It sounds counterintuitive to say that drinking straws are helping the corals off the coast of Florida but that's the case. The straws are biodegradable and being used in an unconventional way.
Reef restoration is extremely important to South Florida’s ecosystem because the coral colonies help protect us from waves and storm surge especially during tropical systems.
Katherine Hardy, a PhD Student at the Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science at the University of Miami says, “with the really devastating heat wave that we saw in 2023, we really have this urgency to outplant new genetic diversity to the reef.”
A company by the name of Wincup developed the Phade products which are biodegradable utensils to help reduce plastic waste that ends up in our waterways… but oceanographers and researchers are using these unconventional tools to help restore the coral reefs.
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Kyle Pisano, the CEO of Reef Fortify says, “what we developed using the Phade technology of the PHA is we brought two very separate industries together.”
“We are using these structures to give them a few months on the reef to be able to acclimate to the wild and be in those conditions and not be preyed upon,” Hardy said.
Biodegradable boba straws are being used as coral forts by Reef Fortify to protect coral from predators, like the parrotfish, that will eat the corals before they have a chance to survive on the reef.
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Pisano says, “because it slowly goes away, the parrotfish don't recognize that coral once it's transplanted as new anymore.”
Hardy says the straws biodegrade in roughly 60 to 80 days.
“So this is going to be fully biodegradable, and then this can be reused. So this is a separate mechanism, this umbrella, which can be detached and reattached to another base. So they both have different benefits,” says Hardy.
Pisano tells us,” The issue with that [reusable] method is that divers have to return to either clean the cage or they need to eventually remove it. And sometimes what happens is when it's removed, it has that same effect of the coral being new on the reef to the parrotfish and that triggers them to feed on it for some reason.”
The straws are essentially made up of fermented canola oil that breaks down in the ocean as natural bacteria begins to eat it… but they last long enough to keep the corals from becoming a snack.
Pisano says, “you know, sometimes you only see 40% survivorship in certain areas with heavy parrotfish predation on your corals. So immediately just going from the realm of 40% up to the 90% that we saw in our initial trials was already a big success.”
