Two years ago, we embarked on a journey to rebuild the coral reef that once existed here. And now, after a lot of hard work, this is what it looks like. Life has returned here in full force. Our coral is healthy. It's growing. And crucially, it is now used by a wide diversity of marine life as a home, a grazing area, a cleaning station, a hunting ground, and as a cradle for the next generation. The complexity that has developed here is incredible. It is nature in all its niche expressions, and it is wonderful to see. But we've not just been waiting around watching coral grow. We've been actively expanding our

reef to new rubble areas. by deploying thousands of new structures and also experimenting with some exciting new ideas. So, uh, welcome back to a rather rainy Indonesia. It is, of course, February, so it's rainy season here, but we're going underwater. And besides a bit less visibility, it shouldn't really affect what I'm trying to show you, which is how much our amazing coral reef here has grown, how many more fish have come in, and also how much progress the team has made. So, I want to start now by checking out all the new areas that we are restoring. Before we jump in, I think it is worth reminding you that all the work you see here and at all our other projects has been fully funded by

people like you watching this video that decide to become a Mossyear member. So, if you're keen to help out, you can join us at mossy.cur. The link is in the description. Now, to start us out, I think it is worth recapping why we are doing this work. To begin with, our project site is here in Indonesia on the north coast of Nusupita. This island is home to wonderful reefs that are for the most part doing really well. The water here is generally cooler, meaning we have a lower risk of bleaching. And the whole island is now a marine protected area, meaning no dynamite fishing and no anchors, only traditional fishing and tourism. However, in the past, some damage was done by human activity. And

amongst the healthy reef, we have these ugly patches of dead coral that feel like a wound on the reef itself. and they do present a real threat. You see, when it comes to reefs, structural complexity is key. It is the ecological function that provides the nooks and the crannies for all this marine life to use, as opposed to the flatness and barrenness of the rubble. And as it turns out, research shows that reefs with more human impacts have lower structural complexity and that reefs with less structure lost even more of it during large bleaching events. Meaning this 3D habitat is key for the resilience of the reef. So our mission here is simple. We are here to patch up this reef as best as possible,

increasing the structural complexity and thus making it as strong and resilient as it can be to face future challenges. We're not trying to just improve a few thousand square meters. We are trying to help the whole reef to become stronger. And based on the scientific literature, the intervention we selected here is to bring back the coral cover by deploying metal structures and attaching loose coral fragments to it. So, last year we were next to that big pinnacle. Yes. And that's where you were that was where you were restoring like how far have you extended the area like from that point? From that point on like from that point we finished because that is the beginning of area four and then

now we are already like maybe halfway of area five. So we restoring about 300 m square more or less. And how many structures is that more or less? I think it will be like,500. All right, 500. So we're going to go look at,500 new structures. Yeah. Nice. To make sense of this restoration site, we have divided the various rubble patches into six distinct areas. We started with area 1 in 2024 and went from west to east and are now reaching area six. As you can see, the shape of these sites is a lot more complex than this, but I think it works well to give you a little bit of perspective and to guide you along as we go through this

video. So, if we go from the most recent to the oldest, first we have area 6 that is still sitting empty because we've just finished mapping it. Then in area 5 is where we are deploying at the moment. This area is more or less a rectangular rubble patch starting in relatively shallow water near some gorgeous coral pinnacles and then going down the slope. In the middle of the site, we have this massive coral colony that looks really healthy, but for now is a bit lonely amongst all the rubble. And it is also here where we have reached a pretty cool milestone, which is to finally connect to our original small-cale trial site from late 2023. We lost a couple of

corals here to bleaching, but everything still looks quite good. So much so that we spotted a rather angry fish here defending this place because this is where it has decided to lay its eggs right there on our structure. And this is a pattern we observed in a few other places on our reef. And it is really cool to see it being used in this way. Now all the corals we source are small fragments of opportunity, meaning they break off naturally and we attach them. But sometimes after a big storm, we find some really large pieces such as this tabletop coral here in area 5 or this brain coral we have incorporated into area 4 in the hope that they will recover and attach themselves to give

this new part of the reef a head start. Further along in area 4, you can see that the shallower coral here has been growing really well. It still looks like nothing next to this glorious bit of healthy coral, but it's a start. Deeper down, we have this area where we originally were not planning to put many structures as it is a bit deeper, but we felt it was important to stabilize the rubble here. So, we added these terraces together with the structures. Maybe in the future, we'll add more structures, but in the short term, this solves the problem here. Another change we have made in areas four and five has been to fully commit to aluminium wires instead of plastic zip ties for attaching. This

has slowed down the progress a little bit, but based on our trial, we thought we could get similar survival rates. And indeed, we did, which is really great to see and removes an element of the project which we didn't really like. Then if we move along to area 3, we start getting into the good stuff. As you can see, the corals here have exploded in size, especially in the shallow part where they get more light, and a lot of fish have noticed and have Julie moved in from the adjacent reef. This place is really busy now, and it is wonderful to see it connecting with the healthy reef and starting to blend with it really well, offering a new home for all kinds of marine life. And to capture

this properly, I armed dudy with a macro lens. And he spent a few dives here using his keen diving instructor eye to find tiny crabs living among the corals, colorful nudie branch under the structures, and even a banded sea crate, a highly venomous species of sea snake that was hunting for its next meal in between our structures. Then between area 3 and area 2, we have these structures with no coral on them. These are a recent deployment just to connect these two areas and we are leaving them empty to test an idea that we have. You see, normally we attach the coral right away after deploying and then spend some weeks scrubbing the green algae that show up so that they don't take over the

