‘A Little Thank You Back’: Sub-Immersion, Hands-On Hope and Coral Kin-Making in a Restoration Nursery

Abstract

As restoration divers descend to care for corals in marine nurseries, their humanness is diluted. As a practice I conceptualise as sub-immersion, conservation diving as facilitated by the scuba assemblage, dissolves and disrupts human sensoria, making ontological room and supporting engaged practices of immersive care. It is at-depth, that divers make coral kin. Following the practice of in-situ nursery caretaking, this text centers the relationalities of divers and their corals as they meet via mucous-y, hands-on, cross-species encounters that amplify diver-reef intimacies, senses of protection and response-abilities in-water. Centred on experiences of ecological grief as motivating hopeful and intimate assisted-recovery, this article highlights findings gathered via ethnographic research at-depth in coral restoration nurseries on the Great Barrier Reef. Drawing from participant observation and semi-structured interviews with restoration practitioners, the writing frames reef restoration as a kin-making practice, enabled by corporeal submersion in water and ontological immersion in reef worlds.