[Editors] MIT students regrow coral with alternative energy

[Heather Manning]

MIT News Office
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Room 11-400
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA  02139-4307
Phone: 617-253-2700
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/www

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MIT students regrow coral with alternative energy
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For Immediate Release
THURSDAY, MAY 10, 2007
Contact: Heather Manning, MIT News Office
Phone: 617-253-1682
Email:hmanning at mit.edu

IMAGES AVAILABLE

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--A group of MIT students are using a new technology 
in a low-cost, environmentally friendly way to regrow the Philippine 
coral reefs--recently ranked one of the worst coral "hot spots" in 
the world by Science magazine. Their project, First-Step Coral, aims 
to restore the habitat of one of the highest concentrations of 
biodiversity in the world, using solar and wind power.

The students teamed up with MIT alumnus Thomas J. Goreau, founder of 
the Cambridge, Mass.-based Global Coral Reef Alliance (GCRA), a small 
nonprofit dedicated to growing, protecting and managing coral reefs. 
Goreau created a technology, called BioRock, which uses an 
electro-chemical process to deposit calcium carbonate onto the common 
building material, rebar. After the calcium is deposited on the black 
metal, it turns white, and clumps of living coral that the volunteers 
tie to the metal begin to grow and attach themselves to the 
framework. In trials in the Pacific islands, the Indian Ocean and the 
Caribbean, corals attached to Biorock grow three to five times faster 
than native coral and have an increased survival rate.

The MIT students' innovation on the technology is to power the 
electro-chemical process with wind turbines, tidal power and solar 
panels. During a trip to the Philippines in January, the First-Step 
Coral team installed 500-watt solar panels donated by Shell and 
Sunpower to power Biorock in the Carbin and Molocaboc islands in the 
Sagay Marine Reserve. The team plans to study the effect of the 
cyclical nature of the renewable sources on the growth and 
development of the coral.

The coral reefs help provide more than 60 percent of the animal 
protein consumed by the Philippines' population of 80 million. The 
declining fishing industry then puts more pressures on the land, 
which must support more agriculture as people move inland in search 
of a new food supply.

One of the students in the project, Gerardo Jose la O', left his 
hometown of Bacolod City in the Philippines almost 10 years  ago to 
attend Berkeley and then graduate school at MIT.  Even before he left 
for college, la O' had noticed something about the coral reefs that 
disturbed him: they were getting harder to find. You had to swim 
farther out, braving strong currents, to find the reefs and their 
1,000-plus species of spectacularly colored fish.

"I've seen the natural ecosystem get worse and worse. It's overused, 
overexploited," la O' said. "The fishermen throw sticks of dynamite 
into the water and the sonic waves cause the fish to die and make 
them easier to catch. It also shatters the coral and causes it to 
slowly die off. It's akin to carving a hole in the center of the 
Amazon and denuding it, but the coral reefs are less visible because 
they're underwater."

With fellowships from MIT's Graduate Student Council and the MIT 
Public Service Center, la O' and MIT students Emzo de los Santos, a 
sophomore studying biological engineering, Martin M. Lorilla, a Sloan 
management student, and former MIT Department of Urban Studies and 
Planning Fellow Iliac Diaz launched First-Step Coral. The students 
coupled their science and engineering skills with a new technology to 
promote a low-cost, environmentally friendly way to regrow the 
Philippine coral reefs.

First-Step Coral recently won a $7,500 award in the MIT IDEAS 
competition and is one of eight semifinalists in the 2007 MIT $100K 
Entrepreneurship Competition "development track" for advancing 
low-income communities in developing countries. Winners will be 
announced May 16 at an awards ceremony at 7 p.m. in Kresge Auditorium.