coral. However, there are these other algae called coraline algae. This uh purple stuff here that is really great for coral to attach to. And we noticed essentially that when we put some structures in and left them alone, first they would become green, but then the coraline algae would take over. And this can actually save us some time in terms of scrubbing. So we are testing simply leaving these here until they look ideal for attaching. And just to note that if you like this nitty-gritty side of the project, you can follow Udian Chances vlogs here on YouTube on our Mossier Earth Fieldnotes channel and also on Instagram and Tik Tok under the name Wilder Reefs. The links are in the

description as well. Now, here in area 2, the coral has also grown really well, but I think for this place, it would be great for us to actually quantify things a bit for you. We like to show you our project area underwater, so you can see with your own eyes how it is progressing, how it's evolving and turning into a mature reef. But we also here at Mosur like to measure things accurately. So today we're going to complete an underwater photo transact to really measure how this coral reef is progressing. So I'll be get into the water and then open the transct 25 m and then I'll take photos each uh in every 50 cm. So I'll take it zigzag so I'll have like 50 photos after to process it in the software.

We completed two transacts, one here in area 2 and another one in area 1, which I'll show you properly in a bit. And while the process is tricky and hard to replicate perfectly each time, the results still give us a useful sample of the coral coverage in the area. In area 2, we had a coral coverage of around 19.08%. Up from 9.9% last August. And in area 1, our sample showed a coral coverage of 49.12% up from 42% last August, which is really cool to see. Now, this coverage varies depending where you draw your line, but I think it is still a very useful snapshot for us to have. And in this assessment, we also looked at the genus of the various corals here with six different genre present in area 2 and 10

genera present in area 1. Remember, this is at genus level, not species level. That number is probably a lot higher. Now in both of these sites the Acropora genus dominates which is no surprise. I mean they grow really fast and it is closely followed by the parietes. Then in area one we have a stronger presence of Akinopora but I think if the line went over one of the larger patches they would also be one of the dominant generate there. And then finally we have the rest which is comprised of slower growing and generally rarer corals namely the galaxia hnopora meerina gonopora helopora pokilopora and samocora genre and I think this diversity is really important to have in our reef.

So, every morning as I'm rigging out the camera, I'm just here kind of giddy with excitement to go and dive our project area for like the 20th time in a row. And you would have thought it would get old at some point, but the truth is especially area 1 has just progressed in such a magnificent way that it's really amazing to be down there. And I'm really excited to show that to you. But before we get to that, I just like to say that the only reason we can do these projects, we can consistently create these rewing teams and support them for years and years is because of our Mossy Earth members. People like you watching this video that make a monthly contribution to our projects. It's really cheap to join, like a

Starbucks coffee every month, but it goes a really long way when many of us get together to do these projects. So, if you're not yet a member, but you like our projects, then please consider becoming one at mossy.ear. It is truly what makes all of this possible. Now, let's go check out Area 1 because things have really progressed yet again. 2 years ago, when Yudi, Chanca, myself, and Julia first dove here, this place was better. Then 6 months after deploying the first structures here, we were surprised by the fast coral growth and the few fish that moved in. A year into the project and this place started to look a lot more like a coral reef. But something was still missing. And I think now it has finally arrived.

It is a living curtain of movement and color. Not just hundreds, but thousands and thousands of fish everywhere you look. And it is not just one species, it is dozens, if not hundreds of them in an incredible combination of abundance and diversity. And it felt really great to have the opportunity to dive here with the team and reflect on the progress we have made. Shallow and looking at everything, you can just it like looks really impressive. Yeah. And I feel a little bit like now the fishes are my family now. I think I'm so welcomed here.

I mean you built it. Yeah. I mean they not so strange just not so stranger to us anymore. They also don't mind we are hovering around now. It's really hard to do justice to what it feels like to be down there in this frenzy of life. But we think it is our job to bring you, our members who built this reef, down along with us. And for that, we decided to experiment with a new wider perspective that can show you the true size of these shos. One of the first groups you'll notice here is our oldest resident shaw of yellow goatfish that have been around for more than one year and have continued to thrive. Then near the pinnacle where they like to hang out, we have a cloud of bicolar chromies that live inside

this coral itself and have really been multiplying in numbers. Then lowered down among our reef, we have groups of cloudy dashillos dipping in and out of the shelter that the coral offers and often mixing with sunburst butterfly fish, which are usually seen in singles or pairs. But here on our reef, they come together in much larger groups. And then we have the shors that really dominate in terms of numbers. We have the blue green chromies often mixing with the gray chromies to form these large massive groups. I think it's so beautiful when they all swim in the same direction. And finally, we have the everpresent Sergeant Major. I mean, these guys just sort of fill the sky.

When you're diving and you look up to see the surface, it's just a cloud of surgeent major just swimming there. And sometimes they dip down into the reef. It's just spectacular. And when observing this, I mean, it really hits home that with some hard work, it is actually possible for us to fix things up and make space for nature to thrive. We actually have a lot more to show you because we followed the lives of the fish and other marine life on our reef both during the day and at night. And the results are really, really interesting. But that's something for the next video when we will also be

deploying a new kind of structure, the reef bells, which will eventually form a new fish village at our project site, which is really exciting. And yeah, I mean, I just want to say a huge thank you to our Mossy Earth members who enable this work. I mean, it's a really big deal. And sometimes, you know, I'm just sitting there like, how is this possible? How is it that we can do this work? It's Yeah, it's really incredible. So, a big thank you to you. And if you're not yet a member, please consider becoming one at mossi.ear. It's really easy to join. It's cheap. You can cancel anytime. And we put the money towards some amazing projects. And finally, if you're already a member, you

can always support this project beyond the budget that we've allocated to it so far by going into the fund extra section of your account where you can purchase additional structures to go down and expand this project. We will send you a photo for each structure bought in the months of March and April 2026. So yeah, a huge thank you once again and until next time. Cheers.