WEBVTT
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Good evening, everyone.
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We're pleased to have you join us
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for our annual Seaside Chats speaker series
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about ocean topics associated with Flower Garden Banks
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National Marine Sanctuary and the Gulf of Mexico.
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This year, we are also part
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of the National Marine Sanctuaries Webinar Series,
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which is hosted by NOAA's Office
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of National Marine Sanctuaries.
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And we are also part of the NOAA Science Seminar Series.
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During the presentation, all attendees
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will be in listen-only mode.
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You are welcome to type questions for the presenter
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into the question box at the bottom of the control panel
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on the right-hand side of your screen.
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This is the same area you can let us know
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about any technical issues you may be having.
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We will be monitoring incoming questions
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and technical issues, and we'll respond to them
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as soon as we can.
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We are recording this session and we'll post the recording
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to the National Marine Sanctuaries
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and Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary websites.
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We will notify registered participants via email
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when these recordings are available.
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And for those of you who are educators,
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we have provided a Coral Spawning Globe activity,
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a Splitting Coral Polyp diagram,
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and a Predator-Prey Interactions in the Ocean activity
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in the handouts pane of the control panel.
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Simply click on these items to download them.
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The Seaside Chats speaker series began as a way
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for Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary
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to share current research and management efforts
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in the Gulf of Mexico in an informal setting.
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These chats started in 2012 with presentations
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in the gift shop of the Galveston Fishing Pier.
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From one year to the next, we moved around
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the Galveston community, hosting presentations
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at Moody Gardens, Texas A&M Galveston,
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Texas Seaport Museum, and Sea Star Base Galveston.
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In 2020, we brought the presentations home to our offices
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at historic Fort Crockett just before the world shut down
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for the pandemic.
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And although we have offered webinar connections
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during our live events for many years, it wasn't until 2021
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that we went completely virtual and joined forces
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with the National Marine Sanctuaries webinar series.
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In all that time, our Seaside Chats only missed one year,
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2019, which makes this our 10th year of presentations.
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We've chosen to recognize this milestone
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with a brand new graphic that you see here.
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We hope you agree with us that this comfortable chair
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by the sea at sunset captures the essence of our program.
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Hello, everyone, my name is Kelly Drinnen,
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and I'm the education and outreach specialist
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for Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary.
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I'll be facilitating today's webinar from Dickinson, Texas.
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Also with me today is Leslie Whaylen Clift,
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our constituency affairs coordinator,
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and Leslie will be helping me with back end administration
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of this webinar.
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50 years ago, the United States ushered in a new era
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of ocean conservation by creating
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the National Marine Sanctuary system.
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Since then, we've grown into a nationwide network
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of 15 National Marine Sanctuaries
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and two Marine National Monuments
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that conserve more than 620,000 square miles
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of spectacular ocean and Great Lakes waters.
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That's an area nearly the size of Alaska.
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These marine protected areas
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are somewhat like national parks
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and national forests, but underwater.
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In celebration of this 50th anniversary,
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we are running a Save Spectacular campaign
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across the entire sanctuary system, a way to remind everyone
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just how special these places really are.
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The National Marine Sanctuaries Act gives NOAA the authority
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to designate special areas of the marine environment
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as National Marine Sanctuaries.
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It also mandates that the Office
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of National Marine Sanctuaries conduct research, monitoring,
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resource protection, education, outreach,
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and management of America's underwater treasures
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to preserve them for future generations.
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In addition to being places for recreation and research,
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National Marine Sanctuaries are also living classrooms
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where people can see, touch, and learn
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about the nation's Great Lakes and ocean treasures.
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This webinar series is just one part
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of that national education and outreach effort.
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Today's Seaside Chat series is hosted
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by Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary,
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the only National Marine Sanctuary in the Gulf of Mexico.
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This sanctuary consists of 17 banks,
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or small underwater mountains, that are home
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to some of the healthiest coral reefs in the world,
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amazing algal and sponge communities, and deep reef habitats
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featuring an abundance of black corals.
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The original sanctuary designation took place in January
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of 1992, so just a few weeks ago,
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we celebrated our 30th anniversary.
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As you can see, 2022 is turning out
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to be quite the anniversary year.
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Today's presentation focuses
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on the Sex Lives of Corals, which exhibit some
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of the most fascinating reproductive behavior
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in the animal kingdom.
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Once a year, they release their eggs and sperm
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into the water column for external fertilization,
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a strategy that enables corals,
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which are usually stuck in one place,
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to disperse to new reefs.
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This spawning behavior also allows coral researchers
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to study a variety of different topics
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to better understand coral symbiosis, dispersal,
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and responses to climate change.
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Our speaker today will share some
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of the exciting research her lab is doing,
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including some of the ways this research
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might inform coral conservation.
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Today, we welcome Dr. Sarah Davies,
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assistant professor of biology at Boston University,
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to talk about her work with corals.
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Sarah earned her Masters of Science
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from the University of Calgary in 2009
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and her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014.
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In 2014, she worked as a post-doctoral researcher
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at the University of North Carolina, and in 2016,
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she became a Simon's Foundation Fellow
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of the Life Sciences Research Foundation.
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Sarah is an integrative biologist
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and her expertise includes ecological genomics,
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population genetics, physiology, and marine biology.
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Her research largely focuses on how corals respond
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to climate change.
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She's also deeply passionate about mentorship
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and its ability to facilitate increased representation
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of marginalized scholars in STEM learning,
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which is science, technology, engineering, and math.
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Sarah has worked at the Flower Garden Banks since 2007,
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and although she has spent time on many reefs
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around the world, the annual coral spawning event
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at Flower Garden Banks remains one
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of her field work highlights to this date.
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Welcome, Sarah.
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Thanks, Kelly.
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I'm gonna share.
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All right.
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So thanks for-
Let's go, I can-
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Can you hear me?
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Yes, I can.
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Cool.
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And we're prepared to show your screen.
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All right.
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Okay, so sharing, okay, so first off,
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thanks so much for the invite today.
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Sarah, it's not quite, it's not in full screen,
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there we go, now it's full screen.
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Okay I think there's a little bit of a lag,
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so I'll apologize in advance.
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But yeah, so Kelly, thanks so much
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for the invite to talk to everyone tonight.
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You know, I think COVID has taught us that virtual learning
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is really effective, so hopefully,
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I can teach you something about the sex lives of corals,
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thinking about coral spawning and coral conservation.
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For any of you out there interested in following me
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on Twitter, I share a lot of our lab's research
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and talk a lot about mentorship and being a mom,
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so if you're interested in any of those things,
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feel free to give me a follow on Twitter.
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So yeah, I'm an assistant professor at Boston University
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and we work a lot on Flower Garden Banks coral,
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so I'm excited to talk to you about that tonight.
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So I have three sections of the talk.
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The first is kind of like a Coral 101,
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so we're gonna talk about corals, are they animals,
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rocks, or plants, and talk about how they're in peril.
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The second part of the talk
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is gonna talk about their very intriguing sex life.
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And the third part is thinking about more of my research,
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from coral spawning to coral conservation.
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All right, so we'll start here, so corals.
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Whenever I talk to people about corals,
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they're always like, have opinions about,
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whether they're animals, rocks, or plants.
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And the answer is they're all three and you're not wrong
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if you think they're an animal or a rock or a plant,
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but if you think they're all three, then you win a prize.
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And that prize is just that you get a high five.
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But corals are animals, so this is a picture I took
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of a coral in Micronesia in 2010,
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so when I was a budding marine biologist.
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And this is a branching coral, quite beautiful.
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And if you zoomed in on this,
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you would see what coral nerds call polyps.
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So this is a single coral polyp, this individual here,
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so these are two polyps, and they're genetically identical.
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So all of the polyps on this coral reproduce asexually
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to make these colonies. But these are animals,
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they look kind of like anemones, and that's because
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I'll tell you in a second they're related.
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So when we think about the tree of metazoan life
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or animal life, we have everything
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from sponges all the way up to humans.
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And corals are here, so corals are in the phylum Cnidaria.
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So they are related to jellyfish and anemones,
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so like Finding Nemo's home.
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So here is the coral, and they're distantly related to us
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and these lovely women here who won the Nobel Prize.
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So corals are most definitely animals,
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but they're also most definitely rocks.
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So when you look at this, if you were to touch it
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on the reef, which you shouldn't
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because it would hurt the coral,
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but you would feel that it is rough and feels like a rock.
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And that is because if you zoomed in
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and took off the coral layer, you would see
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these beautiful structures of calcium carbonate.
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And this is the structure that the corals actually accrete.
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And when they grow, they accrete on top of,
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I'll show you in a second but,
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and this is this beautiful lattice structure
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that's made of calcium carbonate.
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And when you take a cross-section,
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so now this is a cross-section of a coral polyp,
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and one interesting fact about the coral here
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is that its mouth is also its butt.
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So they only have one opening here to the outside world.
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And here, we have the polyp and it's integrating here in
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with the calcium carbonate skeleton,
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and this is where the coral will accrete
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that calcium carbonate skeleton.
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So the coral literally builds this structure itself,
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so this animal literally builds this beautiful structure,
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and these structures have fascinated biologists forever,
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you know, finding little pieces of coral on the beach,
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they come in these beautiful variety of forms.
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And when we think about it on a reef scale,
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you have all of these beautiful shapes made
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by all of these different species to produce coral reefs.
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So they're most definitely rocks.
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But they're also plants, or actually algae, to be specific.
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So if we zoom in here, now we're looking
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at a single polyp again.
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But if you look at this, this polyp has this coloration.
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And these are single-celled algae
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in the family Symbiodiniaceae.
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Don't try to spell it, it's a new word in our world
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that's quite challenging.
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But all of these little brown smudges are algal symbionts.
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And these algal symbionts actually live inside the coral
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in a vesicle called the symbiosome, so it's intracellular.
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And so this is a brain coral now, but if we look in,
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now we're looking down at the coral's mouth.
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And this yellow and green part here is,
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we're looking in a fluorescent microscope.
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So the yellow and green are innate fluorescence
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that the coral actually makes itself.
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And then every single red dot you see
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is a single algal cell.
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00:12:23.030 --> 00:12:26.190
So the algal cells are fluorescing in the red color here
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because of chlorophyll fluorescence.
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00:12:28.580 --> 00:12:30.600
So this is what algae look like in culture.
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So they're pretty cute, but maybe not as charismatic
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as the corals, but when we think about
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the symbiotic relationship, the majority of tropical corals,
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this relationship is actually mandatory or obligate.
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So when we think about what the corals get
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from the symbionts, well, just like trees,
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the algae will photosynthesize
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and they give the coral, 'cause they're intracellular,
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00:12:52.110 --> 00:12:54.550
they give them their carbon sugars.
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So it's a byproduct of photosynthesis,
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the algae doesn't need it.
