Building a Reef - Cause and Effect

Posted by Ret Talbot Jun 25, 2008

Southern California Edison is hard at work on an artificial reef off San Clamente. I can see the barge with quarried rock from Catalina Island chugging to the reef when I’m walking the tidepools along my home shoreline. The reef is “compensation” for environmental damage to the marine environment caused by the San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant. When it’s all said and done, the artificial reef will be 2.5-miles long and encompass 150-acres. More than 100,000 tons of stone will be used to complete the project.

Building an ecosystem is a strange concept to some, but not to the reef aquarist. Every reef aquarist out there has watched the process of ecosystem-creation happen in their own aquarium. Starting with only live rock, a sand substrate and a few small organisms, over the course of months and then years, the reef comes to life.

While aquarium reef building is not for the impatient, it is one of the most rewarding experiences I can imagine. It is also quite instructive in terms of better understanding natural reef ecosystems. One of the reasons that Southern California Edison agreed to build the artificial reef (it will set them back an estimated $40 million) is because discharge from the plant was found to be blocking sunlight from natural kelp forests, effectively killing an ecosystem.

Aquarists learn all too quickly that accidental environmental changes to their mini-reefs can have equally detrimental effects. Changes to light, temperature and water quality can throw a healthy, thriving reef into decline literally over night. As such, the aquarist understands, perhaps better than most, that you can’t build a 2,200-megawatt nuclear power plant on the ocean and not have an impact.

Too bad more people don’t keep aquaria.