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Supercharged coral vs climate change
OPINION INTERVIEW
Supercharged coral vs climate change By giving evolution a helping hand, Ruth Gates is creating corals tough enough to survive in increasingly hostile oceans
What does your coral project consist of?
It’s an ambitious project to breed coral able to survive the enormously challenging conditions brought on by climate change. Our research facility is on Coconut Island in Hawaii, a small island off the coast of Oahu, where the opening shots of the TV show Gilligan’s Island were filmed. It’s incredible. I get into a tiny boat each morning to go to work. The island is surrounded by coral reefs: I am literally sitting in the middle of our experiment. What are the goals of this work?
We are exploring why some corals survive conditions that kill others. We will then 26 | NewScientist | 9 April 2016
For more opinion articles, visit newscientist.com/opinion
Photographed for New Scientist by Elyse Butler Mallams
Profile Ruth Gates is a marine biologist and director of the University of Hawaii’s Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology at Coconut Island, where she leads the Gates Coral Lab
the rates of decline in reefs are outpacing their evolutionary capacity to adapt to ocean acidification and warming waters. But I’m trying to combat the doom and gloom surrounding the idea that virtually all corals will be dead by 2050. Such a scenario raises awareness about the need to mitigate the effects of climate change, but the message that all corals are going to die is not one that empowers and engages people. We should be doing everything we can to reduce our burning of fossil fuels, but in parallel we should be doing everything in our power to stop the decline of reefs.
their ability to respond to stress and imprint a memory they will retain and hopefully pass to their offspring via epigenetics. Thirdly, we will tweak the symbiosis a bit by introducing new high-performing algae that will feed the corals more efficiently, making them as healthy as possible to face the rigours of the future. Fourthly, my collaborator Madeleine van Oppen at the Institute of Marine Science in Australia will be hybridising corals, taking closely related species and creating offspring that we hope will be more resilient than either of the two parent species. What will you do with these “super corals”?
One threat to reefs is bleaching as a result of environmental stress. What happens?
You go from this teeming, brilliantly coloured, three-dimensional underwater city to a flat pavement covered with a scum of grey-green algae. It is very distressing! Coral polyps have these tiny plants, or microalgae, living inside their cells. The microscopic plants produce food and give it to the coral, so corals essentially have a food factory living within
“We’ll take high-performing corals – super-athletes – and breed them together ” their tissues. It is a mutually beneficial relationship. The brownish colour of typical corals reflects high densities of these microalgae within the polyp. When a coral undergoes some kind of stress – such as exposure to warmer water – you see a paling and whitening as the coral expels its algae. Is such bleaching terminal for a reef?
selectively cross-breed the healthiest specimens, a technique that is common in agriculture but has never been attempted in corals before. We’ll take high-performing individuals – super-athletes – and breed them together. By the end of our five-year mission, in 2020, we hope to have a significant stockpile of highly resilient coral strains and a plan in place to use them to restore completely denuded and partially damaged reefs in Hawaii and Australia. What’s the outlook for coral in general?
As a biologist who has looked at reefs for 30 years, I’m realistic about what I see – and it’s not pretty. Few would argue with the fact that
If severely bleached, the animals usually die. But if the stress is relieved before that stage, the microalgae in the corals will regrow and the coral will rebrown and survive. Hawaii had massive bleaching events in 2014 and 2015. But what is remarkable is that here in Kaneohe Bay, 70 per cent of the corals that bleached last year recovered. It shows that there is a surprising level of resilience in the system.
That’s the fifth and final step. We will assist in the migration of corals by introducing our best performers from places where they are doing well to places where corals and reefs are weaker, so they can reproduce with the existing population, making it hardier. Will you send Hawaiian super corals to Australia?
A coral reef in Hawaii has a very different species assembly from elsewhere in the Pacific, so we won’t be moving coral between Hawaii and Australia. The goal is to develop the capacity in both places to breed coral from the local stock for use in that location. How soon will you be introducing super corals?
