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when we put our minds to it we can bring life back to places that lost it we can bring back the magic and in an age of declining Wilderness being able to do that is truly a superpower which is why today's story feels like the start of something big and in this video we want to show you what 5 months of hard work and progress looks like okay so today we're finally going to start putting some structures in the water here they are they've been coated they have dried and they're now ready to go into the sea so we're going to load them onto our boat we're going to drive that boat to pamas and we're going to do the first deployment of this project which is just such an exciting Milestone to reach
because a lot of work has been put in to be able to get to this moment but before we get into that I want to spend a few minutes showing you the state of the reef we are restoring and the animals that live here and to do so quickly I came up with a funny concept so if you're willing try to hold your breath with me throughout this whole tour of the project so now take a big uh deep breath and uh let's go see what we can find okay let's get started our project area is still a beautiful place with a lot of healthy Coral Reef in the shallow Parts where it forms this wonderful mazike Gardens that are really fun to explore however when you spend a bit of time here you start seeing the problem
we humans leave ugly scars behind and Here There is almost no natural regeneration and where we Have No reef we have no marine life this place is a mini desert and it is exactly what we are trying to fix but when you swim a bit deeper you see the best that this place has to offer there is this Mighty Pinnacle this Tower of life that has slowly built up over hundreds if not thousands of years it's Generations upon generations of coral and it's teeming with fish its presence is like an old tree looming large over us judging us to see if we finally turned the page and are ready to fix the things that we broke even though there of course those damaged areas is just such a special
place to dive especially that Pinacle at the end I mean how incredible like what an explosion of life but yeah I think to see the wildlife now we going to need to spend a bit more time underwater so let's change to scuba kit and go check out what animals are living here this place is of course full of fish there are puffer fish parrot fish trumpet fish flatfish and even the famous clown fish hiding in its anemone there are also quite a few Turtles foraging for algae and sponges there are plenty of moray eels and when I saw this in the distance I thought it was a Mor eel out hunting but when I got close it turned out to be a beaked sea snake this is a pretty cool find so I was fully focused
on filming it but as it swam past me I remembered that a single bite from this snake has enough Venom to kill five grown humans which uh made me a bit jumpy but it went on its way we also saw a few mantis shrimp which arguably has the best Vision on Earth and we also managed to find what is probably my favorite animal to see underwater the intelligent master of camouflage the octopus then amongst the reef we found yudi's favorite animal the nudie Branch you see experienced divers collect sightings of these a bit like Pokémons as each one is just a little bit different and then one of the days we were diving here we saw something at the surface and managed to dive down really deep quite fast to catch a distant
glimpse of a very weird animal the mola Moola what a cool and unique animal to have in our project area and it's coming here to get cleaned by the fish that live on this Reef always blows my mind like how busy and diverse it is down there and I mean these are the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth after all but yeah there is H work to be done we have our permit so time to jump into action by the time we got the permit we had a bit over 30 structures ready to go so then it was time for them to go into the boats to be the deployed by the team which for this first deployment will be Udi encha myself Julia and Captain pakade and as a reminder the reason we are able to hire this team by this boat and all the
necessary equipment is because of our Mossy Earth members that join us with a monthly contribution to fund the various reing projects that we Implement and if you want to be a part of that you can do so at Mossy do earth now it's time for action wo we decided to start in this shallow corner of rubble Area 1 next to this small Pinnacle which has a coral that is home to a family of domino fish who you might remember from our trial site in the last video so we're right at the spot here this is the like the little island with some coral and the rubble area now around it and all the way down that way so this is exactly where we need to be with pakade keeping the boat in place cha passing me the
structures and Judy putting them down at the bottom we quickly managed to get all of them in the right location then down there it was a matter of rearranging them and fixing them in place before taking a break for a quick lunch it went pretty good like uh to put that much of structure in One D it's quite a success just need to wait and see how we collect the fragments and we attachment I think that will be more consuming time consuming and especially if we have the current we had now at the end oh yeah that end that current is crazy quite fast sometimes was like the current decided what I was like what I was filming I bit back and forth in this direction the current was indeed an everpresent challenge both for the work
and of course for the filming because to stay in the same place to get this shot for an instance Julia had to be kicking like crazy however these currents are one of the factors that allows the corals here to grow super fast but more on that in a bit when we look at the results now it's time to go collect the fragments do we mostly want to put Reef Builders or anything goes uh prefer we can put something that already exists in the area but don't put uh for one species too much just mix it a little bit with almost same composition almost the same composition yeah I mean trying to imitate what's it's the other area nearby right yeah collecting the fragments from the nearby Reef was quite
fun we essentially went around swimming with this big red box and we were looking for loose fragments of healthy Coral found in amongst the healthy reef and we would pick them up and bring them with us you see these healthy reefs have plenty of these broken fragments that we can use and of course as a diver you shouldn't touch anything but in our case we were picking them up to attach them to our structures then the attaching process involved using plastic zip ties to secure the coral to the metal structures and before you write a comment we will talk more about this in a bit and after some hours of work we had made a lot of progress okay so that was our first day of deployment I think
we got a lot done in the end I mean how many structures do you think we managed to cover about 10 maybe 10 yeah I mean about 15 okay but it started to look really good I mean it started really to look like something where they can start growing once you know you got to keep chipping away at it and then some you look at the whole picture and it's really nice yeah that's true like if it's all covered then it will look very different yeah completely but yet to do a whole Rubble area it's a lot of work I really realize now like this is a big project already you know to do this areas here exactly over the next few days we completed the remaining structures and right away we could see
