The Tree Of Life: I Created An Underwater Electrified Artificial Reef

I’ve been working as a reef sculptor for the last 4 years and have made several installations that I’m proud of, but none nearly as much as this latest piece.

This “Tree of Life” is an electrified artificial reef, which causes it to form a crust of limestone on its surfaces creating a bio-engineered habitat for the coral that we’ll garden across the sculpture. This is just one piece, a part of a larger electrified site that I’ve been creating through the New Heaven Reef Conservation Program and in partnership with coralAID for the last 2 years. You can find more context on this concept here.

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Growing the Tree

Transportation

Finally 10 meters below the surface of the ocean, the Tree of Life stands

Dascyllus Damsel Fish checking out the latest addition to the seafloor

The work has only just begun. Now to garden this space with small, naturally fragmented coral that we’ll find lying in the sand

These coral fragments, broken by waves and careless activity will be rescued from the sands where they would otherwise die, and fixed to the bars of the sculpture where they’ll thrive and grow into healthy colonies

The sculpture took several months to complete, and in that time it sat on my balcony as a lamp so it wasn’t entirely functionless

It won’t light up my bungalow any more, but it’ll be so much more useful to the marine life that will call it home