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00:12:57.800 --> 00:13:02.800
And in return, the coral will actually give the algae CO2,
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which it needs for photosynthesis,
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00:13:04.840 --> 00:13:06.100
and also, it gets a free home,
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00:13:06.100 --> 00:13:08.760
so it's a pretty good deal for everyone.
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But these corals are in peril, so this reef on the left,
283
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you'll see all the beautiful colors,
284
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the browns and the greens and the yellows,
285
00:13:15.560 --> 00:13:17.340
that's all healthy coral.
286
00:13:17.340 --> 00:13:20.130
And then this reef on the right is called bleached.
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00:13:20.130 --> 00:13:23.940
So the reef on the right is quite sick.
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00:13:23.940 --> 00:13:26.510
So why is it sick? Well, I'm gonna tell you.
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So this is our Earth. We're somewhere,
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I'm not sure where you are, I'm somewhere up here,
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00:13:30.460 --> 00:13:32.960
and it's very chilly.
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00:13:32.960 --> 00:13:34.670
I think some of you all are down here in Texas
293
00:13:34.670 --> 00:13:36.880
where it's a lot warmer today than, I know you think
294
00:13:36.880 --> 00:13:39.417
it's cold, but you should be in Boston right now.
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00:13:40.690 --> 00:13:43.260
And the Earth is beautiful, but why is it habitable
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where our other planets are not?
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00:13:45.150 --> 00:13:49.400
It has these greenhouse gases that make up the atmosphere.
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00:13:49.400 --> 00:13:51.790
These gases are water vapor, carbon dioxide,
299
00:13:51.790 --> 00:13:54.590
methane, nitrous oxide, and together,
300
00:13:54.590 --> 00:13:58.450
these gases make up our atmosphere.
301
00:13:58.450 --> 00:14:01.689
And so what happens when the sun is shining,
302
00:14:01.689 --> 00:14:04.450
the sun rays will come in and some of them will bounce off,
303
00:14:04.450 --> 00:14:06.410
like you can see happening here,
304
00:14:06.410 --> 00:14:08.090
but some of them will make it in.
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00:14:08.090 --> 00:14:10.200
And they serve to warm up the Earth,
306
00:14:10.200 --> 00:14:12.030
and actually, our greenhouse gas
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00:14:12.030 --> 00:14:15.610
is what makes it actually habitable on Earth.
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00:14:15.610 --> 00:14:19.650
But what's happening now is that we are increasing CO2
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00:14:19.650 --> 00:14:21.960
or carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
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And like I told you,
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00:14:23.140 --> 00:14:26.500
this CO2 is one of the greenhouse gases,
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00:14:26.500 --> 00:14:28.870
so this is serving to have more gases
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00:14:28.870 --> 00:14:31.230
in this greenhouse layer.
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00:14:31.230 --> 00:14:33.700
So this is data from January 11th,
315
00:14:33.700 --> 00:14:36.420
this is from Scripps Institute of Oceanography,
316
00:14:36.420 --> 00:14:39.350
and this is looking through pretty deep time
317
00:14:39.350 --> 00:14:42.490
through ice-core data, looking at the CO2 concentration
318
00:14:42.490 --> 00:14:45.300
in parts per million on the Y axis
319
00:14:45.300 --> 00:14:47.490
through time on the X axis.
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00:14:47.490 --> 00:14:50.280
So as you can see, CO2 levels in the atmosphere
321
00:14:50.280 --> 00:14:51.660
were under 300.
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00:14:51.660 --> 00:14:54.590
And then since the Industrial Revolution, just after 1950,
323
00:14:54.590 --> 00:14:58.570
we see this really strong increase in CO2 in the atmosphere.
324
00:14:58.570 --> 00:15:02.250
And this was, you know, I guess a month ago now,
325
00:15:02.250 --> 00:15:07.150
but for reference, when I, in 2010, when I started my PhD,
326
00:15:07.150 --> 00:15:08.670
this number was under 400.
327
00:15:08.670 --> 00:15:10.540
So just in this short amount of time,
328
00:15:10.540 --> 00:15:12.850
we've been able to see this quite large increase
329
00:15:12.850 --> 00:15:14.393
in CO2 in the atmosphere.
330
00:15:15.630 --> 00:15:17.830
And what this means is that that's more
331
00:15:17.830 --> 00:15:20.460
of these gases in our atmosphere,
332
00:15:20.460 --> 00:15:22.130
so that means that more of the sun's rays
333
00:15:22.130 --> 00:15:24.130
are getting stuck inside.
334
00:15:24.130 --> 00:15:26.230
And what that means is that it's getting hotter.
335
00:15:26.230 --> 00:15:28.530
So now we're looking at thousands of years ago,
336
00:15:28.530 --> 00:15:29.800
so this is today.
337
00:15:29.800 --> 00:15:33.640
So this is today's CO2 level, so this is above 400 here.
338
00:15:33.640 --> 00:15:37.650
And so the orange is CO2 and the blue is temperature.
339
00:15:37.650 --> 00:15:38.483
And what we can see
340
00:15:38.483 --> 00:15:40.600
is that they're tightly correlated through time.
341
00:15:40.600 --> 00:15:43.730
So when there's high CO2, there's high temperature,
342
00:15:43.730 --> 00:15:45.800
and when there's low CO2, there's lower temperatures,
343
00:15:45.800 --> 00:15:47.750
and they're tightly correlated through time.
344
00:15:47.750 --> 00:15:50.210
And so what we're seeing in today's world when CO2
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00:15:50.210 --> 00:15:53.540
is at levels we haven't seen for hundreds of thousands
346
00:15:53.540 --> 00:15:57.000
of years, we're seeing increases in temperature.
347
00:15:57.000 --> 00:15:58.830
So this is looking at the 20 hottest
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00:15:58.830 --> 00:16:02.700
and 20 coldest years since 1880.
349
00:16:02.700 --> 00:16:05.040
And what we can see is that the 20 hottest years
350
00:16:05.040 --> 00:16:06.713
have all been since 1995.
351
00:16:07.927 --> 00:16:12.870
And this is from 2018, but 19 and 20 and 2021
352
00:16:12.870 --> 00:16:15.493
were all also now in the 20 hottest.
353
00:16:16.700 --> 00:16:17.940
And so what does this do for corals?
354
00:16:17.940 --> 00:16:20.230
This causes what I'm sure many of you have heard of
355
00:16:20.230 --> 00:16:21.670
is called coral bleaching.
356
00:16:21.670 --> 00:16:23.260
So this is that healthy coral,
357
00:16:23.260 --> 00:16:25.450
where we can see its little polyp
358
00:16:26.295 --> 00:16:27.960
with its algal symbionts inside.
359
00:16:27.960 --> 00:16:30.410
And this is in its healthy symbiosis.
360
00:16:30.410 --> 00:16:34.840
But when it's too hot, lots of researchers study why,
361
00:16:34.840 --> 00:16:36.990
but the corals' symbiotic relationship
362
00:16:36.990 --> 00:16:38.630
with this algae is lost.
363
00:16:38.630 --> 00:16:41.750
And these are all the algae being expelled from the coral,
364
00:16:41.750 --> 00:16:44.820
and the coral now just looks like a jellyfish,
365
00:16:44.820 --> 00:16:46.630
so it's see-through and all you see
366
00:16:46.630 --> 00:16:48.890
is the coral's calcium carbonate skeleton.
367
00:16:48.890 --> 00:16:51.780
So it looks white, hence the name bleached.
368
00:16:51.780 --> 00:16:54.260
And this process of coral bleaching can,
369
00:16:54.260 --> 00:16:56.630
corals can recover from this if the stressor
370
00:16:56.630 --> 00:16:59.740
like the high temperatures like go back down
371
00:16:59.740 --> 00:17:02.800
or whatever stress was causing the bleaching,
372
00:17:02.800 --> 00:17:04.670
and they can recover their symbionts.
373
00:17:04.670 --> 00:17:07.270
However, like I told you, corals get their food
374
00:17:07.270 --> 00:17:08.250
from their algae.
375
00:17:08.250 --> 00:17:10.580
So if they're in this bleached state for too long,
376
00:17:10.580 --> 00:17:14.080
they will die of starvation and then they'll be covered
377
00:17:14.080 --> 00:17:17.833
in turf algae, and the rest is history.
378
00:17:19.130 --> 00:17:20.150
So coral bleaching
379
00:17:20.150 --> 00:17:23.800
is becoming a very massive problem globally.
380
00:17:23.800 --> 00:17:26.260
It's been referred to as the coral bleaching crisis.
381
00:17:26.260 --> 00:17:28.440
This is looking at the Great Barrier Reef,
382
00:17:28.440 --> 00:17:30.760
and there's been back to back bleaching,
383
00:17:30.760 --> 00:17:33.060
mass bleaching events along the Great Barrier Reef.
384
00:17:33.060 --> 00:17:34.760
So in 2016,
385
00:17:34.760 --> 00:17:37.320
one of the biggest bleaching events ever happened,
386
00:17:37.320 --> 00:17:40.430
and anywhere you see a red dot is severe bleaching
387
00:17:40.430 --> 00:17:43.170
and a green dot means there was no bleaching
388
00:17:43.170 --> 00:17:44.397
or negligible bleaching.
389
00:17:44.397 --> 00:17:46.510
And we can see that in 2016, it was most
390
00:17:46.510 --> 00:17:49.430
of the northern Great Barrier Reef that gets hit.
391
00:17:49.430 --> 00:17:51.700
And then in 2017, there was another bleaching,
392
00:17:51.700 --> 00:17:54.210
so the next year, where we see the inner reefs in the north
393
00:17:54.210 --> 00:17:56.720
were hit and then the central reefs were.
394
00:17:56.720 --> 00:17:59.950
And then in 2020, we saw that all of the in-shore reefs,
395
00:17:59.950 --> 00:18:02.190
all of the center of the Great Barrier Reef
396
00:18:02.190 --> 00:18:04.920
and then the in-shore reefs again, were hit by bleaching.
397
00:18:04.920 --> 00:18:07.170
So very few reefs on the Great Barrier Reef
398
00:18:07.170 --> 00:18:09.500
have not experienced a bleaching event
399
00:18:09.500 --> 00:18:10.963
in the last five years.
400
00:18:12.150 --> 00:18:13.980
So what can corals do in response
401
00:18:13.980 --> 00:18:16.120
to these variety of stressors?
402
00:18:16.120 --> 00:18:18.500
They can bleach and die like we talked about,
403
00:18:18.500 --> 00:18:19.700
which is a major bummer.
404
00:18:20.700 --> 00:18:22.640
Or they can acclimate or adapt.
405
00:18:22.640 --> 00:18:25.040
So this is an individual coral that we are working on
406
00:18:25.040 --> 00:18:27.500
and this is a piece of the same colony,
407
00:18:27.500 --> 00:18:29.510
so all of these are genetically identical,
408
00:18:29.510 --> 00:18:31.430
and we put these pieces into a variety
409
00:18:31.430 --> 00:18:34.030
of different environments and watched what they did.