We are currently in the proof-of-concept phase, determining whether or not we can actually breed super corals. Within a year or two, we aim to move some of our corals from our first group of experiments at inland nurseries to shallow-water nurseries in the ocean. These will be intermediate areas, where they will be observed prior to reintroduction to the reefs from which they came. What factors might cause your programme to falter?
If we already knew how to do it, it wouldn’t be cutting-edge science. But the issues that I anticipate relate to whether we can keep the corals alive in lab conditions for an extended period. For example, we are growing baby corals on tiles, and if we get an infection in one of the tanks, will we lose biology?
So does your project aim to harness this natural variability in resilience?
Is it difficult to grow coral in the lab?
Yes, and we are doing five things. First, we will selectively breed individuals of a given species on the reef that we know are doing well. Secondly, we will condition corals to make them more resilient to stress. In other words, we will have coral organisms in tanks and give them experiences that we think will mobilise
It is not easy. Coral is difficult to culture, which is why it generally doesn’t do well in aquaria. The advantage of our lab is that we are working adjacent to a coral reef and using unfiltered water pumped directly out of it. So we are taking the corals out of their native setting into as similar a one as we can possibly provide. > 9 April 2016 | NewScientist | 27
OPINION Will you need special permission to put these super corals on natural reefs?
Absolutely – we need to get permits from the Hawaiian government. The state has invested an enormous amount of money on an inland nursery that holds and grows endangered species of corals, so is very interested in our work, and we are discussing a partnership. We also need permission from local residents. It is important that we have this discussion with everybody to convince the public at large of the urgent need to act. Is this type of work truly necessary, given recent research on coral’s surprising ability to bounce back?
Yes, because whatever resilience is there in the system is being overwhelmed by the rate of change in the environment. Will nature repair itself? In some cases, yes, but for every story of spontaneous recovery, there are 10 stories of reefs that have been wiped out. Could releasing super corals have drawbacks for biodiversity?
Climate change has already wiped out 30 per cent of Hawaii’s corals – that’s a significant amount of diversity gone. The genetic narrowing that we are going to see with coral breeding should be considered against the backdrop of those kinds of ongoing losses. Is there an ethical dimension to altering reefs?
In places in Hawaii, we have completely denuded settings where there is no reef or fish left. People who live in those places and depend on the reef for their livelihood are saying that they absolutely want us to carry out these interventions. When a reef dies, islands lose a defence against storm waves and as a result can start to lose their land mass. And the people lose their main food source – with 70 per cent of the protein eaten in the Pacific coming from the reef – so they have to migrate, becoming refugees. The clear risk of doing nothing is a catastrophic ecological and social collapse. This seems a very proactive type of science.
There’s no time to waste, so we won’t be sitting on our results, waiting to publish them years later. We’ll be setting up websites and releasing our data as they come in, so that others can learn from our successes and failures at almost the same time as we do. It is a new collective form of science – a global collaboration with people as committed to the mission of saving reefs as we are. 28 | NewScientist | 9 April 2016
What sparked your passion for the oceans?
I call myself a child of Jacques Cousteau. His television shows, with those spectacular underwater visuals, were my inspiration. I also had an amazing lecturer who was able to make coral reefs come alive for me – in a classroom in the north of England, of all places. Can you imagine a world without reefs?
From top left: Reef coral (Pocillopora damicornis) in the lab; Gates and team take a close look; research boats on Coconut Island; coral (Montipora capitata) to be exposed to warmer, more acidic conditions
No, and no one should live with this outcome. Reefs are crucial to the biodiversity of the seas, providing nurseries where countless fish and other species live and reproduce, many of which we eat. But they are fabulous ethereal underwater gardens scaled like a cathedral – vast structures that you can see from space, created by millions of tiny organisms. Swimming among reefs, you have this incredible awareness of being in a world full of colour and teeming with life, created by something so much bigger than yourself. n Interview by Richard Schiffman
Supercharged coral vs climate change By giving evolution a helping hand, Ruth Gates is creating corals tough enough to survive in increasingly hostile oceans
What does your coral project consist of?
