He would not have dared to do not dare to dream that Sander van Lopik, tinkering with his home aquarium, would end up on Bonaire on behalf of Diergaarde Blijdorp when he started his training as a animal caretaker. Now a floating fish nursery he devised in the waters around that special municipality of the Netherlands is sailing in the Caribbean. Small in size, but with a large goal: ensuring that the Coral reef ecosystem continues to exist until the end of time.
Sander van Lopik (32) laughs warmly when he tells this, in his office above the Oceanium of the Rotterdam Zoo Blijdorp. There he was given the space to let his fascination for coral run free and to capture his endless electricity associations and ideas in Roffareefs, started as a start-up that now uses the zoo for coral conservation as a program under the flag. Not by repairing or growing coral, as happens in other places. But by focusing on the indispensable residents of coral: fishing. And to investigate how fish populations can be enlarged at reefs.
The floating fish nursery at sea at Bonaire.
Photo Roffareefs
Because people often forget, says Van Lopik, that corals can not only exist on their own. „Vissen zijn een essentieel onderdeel van dat ecosysteem. Boven water heb je jagers, grazers, omnivoren, onder water is dat niet anders. Neem de doktersvis, dezelfde als Dory uit de gelijknamige Disneyfilm: de tuinman van het rif. Hij graast in wat ik ook wel de koraaltuinen noem. Door de algen en wieren die op de koraalskeletten groeien af te knabbelen, zorgen zij ervoor dat die tuinen niet Overgrowth.
In an aquarium the size of a large TV furniture, he shows how that works. In it, different coral species in all colors grow in the wild, but here live together with all kinds of fish – including the cube cup fish, the Juffer (“The most beautiful colored rat of the sea”), the parrot and the doctor’s fish. “This aquarium already has more residents than the whole of Rotterdam,” says Van Lopik, pointing to countless polyps, algae and invisible microorganisms that together form a self-containing ecosystem.
Coral reefs are among the most biodiverse ecosystems in the world. Due to the warming of the oceans, as a result of climate change, overfishing and tourism, coral reefs die rapidly. Around 50 percent of the living coral is left worldwide, according to estimates that can still be 15 percent in ten years. “The Coral ecosystem is now collapsing worldwide, we can see that,” says Van Lopik. “Perhaps that also triggers the balance of the entire ecosystem of the oceans, we don’t know.”
Van Lopik fell under the spell of underwater life during his many internships during his training as an animal caretaker, and in Burgers Zoo, where they house the largest living coral reef in Europe. He noticed that the watercolors know so much about the individual fish and that their function is often described extensively. But that at the same time there is so little knowledge about their role in the larger ecosystem.
“We look at the reef with a helicopter tin and see that the fish has an important function in it,” says Van Lopik, who emphasizes that he himself is not a scientist, “but at the same time we don’t look at what that fish needs to live within it.” A remarkable blind spot, finds the tree -length Van Lopik (“I am 1.99 meters”), which visibly thinks, with a mobile mouth and eyes that fly in all directions. “This way we don’t even know exactly when they are building a lot of fish. How can you help fish if you don’t even know and understand the beginning of their lives?”
We even let herbivores eat fish, while they would never do that in the wild
His insight that it lacks that knowledge led Van Lopik to focus on breeding fish in the sea, instead of imitating sea conditions in a container. That sounds simple, yet it was not done before. Van Lopik also started in the aquarium, where he tried in vain for a year and a half to get coral devils. The eggs never achieved more than eight days. “That is, I think, because we give fishing in aquariums what we have, even though that does not fit in with their needs,” he says. “Instead of looking at what that fish actually needs.”
Just look at the food that gets fish, says Van Lopik. Van Lopik shows a bucket of fish food in the storage of Blijdorp. Ingredients: fish and fish derivatives – without clear origin. “We even let herbivores eat fish, while they would never do that in the wild,” he says. Researchers already found in American animal food remains of endangered shark species, and Van Lopik suspects that the same applies to fishmeal. That is why he developed vegan fish food, the first step of Roffareefs. He also designed a 3D-printed ‘rack’ with which fish can eat grazily, just like on the reef, instead of shocking all the food in one go.
Thanks to 3D-printed ‘ruiven’, fish can eat grazing food, just like on the reef.
Photo Walter Autumn
His next step was the fish farm. “We know how fish are reproducing,” says Van Lopik, “they shoot hom and calf – either eggs and sperm cells. They release fishing at once, creating a cloud. When they come together, they become eggs that float through the ocean with millions of other eggs. I also call it a limited number of fishing, in the animal soup: in the animal soup is in the point: in the point in the point: in the point in the point is in the point in the point in the point in the point in the point, in the dier’s point: in the animal soup. Ocean of by far the most fish eggs do not come from which knowledge does not exist. ”
Simultaneously with the launch of the floating breeding system on Bonaire, in which self -caught fishing eggs in a protected environment spend the first week of their lives, so that they have more chance of survival, Roffareefs therefore also started a database of fishing eggs. “Going on Eggs pedition, I call it,” he grins. In it they record on the basis of DNA tests which eggs they find and what they look like. “Of the 350 fish species that are known to occur at Bonaire, 80 percent reproduce pelagically [waarbij de eitjes in open water worden losgelaten]. Of twelve species, it was known what the eggs look like, twelve! ” says Van Lopik.
Part of a prototype of the floating fishing nursery.
Photo Walter Autumn
The social context in which nature exists is often forgotten
On Bonaire, where Roffareefs was able to experiment through the innovation fund of the World Wildlife Fund, Van Lopik put his living room ideas into practice. “It may not be crazy for zoo people to think in boxes,” he says, “but because of those lofts, we should not really get new things done.” For Van Lopik, not only science is important, but also the nature with which he works. And the local – and social environment that is in contact with that nature.
For example, he contacted Bonaire active contact with local fishermen. “They are often seen by many people, nature conservationists, often as guilty of going back to nature, because they would be responsible for overfishing,” says Van Lopik. “While they have just as much importance as we that the fish population remains up to date.”
The members of the Piskabon fishing cooperative became an important partner of Roffareefs. “They feel seriously taken by us,” says Van Lopik. “Now they help us. For example, we asked which month in which they came across certain fish in the abdomen when cleaning certain fish. Now we know – without this being scientifically recorded – at which specific moments of fishermen better skip a day of fishing, to give that first life more chance.”
Coral conservation – and nature conservation in a broader sense – is often aimed at a small part, says Van Lopik, on box thinking, “but the social context in which nature exists is often forgotten.” With Roffareefs, he hopes to further spread that way of thinking. For Van Lopik it is simple: more fishing in the sea means a better chance for the reef and for the fishermen who have been living there for centuries. “Different,” he says, “will only remain the aquarium to show how it once was.”
In the Oceanium lab, single -cell algae are grown as food for plankton and shellfish, such as oysters. Plankton is used to, among other things, carry jellyfers in mangroves, fish larvae and corals.
Photo Walter Autumn