery on the Sacramento River. To the people gathered at AhDiNa, they were still worth celebrating.

Gathering around the eggs. Photo: Juliet Grable

The Salmon Dance was the last dance of the ceremony. While the women sang and men drummed, two dancers entered the circle, stepping lightly, undulating like fish. Next came a pair of warriors, their steps more emphatic, underscored by the clatter of anklets. A fifth dancer weaved in and out of the others.

The fifth dancer was the Salmon Spirit, dance captain Rick Wilson explained. First he dances with the salmon and thanks them for presenting themselves. Then he dances with the warriors in the same style.

“He makes sure they’re doing it for the right reason,” says Wilson. “He’s saying, ‘It’s okay; you’re good to go.’ ”

Stronger, Faster, Larger

Down by the river after the ceremony, a small crowd of adults and children pressed around a shade structure, where two vertical stacks of trays were set up. A pipe trickled water continuously through the stack. Each tray can accommodate thousands of salmon eggs. Used in virtually all hatcheries, the system is an efficient if unnatural way to grow fish.

Adjacent the shade structure was a second incubator system designed by Chief Sisk and built with the help of scientists from UC Davis.

Chief Sisk doesn’t like how the fry in the hatchery trays are stacked on top of each other; she wants them to have access to gravel and more agency. Her system, called the Nur Nature Base, has a much larger footprint than the hatchery trays and resembles a backyard water feature. Two deep square basins, lined with gravel, connect to a central pool that is planted with rocks and willow shoots. A sloping chute leads from the pool to a shallow, cobble-lined basin alongside the river.

Chief Sisk demonstrates the Nur Nature Base. Photo: Juliet Grable

Once the eggs hatch, the fish can swim over the lip of the basin into the pool, Chief Sisk explained to the crowd. “And when they’re ready, they’ll swim into this side channel, which the Winnemem Wintu have always built.”

Children crowded around Chief Sisk and her daughter, Marine, waiting for their turn to scoop cups of the orange, BB-sized eggs into the hatchery trays, then into one of the basins of the Nur Nature Base. By the time they completed the task, there were 11,000 eggs in the hatchery trays and 14,000 in the Nature Base.

Chief Sisk is confident that the Nur Nature Base will give the young fish a jump-start. “They’ll be stronger, faster, and larger,” she says.

In a few years, the team will know if she’s correct. Because the fertilized eggs come from the hatchery, the scientists know the identities of their parents and have segregated eggs from unique families between the hatchery trays and the Nur Nature Base. This way any fish that survive and return to the Sacramento River as spawning adults can be genetically traced back to one of the two rearing systems.

Eggs were delivered again in late July and early August, for a total of up to 80,000. Using two different systems and three simulated spawning dates will help the partners learn which strategies work best.

“We’ll know and learn better ways of setting up rearing and incubation,” says Rachel Johnson, salmon life history program lead for NOAA Fisheries Southwest Fisheries Science Center. “What I also love is we are braiding natural science with spiritual and culturally relevant practices.”

Later this summer, the state wildlife department and the Tribe will place a rotary screw sampling trap downstream so they can estimate the number of fry that make it downstream. The agency also hopes to test an experimental in-river fish-trapping station where the McCloud River fattens into an arm of Shasta Lake. Finally, the California Department of Water Resources will install its Juvenile Salmonid Collection System to catch any fish the other traps miss. The system, which the agency piloted last year, uses cold water to funnel young salmon to a collection point, where they can then be trapped and transported below the dam.

Though this is the first project to reintroduce salmon to historical habitat above a large dam in California. Marc Commandatore, environmental program manager at the Department of Water Resources, says the winter-run project is “just the beginning.”

NOAA Fisheries has identified reintroducing fish to high-elevation tributaries as a key climate resilience strategy, especially for salmon languishing in the Central Valley.

“Fish are in the frying pan in the valley,” says Commandatore. “They want to be this beautiful cold water.”

