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Anthropogenic stressors pose substantial threats to the existence of coral reefs. Achieving successful coral recruitment stands as a bottleneck in reef restoration and hybrid reef engineering efforts. Here, we enhance coral settlement through the development of biomimetic microhabitats that replicate the chemical landscape of healthy reefs. We engineered a soft biomaterial, SNAP-X, comprising silica nanoparticles (NPs), biopolymers, and algal exometabolites, to enrich reef microhabitats with bioactive molecules from crustose coralline algae (CCA). Coral settlement was enhanced over 20-fold using SNAP-X-coated substrates compared with uncoated controls. SNAP-X is designed to release chemical signals slowly (>1 month) under natural seawater conditions, and can be rapidly applied to natural reef substrates via photopolymerization, facilitating the light-assisted 3D printing of microengineered habitats. We anticipate that these biomimetic chemical microhabitats will be widely used to augment coral settlement on degraded reefs and to support ecosystem processes on hybrid reefs. 

Abstract Marine organisms are increasingly recognized as both responding to and driving biogeochemical changes in their environment. The addition of exogenous resources to the ocean, such as nutrients, that alter organismal physiology can lead to biogeochemical cascades wherein these solutes both alter water chemistry directly and indirectly by changing biological processes that influence water chemistry. To quantify how allochthonous nutrients drive biogeochemical cascades, we measured a suite of biogeochemical parameters during synoptic spatial surveys across two reefs in Mo’orea, French Polynesia conducted day and night at both low and high tide in two different seasons. These data were used to build a model that demonstrates how inputs of nutrients to coral reefs via submarine groundwater discharge directly alter reef metabolism with cascading effects on the cycling of dissolved organic and inorganic carbon that regulate productivity, calcification, and the microbial loop.