the fish using the space swimming in amongst the new three-dimensional habitats that we created and there were all kinds of species but above all small fish that benefit from these tight spaces such as this family of yellow tailed blue damsel fish that were exploring one of the newly added structures and later we even saw the adult Domino damsel fish that live on the Jason Coral Pinnacle happily rubbing up against the structures which we believe is them preparing the area to lay their eggs but all of this happened in April and we've made a whole lot of progress since then but before you look at the 2,000 structures that we've put in and crucially the new life that has moved in udy wants to quickly say
something about the boat so on the last video we asked you to vote on the name for the boat and we are very happy when you choose Domino for the name because of the Domino fish that the first fish to move into our restoration site so next month when me and Cha is going for a holiday we are going to ask someone to uh repaint the and maybe add some illustration which will be pretty cool so I'm sorry seos and of course the everpresent boy mcboat face but uh Domino won with an overwhelming majority but we've also had your feedback on another much more important point which is the tying methods that we use to attach the coral so I would like to shine some light on that we initially
chose to use plastic zip dies because plastic is one of the best materials imaginable for this task in the CCI ific literature the survival rates far exceed the other materials tested so plastic is what most projects use and I think it's reasonable you can think of it as pretty much the most useful piece of plastic in the sea we cut the ends off and recycle them and the coral eventually covers the zip ties themselves leaving very little of it to disperse however from the beginning we did want to find an alternative method that if possible would be more biodegradable so we set up an attachment trial comparing plastic PLC hemp and cotton thread to see how these materials worked in our project area and right now
it does indeed seem that they are inferior but we have to wait for the trial to finish to have conclusive results but in addition to that we had somewhat of a miracle happen we had a productive conversation on the internet I know right it's crazy you see in September we released our first video about this project and alongside it we also released a video on our M Earth field notes Channel and on both of them we got a ton of useful suggestions so many of you wonderful people out there came up with great ideas which we immediately took action on one really obvious one we had completely missed was to use metal zip dieses which are a bit tricky for Coral attaching but perfect to bind the structures together that was an
immediate 25% reduction right there it's done yudi has implemented this and after yudi made another field notes video on this exact topic we got a whooping 250 comments with ideas so now we will be testing some additional materials like metal wire and potentially some biodegradable Plastics as well I just want to pause here to say that this is well beyond what we were expecting when we created the mossy Earth field notes channel it's so cool to have this direct dialogue with our members and with our viewers and if you haven't heard of this channel yet this is where we post these Raw on theground updates pretty much on a weekly basis I think it's super cool and I take the time to sit
down and uh and watch them as well so be sure to subscribe to that if you're interested and if you're not subscribed to the main M Earth channel that always helps as well okay so since April everything has kicked into gear the team spent May getting things ready on the production side then in June they hired had and Reza to help out on the diving and deploying side of things and since then they've been going out nonstop and have managed an average of 120 structures each week which is amazing so that now in October they have reached 2,000 structures down there and have completed Rubble Area 1 which looks completely different now the work doesn't stop right after deployment the
team needs to scrub the structures free of algae for about 6 months after they go in until the Coraline algae finally takes over they are this purple stuff that you can see here and they produce calcium carbonate which is the perfect surface for Coral to attach and to grow on so once the coral algae has taken over we don't need to worry about other algae competing with our bits of coral and the scrubbing can stop but of course some of them do die and in our case it's only around 2% but we still need to go in and replace the dead fragments with fresh ones and just like that after a few months this whole area has been transformed completely and the fish have noticed they are moving in large
numbers there are hundreds of fish from dozens of different species swimming in between the structures with some of them even helping us keep them nice and clean and then in the areas with the oldest corals something special has happened these were some of the first corals we put in during the deployment we showed you earlier in this video you can see the little Pinnacle in the back here it's the same one and look at how they have grown it is incredible to see and some of them have become big enough to house not one fish but the whole family of them here we have a family of cloudy dasos moving into this acropora bush and they are behaving exactly as they do in the beautiful acropora in the nearby
Reef the fish don't care if it's artificial for them it's a new bit of habitat that works wonderfully I spent a really long time mesmerized looking at these progress videos from UD enchan and the more you look the more interesting things you find it's not just the wonderful fish that pass by or that have moved in but also the coral itself this is an echinopora Coral that we have planted and here right next to it there is a new aoora that we did not put there this means that in all likelihood it spawned from the one nearby which is a great sign of health and that our structures are really good for attaching I also recognize this fragment of slow growing brain coral that we put there and I saw
that while of course it has indeed grown slowly it is already attached which is really great for the diversity of the reef and then there was this Coral here that I was holding during our silly hard hat thumbnail photo shoot it is actually a threatened species of blue coral vulnerable to Extinction and here it is fully attached and growing it is just incredible to see this and this is just the first 2,000 structures in the first 5 months after deployment and one can only imagine how this will look like in a few years and all of this is of course only made possible thanks to our Mossy Earth members all 14,000 amazing people out there that contribute to our projects every month the average contribution is around1 or
$16 but there are many of us and when we put this whole Community together we can do amazing things like this so if you would like to support this project then please consider joining us at moss. Earth and if you are a member and you would like to supercharge this project then you can do so by going to the fund extra part in your account and support the deployment of one or more structures and for all the purchases between now and Christmas we will take one photo when they are eventually deployed at the end of the year so you can see the corals that will grow on it I think it's a pretty fun way to see your impact once again thank you so much for the support
I really can't stress this enough nothing would be possible without you until next time cheers