410
00:18:34.030 --> 00:18:35.610
And what they did, so some of them bleached,
411
00:18:35.610 --> 00:18:37.330
so this one's a little bit bleached.
412
00:18:37.330 --> 00:18:39.200
This is our control fragment, some of them turned
413
00:18:39.200 --> 00:18:42.140
to this like crazy pink color, crazy purple color.
414
00:18:42.140 --> 00:18:45.760
But the point is that corals can modify their physiology
415
00:18:45.760 --> 00:18:48.100
to match their environment and try to survive
416
00:18:48.100 --> 00:18:49.994
until the stressor leaves.
417
00:18:49.994 --> 00:18:51.780
And they can also move away to a new place,
418
00:18:51.780 --> 00:18:54.600
so disperse away to a new reef that may be
419
00:18:54.600 --> 00:18:56.980
where the temperatures are a little cooler.
420
00:18:56.980 --> 00:18:58.950
And you may say, well, Sarah, you just told me
421
00:18:58.950 --> 00:19:00.460
that corals are like rocks.
422
00:19:00.460 --> 00:19:02.660
So how can they move?
423
00:19:02.660 --> 00:19:04.300
Great question.
424
00:19:04.300 --> 00:19:07.090
So yes, in their adult stage, the corals look like this,
425
00:19:07.090 --> 00:19:10.910
so this is a beautiful coral on the Great Barrier Reef.
426
00:19:10.910 --> 00:19:14.700
And while the majority of their lifecycle is spent stuck
427
00:19:14.700 --> 00:19:18.310
to the bottom of a reef, I'm now gonna tell you
428
00:19:18.310 --> 00:19:20.613
about the intriguing sex lives of corals.
429
00:19:21.520 --> 00:19:24.070
So corals do this really incredible
430
00:19:24.070 --> 00:19:27.220
and fascinating activity that's actually
431
00:19:27.220 --> 00:19:30.242
the reason I became a coral biologist.
432
00:19:30.242 --> 00:19:33.030
So I was a student out at this marine station
433
00:19:33.030 --> 00:19:35.327
and this professor was presenting on coral spawning
434
00:19:35.327 --> 00:19:38.810
and I was like, I can't believe this is a real thing,
435
00:19:38.810 --> 00:19:40.760
I need to go and see this.
436
00:19:40.760 --> 00:19:42.620
And the rest is history.
437
00:19:42.620 --> 00:19:47.620
So as an adult, when they're sexually mature,
438
00:19:47.700 --> 00:19:49.700
corals spawn once a year.
439
00:19:49.700 --> 00:19:52.200
And this is so crazy because when we think about the tree
440
00:19:52.200 --> 00:19:53.790
of life, corals are quite basal.
441
00:19:53.790 --> 00:19:55.690
So we think of them as they don't have brains,
442
00:19:55.690 --> 00:19:58.290
they only have a nerve net, but still they coordinate
443
00:19:58.290 --> 00:20:03.290
this, like, very intense and captivating behavior.
444
00:20:03.300 --> 00:20:06.610
So as adults, in the warmest month of the year,
445
00:20:08.090 --> 00:20:10.520
eight days after the full moon,
446
00:20:10.520 --> 00:20:12.230
a certain number of hours after sunset,
447
00:20:12.230 --> 00:20:13.950
depending on what species you are,
448
00:20:13.950 --> 00:20:15.753
you will release your gametes.
449
00:20:16.610 --> 00:20:19.140
And for most of the corals, they're hermaphrodites,
450
00:20:19.140 --> 00:20:21.720
so they release these bundles of eggs and sperm.
451
00:20:21.720 --> 00:20:23.530
And a single coral can't self-fertilize,
452
00:20:23.530 --> 00:20:26.400
so they can't like make babies with themselves.
453
00:20:26.400 --> 00:20:27.850
But what they do is they produce
454
00:20:27.850 --> 00:20:30.250
these really cool spawns slicks at the surface.
455
00:20:30.250 --> 00:20:32.790
And this is where external fertilization happens.
456
00:20:32.790 --> 00:20:35.330
So the gamete bundles go to the surface,
457
00:20:35.330 --> 00:20:37.670
explode, all the eggs and sperm are everywhere.
458
00:20:37.670 --> 00:20:40.840
And they fertilize to produce these very cute
459
00:20:40.840 --> 00:20:44.090
and very charismatic little coral larvae.
460
00:20:44.090 --> 00:20:45.320
And these larvae can swim
461
00:20:45.320 --> 00:20:47.130
and they have cute little behaviors.
462
00:20:47.130 --> 00:20:51.790
So they live in the water column for weeks to months,
463
00:20:51.790 --> 00:20:54.610
at which point they receive cues emanating from the reef
464
00:20:54.610 --> 00:20:57.010
that say, hey, coral, you've like arrived at a reef,
465
00:20:57.010 --> 00:20:58.990
you should like come live here.
466
00:20:58.990 --> 00:21:01.510
And they do these very fun behaviors,
467
00:21:01.510 --> 00:21:04.690
so this is a coral that has already chosen to settle.
468
00:21:04.690 --> 00:21:07.590
This is another coral that has chosen to settle.
469
00:21:07.590 --> 00:21:10.400
And all of this bright pink stuff or orangey stuff
470
00:21:10.400 --> 00:21:13.730
is crustose coralline algae, which is one of the cues
471
00:21:13.730 --> 00:21:17.550
that corals use to detect the reef.
472
00:21:17.550 --> 00:21:19.990
So this larva here, it has a red butt,
473
00:21:19.990 --> 00:21:21.730
so they swim with their butt forward.
474
00:21:21.730 --> 00:21:23.840
And they're sensing their environment
475
00:21:23.840 --> 00:21:26.200
and deciding on a place to settle.
476
00:21:26.200 --> 00:21:28.810
And once they do, they find a place that they like.
477
00:21:28.810 --> 00:21:32.300
This is what a coral recruit looks like,
478
00:21:32.300 --> 00:21:33.930
and this is like after metamorphosis,
479
00:21:33.930 --> 00:21:36.030
so they sit with their butt down.
480
00:21:36.030 --> 00:21:40.040
And then the green part of this coral will become its mouth.
481
00:21:40.040 --> 00:21:43.550
Remember, we saw on that picture the green mouth.
482
00:21:43.550 --> 00:21:45.550
And then at this point, the coral
483
00:21:45.550 --> 00:21:48.010
will start secreting its calcium carbonate skeleton,
484
00:21:48.010 --> 00:21:49.860
it will acquire its algal symbionts.
485
00:21:49.860 --> 00:21:52.560
So this picture here, there's its fluorescent protein.
486
00:21:53.810 --> 00:21:56.150
And this is where it establishes symbiosis.
487
00:21:56.150 --> 00:21:59.160
Then it will, oops, it will reproduce asexually
488
00:21:59.160 --> 00:22:01.289
to produce the big colonies we see on the reef,
489
00:22:01.289 --> 00:22:04.450
and once it's a certain size, it will also participate
490
00:22:04.450 --> 00:22:06.070
in the annual coral spawning event.
491
00:22:06.070 --> 00:22:07.520
So quite fascinating.
492
00:22:07.520 --> 00:22:09.160
I'm gonna show you video, it's probably gonna be
493
00:22:09.160 --> 00:22:12.610
a little bit laggy, but we're gonna give it a go.
494
00:22:12.610 --> 00:22:17.410
So this is a coral spawning video, this is a male,
495
00:22:17.410 --> 00:22:19.080
so I told you that there are mostly hermaphrodite,
496
00:22:19.080 --> 00:22:21.510
but this species here has male colonies.
497
00:22:21.510 --> 00:22:23.600
So this is what, what you're looking at here is sperm
498
00:22:23.600 --> 00:22:25.950
and the sperm is inundating the water column,
499
00:22:25.950 --> 00:22:28.630
so it's just fully saturated, cloudy.
500
00:22:28.630 --> 00:22:29.700
It's like you, all of a sudden,
501
00:22:29.700 --> 00:22:31.770
you go from being able to see really far away
502
00:22:31.770 --> 00:22:34.640
to not being able to see your dive buddy next door.
503
00:22:34.640 --> 00:22:37.560
And now this is the female, so the female receives cues
504
00:22:37.560 --> 00:22:39.230
from the male with sperm in the water,
505
00:22:39.230 --> 00:22:41.520
and these are eggs that are being released.
506
00:22:41.520 --> 00:22:44.960
So these eggs are probably instantaneously fertilized
507
00:22:44.960 --> 00:22:46.003
to produce larvae.
508
00:22:46.840 --> 00:22:48.480
So this is what we call gonochoric,
509
00:22:48.480 --> 00:22:50.460
where they have different sexes.
510
00:22:50.460 --> 00:22:53.960
And the next one here, this is a hermaphroditic colony,
511
00:22:53.960 --> 00:22:56.940
and you can see the synchrony of this coral
512
00:22:56.940 --> 00:22:58.830
when it releases its gametes.
513
00:22:58.830 --> 00:23:02.320
And we know the exact, like, to almost the minute
514
00:23:02.320 --> 00:23:04.000
when these corals are gonna release,
515
00:23:04.000 --> 00:23:05.900
we're gonna span out this, this footage
516
00:23:05.900 --> 00:23:07.840
is from Flower Gardens, just to get an idea
517
00:23:07.840 --> 00:23:11.250
of just how massive the amount of gametes
518
00:23:11.250 --> 00:23:14.030
in the water column is during a spawning event.
519
00:23:14.030 --> 00:23:15.990
We're gonna span out one more time here
520
00:23:15.990 --> 00:23:19.270
and then you'll get to see how big these colonies are.
521
00:23:19.270 --> 00:23:21.823
So it's quite, it's on your bucket list, people.
522
00:23:23.170 --> 00:23:25.010
You should just, if you're not a scuba diver,
523
00:23:25.010 --> 00:23:27.260
you should learn just to go experience
524
00:23:27.260 --> 00:23:30.290
the coral spawning event because it's by far
525
00:23:30.290 --> 00:23:32.013
the coolest thing in the world.
526
00:23:33.903 --> 00:23:35.550
So with that, I'd like to pivot to kind of
527
00:23:35.550 --> 00:23:39.750
what our lab has studied at the Flower Garden Banks.
528
00:23:39.750 --> 00:23:43.160
So just a reminder from Kelly's introduction,
529
00:23:43.160 --> 00:23:46.000
the Flower Garden Banks are a National Marine Sanctuary.
530
00:23:46.000 --> 00:23:49.150
It's located, there's lots of banks in it now,
531
00:23:49.150 --> 00:23:51.010
but the main banks that I've worked on
532
00:23:51.010 --> 00:23:53.090
are Stetson, West Flower Garden Bank,
533
00:23:53.090 --> 00:23:54.510
and East Flower Garden Bank.
534
00:23:54.510 --> 00:23:57.640
And the two Flower Garden Banks are about 100 miles south
535
00:23:57.640 --> 00:23:59.450
of the Texas-Louisiana border.
