From Balls of Concrete To Habitats for Sea Life

'Designer Reefs' Proliferate As a Tool to Counter the Toll Of Pollutants, Overfishing







Designer reefs made from concrete balls help replace and support natural ones as overfishing, pollutants and disease take a toll on vital ecosystems. WSJ's Guatam Naik reports.




Shown at low tide, the breakwater helps  reduce beach erosion. ENLARGE
Shown at low tide, the breakwater helps reduce beach erosion.



In Mexico, authorities from the National Marine Park off Cancun are relying on Mr. Barber's expertise to safeguard their reefs, which have been damaged by boat groundings, powerful hurricanes and a crush of tourists. Many snorkelers, for example, are nowadays dispatched to artificial reefs with terrestrial pedigrees instead of those that sprouted from sea beds. "The natural reefs need to rest," says Jaime Gonzalez Cano, director of the Cancun marine park, who estimates 600,000 snorkelers and divers visit the area every year.

Molded from concrete, a reef ball can be as small as a basketball or as large as a car. An inflatable bladder placed in its hollow center allows the ball to float, making it easy to transport and maneuver in the water. Fragments of living coral are glued to the surface of the ball, which is then submerged. If all goes well, the coral grows and eventually attracts fish and other marine life.

Rescued corals growing ENLARGE
Rescued corals growing

Mr. Barber's team and the Mexican authorities have placed reef balls in three locations near Cancun. During a dive at one of the sites, Mr. Barber pointed out several reef balls that had been planted with coral fragments a month earlier. The balls still had little growth, looking more like huge, abandoned Wiffle balls than anything Jacques Cousteau might have happened on.

At the second location, where 100 balls were placed in 2004, large sea fans waved in the current and tropical fish darted through the reef's hollows. But even artificial structures are vulnerable: When Hurricane Dean hit Mexico in August, it tore a lot of soft growth, including colorful sponges and barnacles, from the reef balls.

The reef balls at the third site, 30 feet down, weren't planted with coral fragments. Instead, in a decade's time, coral, sponges and other organisms sprouted spontaneously on the concrete surfaces and attracted a multitude of fish. When one of the divers brushed aside some sea grass to get a better photograph of a moray eel, the frightened creature slithered from its cranny and lunged at him. "It almost got my hand," said the diver, who was equally startled.

Mr. Barber got interested in restoring coral reefs in 1988, when a hurricane wiped out a Cayman Islands reef he first visited as a teenager. Sitting on the beach with his dad, he wondered what would happen if a beach ball plastered with concrete was rolled onto the ocean floor. Would coral eventually sprout on its surface?

Early experiments suggested it would. So Mr. Barber quit his lucrative job as a consultant at Towers Perrin and put $50,000 of his savings toward making reef balls. In 1996, Mr. Barber turned his company into a nonprofit, publicly audited foundation, figuring that would lead governments -- some of his biggest clients -- to trust it more. The group has coral experts and volunteers who install reef balls all over the world.

Others have licensed the technology. Eternal Reefs Inc., of Decatur, Ga., charges as much as $6,500 to put a person's cremated remains into a reef ball. (It asks less for animal burials.) The Reef Ball Foundation gets part of the revenue and has final say about where the balls will be placed.

Mr. Barber says his foundation, based in Athens, Ga., will oversee the installation of 100,000 reef balls this year, double the number in 2006. It costs an average of $500 to make and install a single reef ball. There are now 550,000 in waters around the world. The president of the United Arab Emirates has them fringing an island he owns.

Says Mr. Barber: "We're trying to keep up with global warming" and other factors that imperil reefs. "You've got to be an optimist and keep plugging on."

Write to Gautam Naik at

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