3 observatories to monitor coral bleaching

Chennai: With coral bleaching becoming a serious cause of concern, three permanent observatories will be set up in Gulf of Mannar, Lakshadweep and Andaman Islands to track and monitor the health and resilience of corals. Chennai-based National Centre for Coastal Research (NCCR) will set up the observatories and use the data to figure out long-term mitigation measures. The observatories will be set up in the next three months.

NCCR director M V Ramana Murthy said these observatories will help them undertake studies on coral resilience in the face of climate change. “Earlier, we didn’t have a continuous monitoring process. So, when bleaching happened, we could not find out why it had happened, or why the sea temperature went up,” he said. “But if we set up an observatory, we will know what were the conditions under which a bleaching event happened and the conditions under which the corals regenerated. This is what we call resilience and when we have a better understanding of that, we can make mitigation plans,” he said.

The observatories will be permanent structures, unlike the buoys off Chennai coast, used to measure coastal water quality. NCCR researchers said these observatories will measure all critical climate change and water quality parameters like sea surface temperature, dissolved oxygen, chlorophyll, blue algae, and water level variations.

Researchers will also dive deep to collect underwater data periodically. The NCCR director said the data from the observatories will be validated with satellite data. “Whenever our people visit the sites for sampling, they also carry underwater cameras to capture images from the same locations to see the difference over a period,” Ramana Murthy said.

NCCR, which monitors the country’s coastal water quality, has a field office in Mandapam, from where a research team monitors 128 coral species in the 21 islands at Gulf of Mannar and Palk Bay region. In 2018, the lab started coral restoration work in the Hare and Manoli islands, where polyps were tied to small concrete slabs on an iron frame and placed at 3m depth. After they grew up for six months, they were transplanted in the surrounding area.