536
00:23:59.450 --> 00:24:04.040
And I've had the complete luxury and privilege to go aboard
537
00:24:04.040 --> 00:24:06.640
the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary's vessel,
538
00:24:06.640 --> 00:24:11.640
RV Manta, where we're fed like queens, I love it.
539
00:24:12.960 --> 00:24:16.840
As a grad student, I loved especially just being fed.
540
00:24:16.840 --> 00:24:18.780
And then we go out for the coral spawn
541
00:24:18.780 --> 00:24:20.163
and it's such an adventure.
542
00:24:21.020 --> 00:24:23.720
So why are Flower Garden Banks so special?
543
00:24:23.720 --> 00:24:25.250
So the reason why they're so special,
544
00:24:25.250 --> 00:24:28.360
one of the reasons Kelly alluded to in her introduction.
545
00:24:28.360 --> 00:24:31.500
So this is looking at the percent coral cover globally
546
00:24:31.500 --> 00:24:35.860
is in black and the blue line is the Caribbean.
547
00:24:35.860 --> 00:24:37.860
So what we've seen is that historically,
548
00:24:37.860 --> 00:24:40.950
coral cover was about 50% on most reefs
549
00:24:40.950 --> 00:24:42.683
in the 1970s and 1980s.
550
00:24:43.600 --> 00:24:46.640
But since then, what we've seen is rapid decline
551
00:24:46.640 --> 00:24:49.610
in coral cover, and the Caribbean is particularly low,
552
00:24:49.610 --> 00:24:51.850
sitting at about 10%.
553
00:24:51.850 --> 00:24:55.060
So we've lost about 40% of reef cover
554
00:24:55.060 --> 00:24:57.553
in the last maybe 30-40 years.
555
00:24:58.890 --> 00:25:01.050
But Flower Garden Banks, so these are data looking
556
00:25:01.050 --> 00:25:03.540
at a bunch of different things on the reef,
557
00:25:03.540 --> 00:25:05.410
but I want you to focus on the red line here,
558
00:25:05.410 --> 00:25:07.250
'cause the red line is the coral.
559
00:25:07.250 --> 00:25:09.310
And this is looking at the East Flower Garden Bank,
560
00:25:09.310 --> 00:25:11.530
so just one of the banks, through time,
561
00:25:11.530 --> 00:25:14.120
so since 1989 when they started monitoring,
562
00:25:14.120 --> 00:25:16.160
and these are data until 2019.
563
00:25:16.160 --> 00:25:18.100
So what you can see is that mean percent cover,
564
00:25:18.100 --> 00:25:23.100
so same axis here, we see that it's hovered around 50%.
565
00:25:23.770 --> 00:25:25.710
So we're talking like 1970s levels
566
00:25:25.710 --> 00:25:27.790
for like every other reef in the world.
567
00:25:27.790 --> 00:25:31.270
So there is something very special and very fascinating
568
00:25:31.270 --> 00:25:33.530
about Flower Garden Banks corals that allow them
569
00:25:33.530 --> 00:25:37.313
to maintain this high coral cover in spite of global change.
570
00:25:38.750 --> 00:25:41.340
And we think one of the things that might facilitate this
571
00:25:41.340 --> 00:25:43.060
is that Flower Garden Banks corals
572
00:25:43.060 --> 00:25:46.360
maintain very high genetic diversity.
573
00:25:46.360 --> 00:25:48.720
So the more genetic diversity you have,
574
00:25:48.720 --> 00:25:50.650
you can think about it as your repertoire
575
00:25:50.650 --> 00:25:52.430
of ways in which you can respond.
576
00:25:52.430 --> 00:25:56.310
So maybe some individuals aren't very good at something
577
00:25:56.310 --> 00:25:59.500
and then something happens and then they get, they die,
578
00:25:59.500 --> 00:26:01.210
but then there's all of these other individuals
579
00:26:01.210 --> 00:26:03.350
that have all of these other things they're good at.
580
00:26:03.350 --> 00:26:06.620
So diversity is great when we think about global change.
581
00:26:06.620 --> 00:26:10.130
And so this is a study we published back in 2017.
582
00:26:10.130 --> 00:26:13.700
So we sampled corals from the Flower Gardens, Florida Keys,
583
00:26:13.700 --> 00:26:17.000
The Bahamas, Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands,
584
00:26:17.000 --> 00:26:20.930
Barbados, Curacao, Panama, Belize, and Mexico,
585
00:26:20.930 --> 00:26:22.840
so across the wider Caribbean.
586
00:26:22.840 --> 00:26:25.870
And then we profiled their genetics.
587
00:26:25.870 --> 00:26:28.390
Essentially, it's like a massive paternity test.
588
00:26:28.390 --> 00:26:31.470
And we asked how related corals are to each other.
589
00:26:31.470 --> 00:26:33.510
And you don't need to know how to do genetics
590
00:26:33.510 --> 00:26:35.200
to be able to read these graphs.
591
00:26:35.200 --> 00:26:36.480
What these graphs are looking at
592
00:26:36.480 --> 00:26:38.840
is if there's lots of different colors,
593
00:26:38.840 --> 00:26:41.670
that means there's lots of different genetic backgrounds.
594
00:26:41.670 --> 00:26:45.130
If there's fewer colors, like for example, in Mexico,
595
00:26:45.130 --> 00:26:50.130
it's really dominated by this tan color in this graph.
596
00:26:50.530 --> 00:26:52.860
Or for example, Puerto Rico is mostly dominated
597
00:26:52.860 --> 00:26:54.603
by this dark brown color here.
598
00:26:55.540 --> 00:26:58.480
Belize is mostly dominated by this teal color.
599
00:26:58.480 --> 00:27:00.350
But when we look at Flower Gardens,
600
00:27:00.350 --> 00:27:03.200
it has a little bit of all of the colors that you see,
601
00:27:03.200 --> 00:27:06.240
so it has all of the colors represented in Barbados,
602
00:27:06.240 --> 00:27:08.610
all of the colors represented in Curacao,
603
00:27:08.610 --> 00:27:10.020
and all of the colors represented
604
00:27:10.020 --> 00:27:11.860
at all of the places we sampled.
605
00:27:11.860 --> 00:27:13.730
So what that means is that Flower Garden Banks
606
00:27:13.730 --> 00:27:16.430
is really special because it houses all
607
00:27:16.430 --> 00:27:19.750
of this genetic diversity, and that's gonna be important
608
00:27:19.750 --> 00:27:22.900
as the climate changes because it offers corals
609
00:27:22.900 --> 00:27:27.900
more opportunities to evolve as climate change progresses.
610
00:27:30.630 --> 00:27:31.830
The second thing we've looked at
611
00:27:31.830 --> 00:27:34.490
is the resilience of Flower Garden Banks corals.
612
00:27:34.490 --> 00:27:37.120
So I've told you that they're very genetically diverse.
613
00:27:37.120 --> 00:27:39.460
And now some of the work by these amazing students
614
00:27:39.460 --> 00:27:40.870
that you see pictured here,
615
00:27:40.870 --> 00:27:45.240
so these are Boston University marine program students.
616
00:27:45.240 --> 00:27:48.530
This is a picture that was taken in December this year.
617
00:27:48.530 --> 00:27:52.825
And we did some experiments looking at Orbicella franksi
618
00:27:52.825 --> 00:27:55.150
and Orbicella faveolata or the great,
619
00:27:55.150 --> 00:27:57.450
I think it's called the great star coral,
620
00:27:57.450 --> 00:27:58.610
from the Flower Garden Banks,
621
00:27:58.610 --> 00:28:01.700
both of these species are endangered species.
622
00:28:01.700 --> 00:28:02.710
This is what it looks like,
623
00:28:02.710 --> 00:28:06.810
so cute with its little polyps and its little tentacles.
624
00:28:06.810 --> 00:28:08.670
So we have these corals on these dishes,
625
00:28:08.670 --> 00:28:10.790
and when we put them into these different treatments
626
00:28:10.790 --> 00:28:12.950
and ask, how do these corals respond
627
00:28:12.950 --> 00:28:14.750
to a variety of different stressors?
628
00:28:15.780 --> 00:28:17.110
So this is what the corals look like,
629
00:28:17.110 --> 00:28:18.890
so this is one of our hot tanks.
630
00:28:18.890 --> 00:28:20.210
So we can see all of our different,
631
00:28:20.210 --> 00:28:22.000
we call them coral nubbins.
632
00:28:22.000 --> 00:28:24.440
And these are them chilling in the hot temperature.
633
00:28:24.440 --> 00:28:26.370
And what we need mean by hot here
634
00:28:26.370 --> 00:28:28.450
is that we have a control condition here,
635
00:28:28.450 --> 00:28:30.040
so this is an 11-day experiment
636
00:28:30.040 --> 00:28:33.260
this is all done within a class at Boston University,
637
00:28:33.260 --> 00:28:36.980
so we do this in a, it's a teaching moment for all these,
638
00:28:36.980 --> 00:28:38.500
all of these students get to participate
639
00:28:38.500 --> 00:28:40.043
in real-world research.
640
00:28:41.290 --> 00:28:43.840
And so we have a control condition that's maintained
641
00:28:43.840 --> 00:28:47.840
at the 26.5C, which is where these corals really like to be,
642
00:28:47.840 --> 00:28:49.870
this is where they've been grown for the last couple years
643
00:28:49.870 --> 00:28:52.490
in the lab, they grow really well, they love it.
644
00:28:52.490 --> 00:28:54.450
And then we took one set of tanks
645
00:28:54.450 --> 00:28:57.520
and we slowly heated them up over the 11 days.
646
00:28:57.520 --> 00:28:59.860
And we heated them up all the way
647
00:28:59.860 --> 00:29:02.840
to 35 degrees centigrade, which is a temperature
648
00:29:02.840 --> 00:29:05.810
that Flower Garden Banks corals never experience.
649
00:29:05.810 --> 00:29:09.780
So it's well outside the historical temperatures
650
00:29:09.780 --> 00:29:12.180
that these corals would've experienced on the reef.
651
00:29:12.180 --> 00:29:17.180
And then we also took these corals all the way down
652
00:29:17.260 --> 00:29:20.630
to about 16, or actually, no, we didn't get,
653
00:29:20.630 --> 00:29:22.560
we were hoping to get to 16, but we didn't.
654
00:29:22.560 --> 00:29:25.560
We got down to about 17 and a half degrees Celsius,
655
00:29:25.560 --> 00:29:27.810
so pretty cold for these corals,
656
00:29:27.810 --> 00:29:30.310
we consider about 18 degrees to be a thermal minimum
657
00:29:30.310 --> 00:29:33.360
for corals, so it's about at their threshold.
