Your support for Como Friends is helping Conservation Champions like EJ Smith rebuild endangered coral reefs in the Caribbean
As a kid, EJ Smith spent hours watching French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau take TV viewers under the sea, unveiling the extraordinary ecosystems that thrive under the surface of our oceans. Now as a life support specialist at Como Zoo, Smith says he’s living out a few of those childhood fantasies, caring for Como’s large collection of aquatic animals, while diving into conservation projects around the world.
In fact, Smith is just back from a two-week conservation trip to Aruba, where Como Zoo is establishing a new Conservation Champions partnership with the ScubbleBubbles Foundation, an Aruba-based environmental nonprofit aimed at getting local youth interested in ocean conservation. Founded by Nichole Danser, a local teacher and passionate diver, ScubbleBubbles is looking at ways that Aruba communities can stem the loss of coral reefs by creating coral nurseries in new locations. Together, Smith and Danser plotted out a brand-new stretch of artificial reef the two organizations plan to start, just off the coast of Aruba’s De Palm Island.
In a process similar to dividing and repotting plants, conservation groups like ScubbleBubbles are identifying coral types that are healthy and resistant to stress, and collecting small chunks to establish new colonies. “Corals grow at an incredibly slow pace, but these micro fragments are found to grow faster in small colonies, speeding up that process of coral growth,” says Smith, who learned about the process while supporting a similar coral recolonization project in the Caribbean last year. On this most recent trip, Smith spent his time mapping the reef site and working in ScubbleBubbles’ coral nurseries, where divers tend to dozens of coral “trees” representing nine different coral genotypes.
Smith and Danser also came up with a name for the newest colony, Friends Reef. “We really wanted to make a statement about the roots of this partnership, so this is a way of highlighting the support we’ve got from Como Friends to make conservation work like this possible, the friendly partnership we have now with ScubbleBubbles, and then all of the little friends that live out on these reefs,” he says. “The name works on a lot of levels.”
Worldwide, coral reefs are facing mounting pressure from pollution, severe weather, overfishing, and weak enforcement of marine protections. While Aruba has been more insulated from hurricanes than many of its Caribbean neighbors, Smith says the ripple effects of collapsing coral reefs are real. Not only are healthy reefs critical to supporting fish populations, they’re just as important in supporting local economies, cultural traditions, and tourism.
This fall, Como Life Support Operator Brittany Pedersen will continue work laying the foundation for Friends Reef, installing sturdy frames coated in epoxy and sand that give coral something to grab hold of and grow on. Future trips will focus on transplanting nursery-grown coral onto the new reef and assisting with research into accelerating coral growth, including studies on electrical stimulation underway at ScubbleBubbles’ new education space, the Coral Academy. If the project shows success, the goal is to share the learning with other coastal communities. “The idea is if your reefs are in trouble, we’ve got a footprint here that you can follow,” she says.
Given the long life-cycle of coral, Smith says the partnership is not a quick fix. “When we’re talking about corals, we’re talking about colonies of animals that are very slow growing. These reefs aren’t created overnight, it takes millennia. This work is going to be generational.”
And while Como is more than 2,000 miles away from the Caribbean, Smith believes this project is an important way to support Como Zoo’s conservation mission here at home: “This world’s much smaller than we think it is.”
