08/29/2026
In the first week of August, we had four nights of Acropora cervicornis (ACER) spawning resulting in an estimated 15,000 larvae! This may not sound like very much compared to the hundreds of thousands of larvae we typically produce for our other species, but this is very exciting for us for a few reasons:
- Our adult ACER colonies have been hit or miss with spawning success in previous years, but this was the best year we've observed from them yet in terms of number of colonies spawned, amount, and synchrony.
- This species generally produces very small gamete bundles compared to our boulder coral species meaning fewer eggs available and therefore fewer embryos can be made.
As for research, Krista Laforest (PhD candidate) was able to continue collecting data for her work on s***m motility and velocity. We were also able to share approximately 9,000 larvae with parthers at NOAA Hollings Marine Laboratory in Charleston for some of their experiments. The remaining larvae we kept for general settlement and growout. Since we did not see any spawning from our OFAV or PCLI colonies in August, we are anticipating that September will be a pretty big month for us!
