izard

In the north-western corner of Bali, close to a ferry to Java and a national park, there is a fishing village of Pemuteran. It was famous for excellent coral few decades ago. Eventually most of the coral was broken, partially because of a high tech fishing (using explosives and cyanide)

After local ppl found that stream of tourists has nearly vanished, they decided to re-grow a coral. Explosives fishing was banned, but normally new coral would take tens of years to appear. So they decided to help coral by creating a steel frames underwater, connected to direct current generated by small wind turbines. The current performs electrolysis releasing calcium that is used by newly planted corals to build themselves.

Few pics under cut.

It takes about 30 euro to weld your name to a frame used to grow a coral.

See bottom right corner. I did not pay anything, but we were customers of a local hotel, dive shop that contribute to the project.

Besides vanity frames with names, there are many which are interesting by their own.

E.g. this Budda structure.

Or this anti-tank barricade.

Right behind the barricade there is a big dome.

When I was diving to the bottom of a dome (about 6 meters) I could see some of more shy fish hiding inside.

That was the only moment I was a bit jealous about scuba divers. They can enter the dome freely, and I was reluctant, because I have a hard limit of about one minute under water.

Nevertheless, this artificial coral is too young to host huge variety of fish we've seen elsewhere. Only starfish was abundant, mostly blue and yellow.