The Sydney Opera House, in partnership with the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and the University of Sydney, has begun a collaborative research project to restore the natural habitat of native marine life in and around Sydney Harbour. The three-year project involves installing pseudo apartment blocks for fish, which will act as artificial reefs. These will hopefully attract native sea life – such as baby blue gropers and seahorses – and create retreats for other species, too. Nine one-metre-long hexagonal-shaped modules (made of fibreglass and concrete) will be placed around Bennelong Point to mimic the original habitats of local sea life (such as rocky reef edges and mangroves) that existed in the harbour before it was interfered with by construction. The existing human-made sandstone seawalls that have replaced up to 50 per cent of Sydney’s natural foreshore have caused a reduction in marine life over time.

Reef designer David Lennon of Reef Design Lab, a not-for-profit design studio based in Melbourne, will design the new underwater retreats. The plan is to have them installed by this summer, if the final stages of permission run smoothly. “We hope to see little juvenile fishes inhabiting these structures that probably wouldn’t have otherwise been in this area [because] there is more habitat and more places for them to hide,” David Booth, lead researcher and UTS Professor of Marine Biology, told Broadsheet.“They are not enormous structures, it’s really just an add-on to the rock wall … to increase the habitat complexity for the little fish,” he says.