Abstract
The deterioration of coral reefs is a serious environmental problem. Conventional conservation policies for terrestrial ecosystems are sometimes difficult to apply to coral reefs because of the large number of stakeholders. In an interesting attempt to solve this problem, some diving tours in Japan have begun to transplant coral fragments on to deteriorated coral reefs. However, the fragments used for transplantation are taken from natural coral colonies, causing potential problems. These include decreasing the fecundity of the donor colonies; having a negative effect on the surrounding environment of the exploited corals; and contributing to low species diversity of transplanted fragments. In this paper, we suggest that seedlings can be used for transplantation. This is costly but has a lower negative environmental effect. We show how to determine the optimal ratio of fragments and seedlings to produce the best environmental effect, depending on the cost and the environmental effect of each coral transplant.