The partnership with the Winnemem Wintu is also a welcome sign of new respect and collaboration among Western scientists and the region’s original salmon stewards. “To bring tribal knowledge into decision-making…I’m humbled by it,” says Commandatore. “We wouldn’t be here if science and engineering and belief hadn’t all come together.”

Previously in The Revelator:

https://therevelator.org/lifeline-winter-run-chinook/

Playing Matchmaker for Corals

Improving the success of sexual reproduction is another tool for restoring the world’s coral reefs.

Coral reefs support vibrant marine ecosystems, stimulate tourism and fishing industries, and protect shorelines from tropical storms and erosion. But reefs around the globe have been hit hard by pollution, overfishing and climate change, which is causing increasingly frequent and severe coral bleaching. Scientists predict severe bleaching on 99% of the world’s reefs within this century unless we reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Saving coral reefs requires major systemic changes — dramatic cuts in energy consumption, switching to renewable energy, managing overfishing and pollution, and restoring target reefs.

Restoration efforts have now become a priority for many scientists. This series looks at some of those efforts.

Along Florida’s coast, multiple coral restoration projects have hundreds of people painstakingly attaching thousands of coral fragments to acres of endangered reefs. These efforts are yielding impressive results, but they won’t be enough — especially now, in the face of unprecedented high sea temperatures, as some projects scramble to rescue corals from in-water nurseries.

Other projects have successfully coaxed corals to reproduce sexually in laboratory settings. But that approach, while important, remains costly and limited in scope.

Another option is boosting natural sexual reproduction of corals. Many corals reproduce sexually through broadcast spawning — a coordinated release of eggs and sperm into the water, with fertilization occurring at the surface. Fish and other marine creatures eat many of the gametes, and others drift off into the open sea without ever bumping into their other half. That doesn’t help their rate of survival, so scientists are developing a workaround. Sexual or larval propagation, also called coral seeding, involves collecting spawn in the wild, fusing the eggs and sperm in a container, growing larvae in protected settings, and dispersing them back onto the reef.

Think of it as sort of fertility treatment for corals.

Freshly collected elkhorn coral gametes. Photo courtesy SECORE International.
Photo: SECORE International / Paul Selvaggio

One project pursuing this option is a joint effort of The Ocean Foundation, Fundación Dominicana de Estudios Marinos (FUNDEMAR) in the Dominican Republic, Centro de Investigaciones Marinas (CIM) at the University of Havana in Cuba, and SECORE International.

SECORE, which stands for SExual COral REproduction, is the research and development arm of the effort.

“We are working on ways to do larval propagation more efficiently and successfully,” says the nonprofit’s research director, Margaret Miller. “We do the research and development and pass it off to the locals to do the work on the ground. As we develop these tools, we have a ready-made beta testing network. We learn a lot about what works and doesn’t work at a variety of settings and locations.”

Coral seeding offers two big advantages over outplanting coral fragments: reduced labor and cost and, more importantly, increased genetic diversity.

As Fernando Bretos of The Ocean Foundation explains, every fragment from a coral organism is genetically identical and, when placed back in the sea, faces the same issues that damaged its reef in the first place. Genetic variety increases the chances that some coral organisms survive harmful events such as disease or increases in water temperature.

There are a lot of steps to this approach, though, and some are tricky. The first challenge is knowing when a specific species is going to spawn. While scientists aren’t exactly sure what sets off spawning events, it likely is some combination of lunar cycle, solar cycle, water temperature, and chemical or light changes. But based on observation of previous events, they can predict spawning for specific reefs and coral species within two or three nights. Some corals are more reliable than others, though, and the cues themselves are sometimes ambiguous. For example, some corals spawn 7 to 10 days after the full moon in August. But when a full moon occurs in early August or late July, or if there are two full moons August, it can happen in September instead of or even in addition to August.

And even when the timing is known, the tiny organisms don’t make things easy.

“Spawning is usually in the middle of the night, and during hurricane season, which is doable but not convenient,” Miller says. “We plan a couple of extra dives to make sure we don’t miss it, because it could be a month or a year before we get another chance. So just being there at the right time is the first big hurdle.”