It’s an ambitious project to breed coral able to survive the enormously challenging conditions brought on by climate change. Our research facility is on Coconut Island in Hawaii, a small island off the coast of Oahu, where the opening shots of the TV show Gilligan’s Island were filmed. It’s incredible. I get into a tiny boat each morning to go to work. The island is surrounded by coral reefs: I am literally sitting in the middle of our experiment. What are the goals of this work?
We are exploring why some corals survive conditions that kill others. We will then 26 | NewScientist | 9 April 2016
For more opinion articles, visit newscientist.com/opinion
Photographed for New Scientist by Elyse Butler Mallams
Profile Ruth Gates is a marine biologist and director of the University of Hawaii’s Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology at Coconut Island, where she leads the Gates Coral Lab
the rates of decline in reefs are outpacing their evolutionary capacity to adapt to ocean acidification and warming waters. But I’m trying to combat the doom and gloom surrounding the idea that virtually all corals will be dead by 2050. Such a scenario raises awareness about the need to mitigate the effects of climate change, but the message that all corals are going to die is not one that empowers and engages people. We should be doing everything we can to reduce our burning of fossil fuels, but in parallel we should be doing everything in our power to stop the decline of reefs.
their ability to respond to stress and imprint a memory they will retain and hopefully pass to their offspring via epigenetics. Thirdly, we will tweak the symbiosis a bit by introducing new high-performing algae that will feed the corals more efficiently, making them as healthy as possible to face the rigours of the future. Fourthly, my collaborator Madeleine van Oppen at the Institute of Marine Science in Australia will be hybridising corals, taking closely related species and creating offspring that we hope will be more resilient than either of the two parent species. What will you do with these “super corals”?
One threat to reefs is bleaching as a result of environmental stress. What happens?
You go from this teeming, brilliantly coloured, three-dimensional underwater city to a flat pavement covered with a scum of grey-green algae. It is very distressing! Coral polyps have these tiny plants, or microalgae, living inside their cells. The microscopic plants produce food and give it to the coral, so corals essentially have a food factory living within
“We’ll take high-performing corals – super-athletes – and breed them together ” their tissues. It is a mutually beneficial relationship. The brownish colour of typical corals reflects high densities of these microalgae within the polyp. When a coral undergoes some kind of stress – such as exposure to warmer water – you see a paling and whitening as the coral expels its algae. Is such bleaching terminal for a reef?
selectively cross-breed the healthiest specimens, a technique that is common in agriculture but has never been attempted in corals before. We’ll take high-performing individuals – super-athletes – and breed them together. By the end of our five-year mission, in 2020, we hope to have a significant stockpile of highly resilient coral strains and a plan in place to use them to restore completely denuded and partially damaged reefs in Hawaii and Australia. What’s the outlook for coral in general?
As a biologist who has looked at reefs for 30 years, I’m realistic about what I see – and it’s not pretty. Few would argue with the fact that
If severely bleached, the animals usually die. But if the stress is relieved before that stage, the microalgae in the corals will regrow and the coral will rebrown and survive. Hawaii had massive bleaching events in 2014 and 2015. But what is remarkable is that here in Kaneohe Bay, 70 per cent of the corals that bleached last year recovered. It shows that there is a surprising level of resilience in the system.
That’s the fifth and final step. We will assist in the migration of corals by introducing our best performers from places where they are doing well to places where corals and reefs are weaker, so they can reproduce with the existing population, making it hardier. Will you send Hawaiian super corals to Australia?
A coral reef in Hawaii has a very different species assembly from elsewhere in the Pacific, so we won’t be moving coral between Hawaii and Australia. The goal is to develop the capacity in both places to breed coral from the local stock for use in that location. How soon will you be introducing super corals?
