Source: People's Daily - People's Daily
Li Xiubao explains coral reef protection. Profile picture
Li Xiubao's team members conducted ecological research in the waters of the Nansha Islands. Profile picture
Li Xiubao monitors the restoration effect of coral reefs on Wuzhizhou Island in Sanya. Photo by Wang Fengguo (People's Vision)
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Beautiful corals are an important place for marine life to inhabit and reproduce. Every year during the ovulation breeding season of corals, Li Xiubao, a professor at the School of Oceanography of Hainan University, will lead a scientific research team to monitor coral growth in many parts of Hainan, repair broken coral reef discs, and cultivate coral nurseries...
He developed a number of coral reef protection technologies such as volcanic rock fixed coral reef disks, and obtained national invention patents, which greatly promoted the improvement of the marine ecological environment.
At night, in a certain sea area of Sanya, Hainan, Li Xiubao, a professor at the School of Oceanography of Hainan University, jumped and dived 10 meters. Chickfish and spiny tailfish are sleeping soundly among the reefs, illuminated by flashlight fluorescence. Li Xiubao came to a clump of coral and quietly waited for the corals to ovulate once a year. He must complete the collection of fertilized eggs within an hour after the release of the sperm and eggs of the corals, bring them back to the laboratory, solve the mystery of the sexual reproduction of the corals, and breed the polyps that are more adapted to survive in this sea.
Protect the beauty of coral without fear of wind and waves
In 2003, after graduating from Anhui Agricultural University majoring in aquaculture, Li Xiubao applied for a master's degree from Huang Hui, a researcher at the South China Sea Institute of Oceanography of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and later studied for a doctoral degree under Huang Hui and Huang Liangmin, a researcher at the South China Sea Institute of Oceanography of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Aquaculture and coral reef protection are completely incompatible. Li Xiubao said that he had accidentally hit the door of coral reef ecology. At that time, in China, this major was still an unpopular discipline.
"Teacher Huang Hui saw me and made only one request, so I quickly learned to dive." Li Xiubao said that at first he had no concept of coral reef protection, and did not know that the test field of this discipline was on the seabed, and he often had to carry dozens of kilograms to dive into the sea more than ten meters deep, and do the work of hammering iron hammers and smashing steel rings.
Li Xiubao's first dive after obtaining a diving license was in the Luhuitou Sea in Sanya , a "tropical rainforest" with a radius of more than ten meters of antler coral jungle connecting the seabed, which was spectacular. "It's a beautiful world I've never seen before, corals are fragile, and staghorn corals are particularly sensitive and picky about the ecological environment." Li Xiubao said.
However, in the past, nearshore sewage discharge, global warming, overfishing and other serious damage to coral reefs, stretching for hundreds of meters of coral jungle gradually degenerated into coral belts that only a few meters left, and some even difficult to connect into belts.
"You can't sit back and watch the beauty of the seabed disappear." More than 100 dives a year make Li Xiubao gradually fall in love with this coral sea. In 2006, he saw rare coral species such as fleshy kidney-shaped true-leaf corals, bubbly bubble corals, and seabed cypress corals scattered in the waters of the Paracel Islands for the first time, and his sense of responsibility for protecting fragile life was stimulated.
In order to see corals, photograph corals, and study corals, he often rents a fishing boat and goes to sea, and he goes to sea for more than a month. Appreciating the beauty of the ocean is, of course, risky. Once Li Xiubao dived into a certain sea area of Sanya for scientific research, and the speedboats on the sea roared over his head, almost wiping his scalp. In more than ten years of field research, Li Xiubao has experienced countless winds and waves and stranded, but these have not diminished his love for coral reefs and the ocean.
The construction of artificial reefs provides favorable conditions for coral growth
Li Xiubao said that corals are like bricks, building homes for marine life to inhabit and reproduce. Coral reefs cover about 1/1/1000 of the ocean, providing shelter for 1/4 of marine life and 1/3 of marine fish. Only by protecting corals can we protect millions of marine life.
"Humans have to make a difference." In 2011, the Marine Ranching Team of the State Key Laboratory of South China Sea Marine Resource Utilization of Hainan University, where Li Xiubao worked, cooperated with Wuzhizhou Island in Sanya, Hainan Province, and officially launched China's first tropical "Marine Ranch" project.