658
00:29:33.360 --> 00:29:35.130
And I don't have data to show you
659
00:29:35.130 --> 00:29:37.050
because we just did this experiment,
660
00:29:37.050 --> 00:29:40.680
but I will tell you that we didn't see any bleaching,
661
00:29:40.680 --> 00:29:43.470
which is super crazy because these temperatures,
662
00:29:43.470 --> 00:29:45.400
both the lower and the upper,
663
00:29:45.400 --> 00:29:47.270
are well outside what these corals experienced
664
00:29:47.270 --> 00:29:49.060
on the reefs that they came from.
665
00:29:49.060 --> 00:29:51.450
So this suggests that these Flower Garden coral
666
00:29:51.450 --> 00:29:54.930
are actually highly resilient, which is really good news.
667
00:29:54.930 --> 00:29:56.950
So the other cool thing that we've done
668
00:29:56.950 --> 00:30:00.870
is during the spawning, we've collected gametes
669
00:30:00.870 --> 00:30:03.200
from these corals as they're spawning,
670
00:30:03.200 --> 00:30:04.820
and then we've cultured their larvae,
671
00:30:04.820 --> 00:30:08.340
and then we've asked questions about their larval biology.
672
00:30:08.340 --> 00:30:10.570
So one of the things, one of the experiments that we do
673
00:30:10.570 --> 00:30:14.470
is we take these larvae and we ask them to settle.
674
00:30:14.470 --> 00:30:16.330
We offer them that crustose coralline algae
675
00:30:16.330 --> 00:30:18.750
that I showed you in that little GIF where,
676
00:30:18.750 --> 00:30:20.980
and we ask them, are you ready to settle?
677
00:30:20.980 --> 00:30:23.080
And we do this every day since they're born.
678
00:30:23.080 --> 00:30:25.490
So we start at one day post fertilization,
679
00:30:25.490 --> 00:30:29.030
so when they're one day old, and progressively all the way
680
00:30:29.030 --> 00:30:32.520
until 120 days, until they're 120 days old,
681
00:30:32.520 --> 00:30:34.743
and we asked, will you settle for us?
682
00:30:35.630 --> 00:30:37.790
And what we found is that this species of coral,
683
00:30:37.790 --> 00:30:40.949
this brain coral, Pseudodiploria strigosa,
684
00:30:40.949 --> 00:30:44.500
it was willing to settle for us at three days.
685
00:30:44.500 --> 00:30:47.360
And it settled for us all the way to 20 days.
686
00:30:47.360 --> 00:30:49.460
This species here, Orbicella franksi,
687
00:30:49.460 --> 00:30:50.830
which is the one that we showed previously
688
00:30:50.830 --> 00:30:53.990
that was really resilient, it was, it didn't settle at all.
689
00:30:53.990 --> 00:30:56.680
It was not willing to settle until 20 days,
690
00:30:56.680 --> 00:31:01.680
it needed to spend 20 days as a larva until it was ready
691
00:31:01.750 --> 00:31:04.310
to receive that cue and settle.
692
00:31:04.310 --> 00:31:07.780
And then we kept them in the lab until 120 days
693
00:31:07.780 --> 00:31:09.960
and then offered them settlement again
694
00:31:09.960 --> 00:31:12.470
to see if they would settle and they still did.
695
00:31:12.470 --> 00:31:14.870
And then, so we modeled out with ocean currents
696
00:31:14.870 --> 00:31:18.000
and asked, how far can these larvae go?
697
00:31:18.000 --> 00:31:19.860
And so what we found is that the species
698
00:31:19.860 --> 00:31:22.440
that has the short duration mostly just chills
699
00:31:22.440 --> 00:31:24.810
and stays and comes back to Flower Gardens
700
00:31:24.810 --> 00:31:26.940
or goes off into the abyss and probably the larvae
701
00:31:26.940 --> 00:31:28.680
are just eaten in the water column
702
00:31:28.680 --> 00:31:30.840
'cause there's no more reefs over here.
703
00:31:30.840 --> 00:31:32.500
But what's very fascinating is that,
704
00:31:32.500 --> 00:31:37.190
here's the Flower Gardens, is that if we model out 120 days,
705
00:31:37.190 --> 00:31:40.700
we see that there's a decent chance that these larvae
706
00:31:40.700 --> 00:31:45.120
will be taken over here all way through the Florida Keys
707
00:31:45.120 --> 00:31:48.430
up along Florida and out up to Boston,
708
00:31:48.430 --> 00:31:49.670
we don't have corals in Boston,
709
00:31:49.670 --> 00:31:52.080
but that's where the model's predicting
710
00:31:52.080 --> 00:31:53.330
that the larvae would go.
711
00:31:53.330 --> 00:31:56.760
So what we found is that there's a probability
712
00:31:56.760 --> 00:31:59.930
that Flower Garden Banks can provide baby coral
713
00:31:59.930 --> 00:32:02.830
to Florida reefs as well as Cuban reefs.
714
00:32:02.830 --> 00:32:04.260
So this is very exciting,
715
00:32:04.260 --> 00:32:06.410
this idea that these resilient corals
716
00:32:06.410 --> 00:32:09.060
with this huge amounts of genetic diversity
717
00:32:09.060 --> 00:32:12.210
could move throughout places like Florida
718
00:32:12.210 --> 00:32:14.830
where their reefs are very degraded.
719
00:32:14.830 --> 00:32:17.850
So when we think about this from a conservation perspective,
720
00:32:17.850 --> 00:32:21.350
we have these adult populations of corals at Flower Gardens
721
00:32:21.350 --> 00:32:24.323
that exhibit this very high genetic diversity.
722
00:32:25.210 --> 00:32:27.380
And then we've also shown that these corals
723
00:32:27.380 --> 00:32:30.150
are able to be very resilient.
724
00:32:30.150 --> 00:32:33.670
And then, so we could imagine that these resilient, oops,
725
00:32:33.670 --> 00:32:36.910
sorry, these resilient and genetically diverse corals
726
00:32:36.910 --> 00:32:39.120
are moving between reefs.
727
00:32:39.120 --> 00:32:42.740
So this is to say that Flower Garden Banks absolutely
728
00:32:42.740 --> 00:32:44.740
should be a priority for conservation
729
00:32:44.740 --> 00:32:47.580
because what we're seeing is that it's a genetic sink
730
00:32:47.580 --> 00:32:51.950
and source, meaning that it has a lot of genetic variation
731
00:32:51.950 --> 00:32:54.760
and that this genetic variation can move between reefs.
732
00:32:54.760 --> 00:32:57.450
So it could source other reefs
733
00:32:57.450 --> 00:33:00.043
that are less healthy and give them babies.
734
00:33:00.940 --> 00:33:03.490
The second thing we've seen is that the percent coral cover
735
00:33:03.490 --> 00:33:06.060
at Flower Gardens is really high.
736
00:33:06.060 --> 00:33:08.030
And so what that means is that potentially,
737
00:33:08.030 --> 00:33:09.930
the Flower Garden Banks could be a source
738
00:33:09.930 --> 00:33:12.690
for restoration material for other Caribbean reefs
739
00:33:12.690 --> 00:33:15.640
that are more degraded, for example, Florida.
740
00:33:15.640 --> 00:33:18.803
I tend to use Florida because their reef cover is very low.
741
00:33:19.690 --> 00:33:23.740
So with that, that's kind of a snapshot into our research.
742
00:33:23.740 --> 00:33:26.580
I'm always happy to nerd out and talk in more detail
743
00:33:26.580 --> 00:33:28.880
about any studies, but I just kind of wanted
744
00:33:28.880 --> 00:33:30.360
to give you a smattering of some of the work
745
00:33:30.360 --> 00:33:32.210
that we've done at Flower Gardens.
746
00:33:32.210 --> 00:33:34.500
So with that, I'd like to do some acknowledgements.
747
00:33:34.500 --> 00:33:37.590
So I'd like to acknowledge the people up in Massachusetts,
748
00:33:37.590 --> 00:33:39.860
where Boston University is and where most of our work
749
00:33:39.860 --> 00:33:43.450
has been done, just a land acknowledgement.
750
00:33:43.450 --> 00:33:45.120
And the second thing, I'd like to thank my lab,
751
00:33:45.120 --> 00:33:47.610
so this is a little bit outdated photo,
752
00:33:47.610 --> 00:33:50.370
we have more people now, but these are all the people
753
00:33:50.370 --> 00:33:52.380
that do all the hard work.
754
00:33:52.380 --> 00:33:54.170
I'd like to thank all of our funding sources,
755
00:33:54.170 --> 00:33:56.590
including NOAA, who's funded some of our work
756
00:33:56.590 --> 00:33:57.863
at Flower Garden Banks.
757
00:33:59.270 --> 00:34:00.560
I'd like to thank the University of Texas
758
00:34:00.560 --> 00:34:03.810
where I did my PhD, and it was really the place
759
00:34:03.810 --> 00:34:06.905
that allowed me to be close enough to Flower Gardens
760
00:34:06.905 --> 00:34:11.380
to really get an obsession with these reefs.
761
00:34:11.380 --> 00:34:13.990
I'd like to thank the sanctuary, like I said,
762
00:34:13.990 --> 00:34:17.050
I've been going out with them for many years now,
763
00:34:17.050 --> 00:34:20.270
and I'm always grateful to be offered the opportunity
764
00:34:20.270 --> 00:34:22.260
to sail with them out to Flower Garden Banks
765
00:34:22.260 --> 00:34:25.900
and dive with their amazing scientists that work there.
766
00:34:25.900 --> 00:34:28.100
And lastly, I'd like to thank Fling Charters,
767
00:34:28.100 --> 00:34:32.010
which is a dive, a recreational dive company
768
00:34:32.010 --> 00:34:35.450
that offers divers going out to Flower Gardens.
769
00:34:35.450 --> 00:34:37.920
So if you have a chance and you're interested
770
00:34:37.920 --> 00:34:40.350
in seeing the Flower Garden Banks reefs,
771
00:34:40.350 --> 00:34:42.420
the Fling is a great way to go out there
772
00:34:42.420 --> 00:34:44.960
and they also have a lot of tasty food.
773
00:34:44.960 --> 00:34:47.040
And with that, if there's any questions,
774
00:34:47.040 --> 00:34:50.780
I'd be happy to take them, or I guess you put them
775
00:34:50.780 --> 00:34:53.739
in the chat and then, yeah.
776
00:34:53.739 --> 00:34:55.810
But thank you so much for listening.
777
00:34:55.810 --> 00:34:58.090
Thank you, Sarah, that was great.
778
00:34:58.090 --> 00:35:00.100
Folks, we will take questions right now,
779
00:35:00.100 --> 00:35:01.770
if you do have questions, please type them
780
00:35:01.770 --> 00:35:03.530
into the question box available
781
00:35:03.530 --> 00:35:07.690
in the control panel of the GoToWebinar system.
782
00:35:07.690 --> 00:35:12.690
And we have about 25 minutes to take questions for Sarah.
783
00:35:13.960 --> 00:35:16.100
And we'll start with a few that have already came in during
784
00:35:16.100 --> 00:35:18.340
the course of the presentation.