We are currently in the proof-of-concept phase, determining whether or not we can actually breed super corals. Within a year or two, we aim to move some of our corals from our first group of experiments at inland nurseries to shallow-water nurseries in the ocean. These will be intermediate areas, where they will be observed prior to reintroduction to the reefs from which they came. What factors might cause your programme to falter?
If we already knew how to do it, it wouldn’t be cutting-edge science. But the issues that I anticipate relate to whether we can keep the corals alive in lab conditions for an extended period. For example, we are growing baby corals on tiles, and if we get an infection in one of the tanks, will we lose biology?
So does your project aim to harness this natural variability in resilience?
Is it difficult to grow coral in the lab?
Yes, and we are doing five things. First, we will selectively breed individuals of a given species on the reef that we know are doing well. Secondly, we will condition corals to make them more resilient to stress. In other words, we will have coral organisms in tanks and give them experiences that we think will mobilise
It is not easy. Coral is difficult to culture, which is why it generally doesn’t do well in aquaria. The advantage of our lab is that we are working adjacent to a coral reef and using unfiltered water pumped directly out of it. So we are taking the corals out of their native setting into as similar a one as we can possibly provide. > 9 April 2016 | NewScientist | 27
OPINION Will you need special permission to put these super corals on natural reefs?
Absolutely – we need to get permits from the Hawaiian government. The state has invested an enormous amount of money on an inland nursery that holds and grows endangered species of corals, so is very interested in our work, and we are discussing a partnership. We also need permission from local residents. It is important that we have this discussion with everybody to convince the public at large of the urgent need to act. Is this type of work truly necessary, given recent research on coral’s surprising ability to bounce back?
Yes, because whatever resilience is there in the system is being overwhelmed by the rate of change in the environment. Will nature repair itself? In some cases, yes, but for every story of spontaneous recovery, there are 10 stories of reefs that have been wiped out. Could releasing super corals have drawbacks for biodiversity?
Climate change has already wiped out 30 per cent of Hawaii’s corals – that’s a significant amount of diversity gone. The genetic narrowing that we are going to see with coral breeding should be considered against the backdrop of those kinds of ongoing losses. Is there an ethical dimension to altering reefs?
In places in Hawaii, we have completely denuded settings where there is no reef or fish left. People who live in those places and depend on the reef for their livelihood are saying that they absolutely want us to carry out these interventions. When a reef dies, islands lose a defence against storm waves and as a result can start to lose their land mass. And the people lose their main food source – with 70 per cent of the protein eaten in the Pacific coming from the reef – so they have to migrate, becoming refugees. The clear risk of doing nothing is a catastrophic ecological and social collapse. This seems a very proactive type of science.
There’s no time to waste, so we won’t be sitting on our results, waiting to publish them years later. We’ll be setting up websites and releasing our data as they come in, so that others can learn from our successes and failures at almost the same time as we do. It is a new collective form of science – a global collaboration with people as committed to the mission of saving reefs as we are. 28 | NewScientist | 9 April 2016
What sparked your passion for the oceans?
I call myself a child of Jacques Cousteau. His television shows, with those spectacular underwater visuals, were my inspiration. I also had an amazing lecturer who was able to make coral reefs come alive for me – in a classroom in the north of England, of all places. Can you imagine a world without reefs?
From top left: Reef coral (Pocillopora damicornis) in the lab; Gates and team take a close look; research boats on Coconut Island; coral (Montipora capitata) to be exposed to warmer, more acidic conditions
No, and no one should live with this outcome. Reefs are crucial to the biodiversity of the seas, providing nurseries where countless fish and other species live and reproduce, many of which we eat. But they are fabulous ethereal underwater gardens scaled like a cathedral – vast structures that you can see from space, created by millions of tiny organisms. Swimming among reefs, you have this incredible awareness of being in a world full of colour and teeming with life, created by something so much bigger than yourself. n Interview by Richard Schiffman