The title of this article in Ecological Restoration also happens to be a research question: “Should Coral Fragments Collected for Restoration be Subdivided to Create More, Smaller Pieces for Transplanting?” Rephrased a bit to tell the researcher more about data, it would be “Do smaller coral fragments have a higher success rate for reef restoration than larger fragments?” The topic is reef restoration, and the data they were seeking was coral growth, which is an event/act, which they gathered by detached observation. Going more in-depth, they gathered fragments of coral that had already been broken off of their original colonies by storms, and transplanted them to a different reef. To compare larger versus smaller fragment growth, they matched their fragments by size and split one half of the pair into several small pieces and left the other intact, then attached them close together on the new reef, tagging each individual fragment. They measured the surface area of each fragment after three and twelve months. They analyzed this data comparatively by cross-tabulating the amounts of experimental coral versus control coral that survived, and found that in their experiment the smaller fragments were less likely to survive than the larger ones.

This research was relatively easy to match to the six research design steps, and the method was easy to follow, knowing a little bit about coral propagation. It seems like a very easy and replicable experiment, but the actual work of transplanting and monitoring takes up a lot of resources. Also, it would have been better to check back on the coral after several years as well as several months, because as it is, they only learned about oral survival, and not whether smaller or larger fragments grew quicker, as coral is very slow-growing. For short-term restoration, at least, larger fragments seem to definitely be better.

Forrester, G., Dauksis, R., & Ferguson, M. (2013). Should Coral Fragments Collected for Restoration be Subdivided to Create More, Smaller Pieces for Transplanting? Ecological Restoration, 31(1), 4-7. doi:10.3368/er.31.1.4