785
00:35:18.340 --> 00:35:20.840
Sarah, are there coral anchor type environments
786
00:35:20.840 --> 00:35:24.780
that can help grow coral independent of higher temperatures?
787
00:35:24.780 --> 00:35:26.093
Coral anchor?
788
00:35:27.070 --> 00:35:28.130
Yes, that's what it says,
789
00:35:28.130 --> 00:35:31.960
coral anchor type environments.
790
00:35:31.960 --> 00:35:35.670
So I think we're thinking about like,
791
00:35:35.670 --> 00:35:38.310
are there residual like places
792
00:35:38.310 --> 00:35:41.000
where we can find resilient corals, is that maybe?
793
00:35:41.000 --> 00:35:43.270
So I think when we think about, we've thought a lot about,
794
00:35:43.270 --> 00:35:46.170
so I'm part of the Coral Restoration Consortium.
795
00:35:46.170 --> 00:35:47.490
And we're trying to think a lot about
796
00:35:47.490 --> 00:35:50.290
where should we pull corals from
797
00:35:50.290 --> 00:35:52.920
for these restoration programs. These restoration programs,
798
00:35:52.920 --> 00:35:54.160
just for a little bit of background,
799
00:35:54.160 --> 00:35:58.650
are taking corals off the reef and fragmenting them.
800
00:35:58.650 --> 00:36:00.780
So having these kind of like repositories
801
00:36:00.780 --> 00:36:04.520
of coral genetic diversity and then outplanting them
802
00:36:04.520 --> 00:36:08.580
to different places to try to increase artificially
803
00:36:08.580 --> 00:36:12.020
through humans, like, and usually with adults,
804
00:36:12.020 --> 00:36:14.748
but they're also trying to do it with larvae too,
805
00:36:14.748 --> 00:36:16.930
the genetic diversity on a reef.
806
00:36:16.930 --> 00:36:18.620
So when we think about, are there places
807
00:36:18.620 --> 00:36:20.850
that we should source those corals from?
808
00:36:20.850 --> 00:36:23.690
I mean, Flower Garden Banks is a great idea.
809
00:36:23.690 --> 00:36:26.410
But it might be a permitting nightmare.
810
00:36:26.410 --> 00:36:29.960
But also, we've shown that corals
811
00:36:29.960 --> 00:36:33.120
that are from more thermally variable environments,
812
00:36:33.120 --> 00:36:36.670
so environments that experience higher highs and lower lows,
813
00:36:36.670 --> 00:36:39.300
tend to be more resilient, so those could be like sources
814
00:36:39.300 --> 00:36:41.673
of resilient corals.
815
00:36:43.200 --> 00:36:46.630
And then as far as, can you make corals more resilient?,
816
00:36:46.630 --> 00:36:50.180
there's been a little bit of work trying
817
00:36:50.180 --> 00:36:52.790
to like prime corals to be stronger.
818
00:36:52.790 --> 00:36:53.860
So one of the things you can do
819
00:36:53.860 --> 00:36:57.630
is you can kind of like hit them with a stress but not like,
820
00:36:57.630 --> 00:36:59.980
kind of like, I mean, think about
821
00:36:59.980 --> 00:37:01.790
the way the COVID vaccine works,
822
00:37:01.790 --> 00:37:03.540
it's like totally different mechanism, but you know,
823
00:37:03.540 --> 00:37:06.000
you get this vaccine and it mounts this immunity response,
824
00:37:06.000 --> 00:37:11.000
so like you get this memory of how to respond to this virus.
825
00:37:11.280 --> 00:37:13.250
It's like, you could imagine the same thing
826
00:37:13.250 --> 00:37:15.010
with heat stress, it's a totally different mechanism,
827
00:37:15.010 --> 00:37:19.910
but where you hit the coral with a slightly hot temperature
828
00:37:19.910 --> 00:37:22.900
and then that should prime it to be better
829
00:37:22.900 --> 00:37:25.270
when it sees that temperature again.
830
00:37:25.270 --> 00:37:27.070
So these are some of the ways that people are thinking
831
00:37:27.070 --> 00:37:28.680
about restoring coral populations
832
00:37:28.680 --> 00:37:30.853
and like priming them for resilience.
833
00:37:35.030 --> 00:37:36.480
Okay.
834
00:37:36.480 --> 00:37:38.803
Next question.
835
00:37:39.880 --> 00:37:42.563
Why do corals spawn after sunset?
836
00:37:45.581 --> 00:37:47.800
That's a great question, it's probably,
837
00:37:47.800 --> 00:37:50.530
I don't know the, like the why.
838
00:37:50.530 --> 00:37:54.250
But I imagine that it's like, so at the Flower Gardens,
839
00:37:54.250 --> 00:37:56.970
you know, there's probably, I don't know,
840
00:37:56.970 --> 00:37:59.670
half a dozen to a dozen corals that spawn on the same night,
841
00:37:59.670 --> 00:38:03.590
so it's not as crazy as far as like species diversity.
842
00:38:03.590 --> 00:38:06.360
But you really need to make sure that you're going
843
00:38:06.360 --> 00:38:08.450
at the same time as everybody else,
844
00:38:08.450 --> 00:38:10.580
because I told you that you can't self.
845
00:38:10.580 --> 00:38:11.550
So it's not like you can,
846
00:38:11.550 --> 00:38:13.900
you can't make babies with yourself.
847
00:38:13.900 --> 00:38:15.930
So you need to make sure that other corals are going
848
00:38:15.930 --> 00:38:19.560
at the same time, so I imagine that it's been evolved
849
00:38:19.560 --> 00:38:22.420
because light is a very clear cue
850
00:38:22.420 --> 00:38:23.490
and we know that corals can,
851
00:38:23.490 --> 00:38:24.980
even though they don't have eyes,
852
00:38:24.980 --> 00:38:26.660
that they can perceive light.
853
00:38:26.660 --> 00:38:28.830
So it's probably a way for them to ensure
854
00:38:28.830 --> 00:38:31.600
that they're all spawning at the same time.
855
00:38:31.600 --> 00:38:34.310
But I don't know why they wouldn't do it like in the morning
856
00:38:34.310 --> 00:38:37.310
because we know that like some sponges spawn in the morning,
857
00:38:37.310 --> 00:38:39.820
like a certain amount of time after sunrise.
858
00:38:39.820 --> 00:38:44.500
So yeah, I'm not sure why it evolved this way,
859
00:38:44.500 --> 00:38:48.453
but the nighttime spawning is consistent for all corals.
860
00:38:49.830 --> 00:38:52.840
So although I don't know brooding corals,
861
00:38:52.840 --> 00:38:54.540
brooding corals do something a little bit different
862
00:38:54.540 --> 00:38:56.950
where they go off of lunar light,
863
00:38:56.950 --> 00:38:58.730
but they spawn several times a year,
864
00:38:58.730 --> 00:39:00.430
I know less about brooding corals.
865
00:39:01.410 --> 00:39:02.590
But definitely for the broadcasters,
866
00:39:02.590 --> 00:39:03.760
I don't have the answer for the why,
867
00:39:03.760 --> 00:39:05.620
but that's a fascinating question.
868
00:39:05.620 --> 00:39:08.370
Like why didn't they decide to spawn in the morning?
869
00:39:08.370 --> 00:39:11.693
Maybe it's like to avoid predation in the water column?
870
00:39:12.823 --> 00:39:14.673
I don't know, that's a good question.
871
00:39:16.190 --> 00:39:18.190
Okay, hopefully, we've got some more good ones
872
00:39:18.190 --> 00:39:19.410
for you.
873
00:39:19.410 --> 00:39:22.340
Why do you put the coral aquariums with UV light?
874
00:39:22.340 --> 00:39:24.890
Is there a correlation between the resistance of the corals
875
00:39:24.890 --> 00:39:27.150
to extreme temperatures and the size of them?
876
00:39:27.150 --> 00:39:28.230
So two questions in one.
877
00:39:28.230 --> 00:39:29.310
So two questions, so the first one
878
00:39:29.310 --> 00:39:31.530
is why do we put them under UV light?
879
00:39:31.530 --> 00:39:32.750
Yes.
880
00:39:32.750 --> 00:39:33.930
So it's not actually UV light,
881
00:39:33.930 --> 00:39:36.230
it looks like it, it's actinic light.
882
00:39:36.230 --> 00:39:40.280
So it looks very blue in the aquariums,
883
00:39:40.280 --> 00:39:43.650
but it's actually similar to the wavelengths
884
00:39:43.650 --> 00:39:44.780
that they would get on the reef.
885
00:39:44.780 --> 00:39:47.390
So we have lights that are programmed to be similar
886
00:39:47.390 --> 00:39:49.500
to the spectral qualities of a reef,
887
00:39:49.500 --> 00:39:51.970
so for anyone out there that's dove,
888
00:39:51.970 --> 00:39:53.770
one of the first things that you'll notice is that,
889
00:39:53.770 --> 00:39:58.750
as you go down in depth, the light is attenuated.
890
00:39:58.750 --> 00:40:02.020
So shorter wavelength light, which are more red colors,
891
00:40:02.020 --> 00:40:05.000
red, oranges, yellows, those get attenuated first.
892
00:40:05.000 --> 00:40:06.780
And that's why, when you're in the ocean,
893
00:40:06.780 --> 00:40:08.560
everything, especially when you're deep,
894
00:40:08.560 --> 00:40:10.880
everything looks blue or purple.
895
00:40:10.880 --> 00:40:12.460
But if you took down a light,
896
00:40:12.460 --> 00:40:14.630
what you see is that there's actually a variety of colors
897
00:40:14.630 --> 00:40:18.620
that you've missed because those light wavelengths
898
00:40:18.620 --> 00:40:21.990
got dissipated early as you were moving down.
899
00:40:21.990 --> 00:40:23.280
So that's why shallower reefs
900
00:40:23.280 --> 00:40:26.020
can sometimes look more colorful.
901
00:40:26.020 --> 00:40:28.180
But in reality, they're both just as colorful
902
00:40:28.180 --> 00:40:30.380
as like a shallow versus a deeper reef.
903
00:40:30.380 --> 00:40:32.280
It's just that we don't see the light
904
00:40:33.770 --> 00:40:35.700
because all that light's attenuated.
905
00:40:35.700 --> 00:40:37.270
So the light that we're giving our corals like,
906
00:40:37.270 --> 00:40:40.920
for example, in this picture here, it looks pretty blue,
907
00:40:40.920 --> 00:40:42.090
but that's actually pretty similar
908
00:40:42.090 --> 00:40:43.620
to the light that they would receive on the reef,
909
00:40:43.620 --> 00:40:45.070
which is actually pretty blue light
910
00:40:45.070 --> 00:40:48.600
because even in the first 10 feet of the water column,
911
00:40:48.600 --> 00:40:51.000
the majority of red light's actually attenuated.
912
00:40:51.000 --> 00:40:53.320
So if you put them under UV light though,
913
00:40:53.320 --> 00:40:55.050
they'd be very stressed.
