We have had a busy past few months doing some experimental fieldwork. This included a pilot study looking at some semi-artificial reef installations to see if juvenile paua would use some rock-filled cages for cover/shelter. These were designed to provide optimal habitat for wild paua, and possibly to use as deployment structures for paua reseeding efforts. In just a couple weeks we found that all sorts of animals had voluntarily crawled into the cages, including plenty of black and yellow paua aged 1-2 years. We were pretty excited at this response, which showed that the cages provided good protection for young paua. We’re following this up with some more experiments using the cages to test ideas about paua recruitment.
