A major bottleneck to planting efficiency has been (re-)attaching corals to the reef. For tourism industries, physical attachment approaches are generally favoured over chemical approaches (e.g. glues), leading to John Edmondson’s conception of Coralclip®. The device consists of a stainless-steel spring clip that clamps the coral or fragment to the reef for long enough to begin growing onto the substrate securely. The device is overgrown by the coral or corroded (for example, after several months the metal feels very thin and brittle). Through the first phases of the Program, we demonstrated that these low-cost clips could be deployed typically in 15s, with up to several hundred corals planted per shallow dive. Its small, unobtrusive design means it blends into the seascape and so useful for retaining the aesthetics of tourism reef sites.
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