914
00:40:55.050 --> 00:40:59.010
So that would elicit a stress response for the corals.
915
00:40:59.010 --> 00:41:01.250
Yeah, what was the second part of that question, Kelly?
916
00:41:01.250 --> 00:41:02.460
The second part was,
917
00:41:02.460 --> 00:41:04.430
is there a correlation between the resistance
918
00:41:04.430 --> 00:41:07.380
of the corals to extreme temperatures and the size of them?
919
00:41:08.784 --> 00:41:09.617
Hmm.
920
00:41:12.450 --> 00:41:16.340
So like an age, so size generally correlates with age.
921
00:41:16.340 --> 00:41:20.343
So is there correlation, so definitely,
922
00:41:23.940 --> 00:41:25.540
I don't have an answer for that.
923
00:41:29.328 --> 00:41:31.920
So one of the, like the only thing I can think about
924
00:41:31.920 --> 00:41:35.023
to sound smart, so I actually don't know.
925
00:41:37.360 --> 00:41:42.360
My feeling is that an older coral would have,
926
00:41:44.670 --> 00:41:46.060
I sound like a grandma or something,
927
00:41:46.060 --> 00:41:51.060
would've experienced a more diverse set of experiences
928
00:41:51.150 --> 00:41:54.140
'cause some of these corals can live for hundreds of years.
929
00:41:54.140 --> 00:41:56.360
Like they're definitely, like if you see this giant coral
930
00:41:56.360 --> 00:41:58.460
in the reef, it's older than you for sure.
931
00:41:59.700 --> 00:42:03.610
So you could imagine that that coral has like seen its time.
932
00:42:03.610 --> 00:42:05.990
So when you think about that priming idea,
933
00:42:05.990 --> 00:42:10.810
my feeling would be that bigger corals would be what's left.
934
00:42:10.810 --> 00:42:13.250
So if you were young and resilient
935
00:42:13.250 --> 00:42:15.400
and you made it through like a couple bleaching events
936
00:42:15.400 --> 00:42:16.770
and you were still there, well then,
937
00:42:16.770 --> 00:42:18.480
you're like pretty resilient.
938
00:42:18.480 --> 00:42:21.420
Whereas little ones, it could be that like individuals
939
00:42:21.420 --> 00:42:25.660
from like that little population on the reef,
940
00:42:25.660 --> 00:42:28.360
like let's say all the juveniles, not,
941
00:42:28.360 --> 00:42:30.090
like maybe there hasn't been a bleaching event yet
942
00:42:30.090 --> 00:42:32.520
that like knocked out the kind of losers.
943
00:42:32.520 --> 00:42:34.730
So we can think of the biggest ones on the reef
944
00:42:34.730 --> 00:42:37.190
as being like the long-term winners,
945
00:42:37.190 --> 00:42:39.270
like they've won so far.
946
00:42:39.270 --> 00:42:42.510
And the other really interesting thing to think about
947
00:42:42.510 --> 00:42:47.250
is that, when they establish the symbiotic relationship,
948
00:42:47.250 --> 00:42:51.410
so they settle and then they don't have any symbionts.
949
00:42:51.410 --> 00:42:53.790
They establish symbiosis.
950
00:42:53.790 --> 00:42:58.790
But if they're very small, they're like very confused.
951
00:42:59.100 --> 00:43:00.750
So they're just like testing the waters,
952
00:43:00.750 --> 00:43:03.580
they'll like associate with any algal symbionts.
953
00:43:03.580 --> 00:43:06.180
But as they grow up, their immune system,
954
00:43:06.180 --> 00:43:08.730
so they actually have innate immune systems.
955
00:43:08.730 --> 00:43:11.320
So we have innate and adaptive immune systems,
956
00:43:11.320 --> 00:43:13.320
but corals have an innate immune system.
957
00:43:14.600 --> 00:43:17.620
The coral will kind of like grow up,
958
00:43:17.620 --> 00:43:19.490
its immunity kind of turns on,
959
00:43:19.490 --> 00:43:21.550
you can think of it like puberty or something.
960
00:43:21.550 --> 00:43:25.710
And then that immune system will kind of chuck out,
961
00:43:25.710 --> 00:43:27.790
so get rid of the algal symbionts
962
00:43:27.790 --> 00:43:30.140
that are like not the best ones.
963
00:43:30.140 --> 00:43:33.270
And then eventually, when those baby corals grow up,
964
00:43:33.270 --> 00:43:37.520
its algal symbiont community will be very similar
965
00:43:37.520 --> 00:43:38.860
to the algal symbiont communities
966
00:43:38.860 --> 00:43:42.053
of the big corals on the same reef.
967
00:43:43.180 --> 00:43:45.460
So in that way, I could imagine
968
00:43:45.460 --> 00:43:48.660
that if you had the wrong algal assemblage,
969
00:43:48.660 --> 00:43:51.263
wrong meaning like you haven't weaned it out yet,
970
00:43:52.150 --> 00:43:54.030
you might be more susceptible
971
00:43:56.193 --> 00:43:58.200
to a stressor than maybe a bigger coral
972
00:43:58.200 --> 00:44:00.900
that has a more established symbiotic relationship.
973
00:44:00.900 --> 00:44:02.710
But I don't actually know the answer to that question,
974
00:44:02.710 --> 00:44:05.550
so that's just me kind of thinking about what I know
975
00:44:05.550 --> 00:44:08.470
and how it might relate to what you asked.
976
00:44:08.470 --> 00:44:09.870
It's another great question.
977
00:44:11.440 --> 00:44:12.420
Okay.
978
00:44:12.420 --> 00:44:15.420
Next question. Wwhat are actions you would recommend sharing
979
00:44:15.420 --> 00:44:17.620
with the public to help protect coral reefs?
980
00:44:18.520 --> 00:44:22.350
Yeah, that's a great, so I don't like to get political,
981
00:44:22.350 --> 00:44:25.890
but the best thing we can do is vote people into power
982
00:44:25.890 --> 00:44:30.890
who are actively pushing for mitigating CO2 emissions.
983
00:44:31.180 --> 00:44:35.493
So that's the most direct way that we can make change.
984
00:44:36.440 --> 00:44:38.580
You know, obviously, there's lots of small little things
985
00:44:38.580 --> 00:44:40.420
we can do in our lifestyle, Kelly and I were chatting
986
00:44:40.420 --> 00:44:43.980
about it before we started, before we got
987
00:44:43.980 --> 00:44:47.870
on the official webinar, you know, driving less,
988
00:44:47.870 --> 00:44:49.910
so just ways in which you can reduce
989
00:44:49.910 --> 00:44:51.820
your personal footprint.
990
00:44:51.820 --> 00:44:53.880
But at the end of the day, these personal footprints
991
00:44:53.880 --> 00:44:58.580
are so small in the grand scheme of the CO2 problem
992
00:44:58.580 --> 00:45:02.120
is that it's really we need like broad policy change
993
00:45:02.120 --> 00:45:05.220
to be able to reduce emissions at a rate
994
00:45:05.220 --> 00:45:07.280
that we think is gonna be required
995
00:45:07.280 --> 00:45:10.163
to maintain healthy coral populations.
996
00:45:11.360 --> 00:45:15.130
I think investments in fun technologies that are pulling,
997
00:45:15.130 --> 00:45:19.370
like crazy stuff like pulling CO2 and making,
998
00:45:19.370 --> 00:45:21.870
like we've thought about making like coral biofilms
999
00:45:21.870 --> 00:45:25.000
on roofs where like you could accrete this biofilm
1000
00:45:25.000 --> 00:45:28.040
that like pulls CO2, 'cause CO2 is used
1001
00:45:28.040 --> 00:45:31.030
in the calcium carbonate process.
1002
00:45:31.030 --> 00:45:34.210
So funding research into these sorts of things
1003
00:45:34.210 --> 00:45:37.990
is obviously a way that people can do personally.
1004
00:45:37.990 --> 00:45:40.970
You know, divesting your investment portfolio away
1005
00:45:40.970 --> 00:45:45.580
from fossil fuels is a great way to make a personal impact.
1006
00:45:45.580 --> 00:45:49.810
So I really believe that as people, as part of society,
1007
00:45:49.810 --> 00:45:52.300
we can. Shat we spend our money on says a lot
1008
00:45:52.300 --> 00:45:53.823
about where our values are.
1009
00:45:54.700 --> 00:45:58.590
So making sure that we are supporting companies
1010
00:45:58.590 --> 00:46:00.640
and businesses that represent our values.
1011
00:46:01.630 --> 00:46:03.670
So those are kind of like tangential ways.
1012
00:46:03.670 --> 00:46:06.570
There's obviously more direct ways, so you can,
1013
00:46:06.570 --> 00:46:10.840
there's lots of coral restoration happening actively,
1014
00:46:10.840 --> 00:46:13.210
throughout the Caribbean especially.
1015
00:46:13.210 --> 00:46:15.980
Pacific Islanders are. Like coral restoration
1016
00:46:15.980 --> 00:46:17.450
is happening everywhere, it's kind of mind blowing
1017
00:46:17.450 --> 00:46:19.450
how much coral restoration is happening.
1018
00:46:20.670 --> 00:46:22.610
And so getting involved with one
1019
00:46:22.610 --> 00:46:24.680
of the restoration consortiums
1020
00:46:24.680 --> 00:46:26.883
would be a great way to be active.
1021
00:46:28.110 --> 00:46:29.780
But yeah, so those are my,
1022
00:46:29.780 --> 00:46:34.780
they're kind of more opaque things but, you know,
1023
00:46:34.990 --> 00:46:38.620
I don't know that, you know, there's lots of small things
1024
00:46:38.620 --> 00:46:40.520
we can do in our day-to-day lives
1025
00:46:40.520 --> 00:46:44.120
that I think make an impact.
1026
00:46:44.120 --> 00:46:46.233
But as far as corals, it's really CO2.
1027
00:46:47.444 --> 00:46:51.160
We need to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere like yesterday.
1028
00:46:51.160 --> 00:46:54.160
So that's the main thing we need to think about with corals.
1029
00:46:55.573 --> 00:46:56.590
Sarah, you just reminded me
1030
00:46:56.590 --> 00:46:58.450
of something I heard on TED Talk the other day
1031
00:46:58.450 --> 00:47:00.340
by researcher Phil Dunstan.
1032
00:47:00.340 --> 00:47:03.133
He said the ocean begins at your front door.
1033
00:47:04.360 --> 00:47:06.520
So what you do at home matters.
1034
00:47:06.520 --> 00:47:09.500
Yeah, I mean, I think about that a lot, so, you know,
1035
00:47:09.500 --> 00:47:10.980
but then I have like devil's advocates
1036
00:47:10.980 --> 00:47:13.320
that are always calling me out 'cause I live in Boston,
1037
00:47:13.320 --> 00:47:15.110
but my family lives in Canada on the west coast.
1038
00:47:15.110 --> 00:47:17.133
So I fly to see them.