Another challenge is the capacity for working in the field, including having the right people and equipment in place at the right time. But on the plus side, other than a boat, that equipment is decidedly low-tech. The devices for collecting coral spawn, for example, are small tents that are open at the bottom and funnel into a container at the top.

The next step, fertilization, basically involves unceremoniously dumping all the eggs and sperm from each colony into a bucket. A slightly high-tech microscope comes in handy at this step, because it isn’t possible to see with the naked eye whether fertilization has occurred, at least not for a day or so.

“If we don’t get good fertilization, like 90%, the rest of the process is really difficult,” Miller adds. (But no pressure, corals.)

The scientists tested the amount of time that different species need to complete fertilization. “Brain coral, for example, is pretty much completely done in 15 minutes,” she says. “For some, it is an hour or more. The default is to keep everything mixed for 1 to 2 hours.”

The next step is providing the tiny swimming larvae with a suitable spot to attach and develop into coral polyps. For that, SECORE designed special tiles with grooved surfaces to encourage settlement by coral larvae but discourage growth of algae, and tiny ledges to protect the settlers as they mature. The tiles also are self-stabilizing and usually can be placed on the reef without using any kind of adhesive — a drastic reduction of labor.

Tiles and larvae are placed together in basins, basically kiddie pools with a cute name: Coral Rearing In-Situ Basins, or CRIBs. These are kept in a little over a yard of water near the beach or dock. About a half million larvae fit in a 6-by-12-foot pool.

Raising corals in CRIBS costs significantly less than raising them in land-based laboratories or aquaculture facilities and requires only about 5% of the labor.

FUNDEMAR and CIM have provided the labor and, along with The Ocean Foundation, training on the process. A $1.9 million grant from the Caribbean Biodiversity Fund paid for the initial work, and now the foundation is looking to expand it.

Coral spawning and restoration training. Photo courtesy SECORE International.

“We brought the entire Cuban coral research community to the Dominican Republic to learn the technique,” Bretos says. “They’ve initially applied it at Jardines de la Reina and Guanahacabibes Peninsula National Parks in Cuba. And we recently held a workshop to look beyond the initial grant, to add 12 new sites and four additional coral species.”

Boosting the number of species propagated is important, Bretos adds, because restoration is more about saving an entire habitat than an individual species. He and Miller stress that the tools of fragmentation and sexual propagation are both needed to accomplish that goal.

“If we can get sexual propagation to the level of converting, say, 10% of the millions of eggs to larvae, versus maybe 1%, there is tremendous potential,” says Miller. “The potential of scale is there in terms of the raw material that corals provide, sperm and eggs.”

But mortality rates remain a barrier to large-scale application of this method, and improving those rates are a research priority for the Coral Restoration Consortium’s Larval Propagation Working Group. A paper the group published notes that there have been examples of corals propagated in this way that survived to sexual maturity and now spawn predictably each year — a huge step forward and validation of the potential of coral seeding.

Plus, as Miller points out, even with the high mortality, the effort makes a difference. “These days the recruitment of species naturally on Florida reefs is zero. So even if our result is low, compared to zero, it’s not nothing. And we are doing the research to improve survival.”

Cuba and the Dominican Republic are the two largest island countries in the Caribbean, Bretos points out, so the project covers a lot of coral area. And they plan to share information and knowledge with scientists and practitioners across the Caribbean, United States and Mexico.

“The Caribbean is linked by ocean currents,” Bretos says. “Every country is facing the same problems. By working together, we share resources and we share experiences. It is a great investment. Yes, it’s a slow game when we need a fast game, but we’re building capacity. And once you do that, it’s forever and it’s a fast game.”

SECORE also has implemented larval propagation projects in Florida, working with the University of Miami, Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science, and the Biscayne National Park Authorities, and in the U.S. Virgin Islands as part of an initiative by The Nature Conservancy. Other projects took place in Belize, Bonaire, Columbia, Honduras, and Mexico.

That represents a lot of people playing matchmaker to help save coral reefs.

Previously in The Revelator

Planting Coral Gardens to Save Florida’s Reefs