Li Xiubao led the team to try to cultivate corals on the seabed, combining the artificial reef design in the "Ocean Ranch" with coral reef restoration, and developed an artificial reef for coral planting and a Li boat-shaped roof coral planting reef.
Typhoons and shifting sand on the ocean floor make it difficult for coral larvae that move with the current to survive, and this artificial reef mixed with steel bones and abandoned fishing boats can be firmly rooted into the seabed. "We hammered and beat iron hammers on the bottom of the sea, and what we did was to build reefs and consolidate the foundation." Li Xiubao said with a smile.
In the waters off Wuzhizhou Island in Sanya, an 80-meter-long I-shaped artificial reef nurtures 1,150 corals. Li Xiubao knew the location of each coral in the nursery: "This plant is a small-leaf staghorn coral, planted in August of the previous year, growing very well, after a while it can be transplanted to a nearby broken coral reef plate; that is hyacinth antler coral, planted at the end of last year..." In the past 10 years, Li Xiubao and his team have transplanted more than 5,000 corals of 10 species, with a one-year coral survival rate of more than 90%, the area of restored coral reefs is about 1 hectare, and the coral coverage rate in this area has risen from less than 15% to more than 23%.
Li Xiubao also innovated the use of new basalt materials to make artificial reefs, and used local materials to fix the broken coral reefs with volcanic rocks unique to Hainan. Affinity, natural volcanic rocks attract coral larvae and fish from coral reefs. In the first two years of the volcanic rock, not only the coral attached to it grew happily, but also a large number of sea cucumbers, sea urchins, and sea lilies appeared around it.
But by the third year, when Li Xiubao returned to this sea, the volcanic rock had become seaweed, and they were more adapted to living on the volcanic rock and occupied the living space of the coral. "At present, how to restore the hawkfish that eat seaweed, horse dung sea urchin, etc., is the problem we are facing. Coral reef restoration is such a process of continuous trial and error and continuous improvement. Li Xiubao said.
Restore the ecosystem based on coral reefs and improve the marine ecological environment
"Ecological protection is a priority, supplemented by artificial restoration, which is the concept of coral reef protection that I have always adhered to." Li Xiubao said that corals are very sensitive to the ecological environment. If water quality is degraded, even the best repair techniques are useless.
In 2016, Li Xiubao, as the team leader and chief scientist, led more than 20 scientific researchers to the waters of the Nansha Islands to carry out more than 40 days of coral reef ecological surveys. This expedition not only allowed him to see the rich population of the South China Sea, but also to see the coral bleaching caused by global warming, as well as the large number of long-spined starfish caused by overfished fish and dafa snails. Li Xiubao said that a long-spined starfish can gnaw on several square meters of coral in a month.
After drifting at sea for more than 40 days, after returning to land, seeing the long-lost green plants, Li Xiubao sighed: "We must explore and develop better restoration techniques, not only to make corals come alive, but also to restore the ecosystem based on coral reefs, so that fishery resources such as fish and shellfish can also be enriched and the marine ecological environment can be improved." ”
Since then, Li Xiubao and his team have not only studied corals, but also included herbivorous fish and shellfish in the monitoring category, collected them back to the laboratory, and selected more suitable fish for breeding and stocking. At their suggestion, local authorities annually mobilize fishermen and diving enthusiasts to go to the sea to catch long-spined starfish and protect the corals. In 2018 alone, more than 60,000 long-spined starfish were captured in the Paracels of the South China Sea, effectively curbing the damage they caused to corals.
"The purpose of transplanting corals is to repair broken coral reefs and restore habitats for marine life, but some of the restorations that lack scientific arguments are counterproductive." For example, cutting off coral limbs from degraded coral reef communities in the wild to cultivate nurseries only exacerbates the degradation of coral reefs. Blind restoration without considering the state of water quality is also unable to achieve the purpose of protection and restoration. Li Xiubao said that fortunately, the concept of coral protection in China is changing, from the initial slow exploration to today's scientific research and appropriate measures, the domestic coral research team has developed from the initial sporadic number to more than 30 today, and hainan university alone has 6 teams doing coral protection research. Li Xiubao hopes that more and more professional researchers and scientific research equipment can join the research on coral reef protection.
People's Daily (2021-04-21 15th edition)