1039
00:47:18.160 --> 00:47:20.640
I fly to Flower Gardens, or not fly there,
1040
00:47:20.640 --> 00:47:22.690
but I fly to Texas to go there.
1041
00:47:22.690 --> 00:47:27.690
So I don't, I have like a philosophical problem
1042
00:47:28.260 --> 00:47:31.890
with like putting it on individuals because I think that
1043
00:47:31.890 --> 00:47:34.440
it's meant to make us feel personally guilty.
1044
00:47:34.440 --> 00:47:35.300
But at the end of the day,
1045
00:47:35.300 --> 00:47:38.450
what's brought us to this problem is policy.
1046
00:47:38.450 --> 00:47:41.870
So I do think individuals, like we should feel accountable,
1047
00:47:41.870 --> 00:47:46.170
but we should push our representatives to represent us.
1048
00:47:46.170 --> 00:47:49.000
So if corals are something that you are passionate about,
1049
00:47:49.000 --> 00:47:52.360
then, you know, if Flower Gardens are a place
1050
00:47:52.360 --> 00:47:54.360
that you wanna visit and you wanna see these healthy reefs
1051
00:47:54.360 --> 00:47:58.750
in the future, then I think that telling your politicians
1052
00:47:58.750 --> 00:48:00.240
that is great. Like the expansion
1053
00:48:00.240 --> 00:48:02.623
of the National Marine Sanctuary was amazing.
1054
00:48:03.780 --> 00:48:05.660
And that happened with a lot of pushing,
1055
00:48:05.660 --> 00:48:10.660
so I think that these personal actions are very effective.
1056
00:48:12.290 --> 00:48:13.870
Yeah.
1057
00:48:13.870 --> 00:48:14.910
Thank you.
1058
00:48:14.910 --> 00:48:18.330
Next question, what is the lifespan for larval disbursement?
1059
00:48:18.330 --> 00:48:19.450
How long can larvae live
1060
00:48:19.450 --> 00:48:21.333
in the water column before settling?
1061
00:48:23.520 --> 00:48:25.530
So that's an awesome question.
1062
00:48:25.530 --> 00:48:29.570
So one of the things I like didn't touch on yet that I think
1063
00:48:29.570 --> 00:48:33.540
is something worthwhile is that, when we culture corals
1064
00:48:33.540 --> 00:48:36.640
in the lab, they are in a little bucket.
1065
00:48:36.640 --> 00:48:38.600
And they just live there, there's no predators,
1066
00:48:38.600 --> 00:48:40.980
there's nothing, they just chill.
1067
00:48:40.980 --> 00:48:44.030
And we change their water and they just,
1068
00:48:44.030 --> 00:48:46.930
it's like the safest environment, like kind of like a zoo.
1069
00:48:48.723 --> 00:48:50.650
So there's no predators.
1070
00:48:50.650 --> 00:48:52.100
Coral larvae are lecithotrophic,
1071
00:48:52.100 --> 00:48:53.180
which means they don't feed,
1072
00:48:53.180 --> 00:48:54.610
so they just have their reserves
1073
00:48:54.610 --> 00:48:58.460
from the maternal egg mass that they had.
1074
00:48:58.460 --> 00:49:00.770
They can essentially go into like a form of diapause
1075
00:49:00.770 --> 00:49:03.713
where they don't really do anything, they just chill.
1076
00:49:05.261 --> 00:49:08.250
And so the longest I've been able to keep larvae
1077
00:49:08.250 --> 00:49:11.250
in the lab was 120 days, but that was
1078
00:49:13.040 --> 00:49:16.120
mostly 'cause I was like tired of keeping them in the lab.
1079
00:49:16.120 --> 00:49:18.050
They would've, I think, lived longer
1080
00:49:20.050 --> 00:49:21.520
if we'd offered it to them.
1081
00:49:21.520 --> 00:49:24.930
That said, the plankton is a very different environment
1082
00:49:24.930 --> 00:49:29.930
than these culture dishes with no predators and, you know,
1083
00:49:29.950 --> 00:49:32.220
no UV, so one of the questions earlier was talking about UV,
1084
00:49:32.220 --> 00:49:35.477
so UV can have a negative impact on larvae
1085
00:49:35.477 --> 00:49:37.700
'cause they're right at the surface.
1086
00:49:37.700 --> 00:49:40.610
And so that can cause strong damage,
1087
00:49:40.610 --> 00:49:43.590
so really like the plankton is not a cool place to be
1088
00:49:43.590 --> 00:49:46.030
if you're a coral larva, because it's not like
1089
00:49:46.030 --> 00:49:49.090
you can like run away from like, they have cilias,
1090
00:49:49.090 --> 00:49:51.180
they can swim, like I showed you their behaviors,
1091
00:49:51.180 --> 00:49:53.240
but it's not like they're, like they're not faster
1092
00:49:53.240 --> 00:49:55.060
than like a copepod or something.
1093
00:49:55.060 --> 00:49:57.040
So whatever wants to eat them kind of can eat them,
1094
00:49:57.040 --> 00:49:59.140
and this like whale shark sitting right here
1095
00:49:59.140 --> 00:50:01.203
would totally eat all sorts of larvae.
1096
00:50:02.560 --> 00:50:07.270
So my guess is is that, you know,
1097
00:50:07.270 --> 00:50:10.070
I don't think that you would see coral larvae
1098
00:50:11.090 --> 00:50:16.090
beyond a few months in the plankton, in the real world.
1099
00:50:16.850 --> 00:50:18.530
That being said, when, you know,
1100
00:50:18.530 --> 00:50:21.010
I showed you those probably billions of babies
1101
00:50:21.010 --> 00:50:22.860
at the surface in that surface slick.
1102
00:50:23.810 --> 00:50:26.030
99.9% of those will die.
1103
00:50:26.030 --> 00:50:28.090
They'll be eaten, they'll die, genetic load,
1104
00:50:28.090 --> 00:50:30.490
all sorts of reasons why they die.
1105
00:50:30.490 --> 00:50:33.370
So the majority of them don't survive and come to the reef,
1106
00:50:33.370 --> 00:50:34.630
so it's really like sweepstakes.
1107
00:50:34.630 --> 00:50:38.970
Like it's very rare that a recruitment event happens
1108
00:50:38.970 --> 00:50:41.100
just because of everything. Like you have,
1109
00:50:41.100 --> 00:50:42.610
to have successful fertilization.
1110
00:50:42.610 --> 00:50:44.660
You have to, the larva has to survive,
1111
00:50:44.660 --> 00:50:45.850
it has to actually find the reef.
1112
00:50:45.850 --> 00:50:48.260
So the currents actually have to take it to the reef.
1113
00:50:48.260 --> 00:50:50.510
It has to find the reef, it has to settle,
1114
00:50:50.510 --> 00:50:52.160
then it has to not get eaten by all the stuff
1115
00:50:52.160 --> 00:50:53.840
that wants to eat it on the reef.
1116
00:50:53.840 --> 00:50:57.630
So really, life of a larva is quite intense.
1117
00:50:57.630 --> 00:50:59.060
they should probably make a movie about it.
1118
00:50:59.060 --> 00:51:00.890
I bet it would be good.
1119
00:51:00.890 --> 00:51:02.286
Yeah.
1120
00:51:02.286 --> 00:51:04.208
That's wonderful.
1121
00:51:04.208 --> 00:51:06.030
There's another question about the eggs themselves.
1122
00:51:06.030 --> 00:51:08.630
Are the individual eggs visible to the naked eye
1123
00:51:08.630 --> 00:51:10.223
or are they microscopic?
1124
00:51:11.760 --> 00:51:15.090
Amazing question, and a funny story with this one.
1125
00:51:15.090 --> 00:51:17.690
So yes, you can totally see them with the naked eye,
1126
00:51:18.530 --> 00:51:20.390
unless you age.
1127
00:51:20.390 --> 00:51:22.790
I've noticed with age that I have a harder time.
1128
00:51:23.720 --> 00:51:25.810
Like I think I need to start wearing reading glasses
1129
00:51:25.810 --> 00:51:28.990
when I do coral spawning work now because, you know,
1130
00:51:28.990 --> 00:51:33.250
we do a lot of counting, like egg counting, in our work,
1131
00:51:33.250 --> 00:51:36.990
and I'm finding that I'm squinting and, anyways.
1132
00:51:36.990 --> 00:51:38.200
And it's funny 'cause I used to make fun
1133
00:51:38.200 --> 00:51:40.170
of this woman I collaborated with in Australia
1134
00:51:40.170 --> 00:51:42.880
and she was like, she'd say, oh, here's this thing,
1135
00:51:42.880 --> 00:51:44.590
all the wells are, each have one in them.
1136
00:51:44.590 --> 00:51:46.960
And I'd look in there and there was just like, I don't know,
1137
00:51:46.960 --> 00:51:50.060
just like totally off like what she said it was.
1138
00:51:50.060 --> 00:51:50.893
And then I found out
1139
00:51:50.893 --> 00:51:52.600
it's 'cause she, like, needed reading glasses
1140
00:51:52.600 --> 00:51:54.520
and I, like, made fun of her at the time and this is,
1141
00:51:54.520 --> 00:51:56.530
you know, 15 years ago or something.
1142
00:51:56.530 --> 00:51:59.270
And now I'm like in the same state, so,
1143
00:51:59.270 --> 00:52:02.133
but yes, to the naked eye if you have good vision.
1144
00:52:04.120 --> 00:52:04.953
Great.
1145
00:52:04.953 --> 00:52:08.140
And does the coral spawning here have any relation
1146
00:52:08.140 --> 00:52:10.540
to deep water corals, say, off the Mid-Atlantic?
1147
00:52:12.300 --> 00:52:14.270
I don't know about coral spawning up the Mid-Atlantic,
1148
00:52:14.270 --> 00:52:17.470
but one of the things I didn't touch on here
1149
00:52:17.470 --> 00:52:20.370
'cause I wasn't sure about at the time,
1150
00:52:20.370 --> 00:52:21.940
obviously, I would've.
1151
00:52:21.940 --> 00:52:25.993
So one of the cool things we did, what year was it? 2019.
1152
00:52:27.080 --> 00:52:29.980
It was actually funded by NOAA, we did a telepresence cruise
1153
00:52:29.980 --> 00:52:32.870
to the Flower Gardens and we used
1154
00:52:32.870 --> 00:52:36.520
a remotely operated vehicle, so an ROV, to go down
1155
00:52:36.520 --> 00:52:38.760
and monitor coral spawning at depth.
1156
00:52:38.760 --> 00:52:42.420
So we're talking like 45 meters, so quite deep.
1157
00:52:42.420 --> 00:52:45.790
So the same species can live quite shallow
1158
00:52:45.790 --> 00:52:47.750
all the way down to 45 meters.
1159
00:52:47.750 --> 00:52:51.130
So like at Flower Gardens, I think the top part
1160
00:52:51.130 --> 00:52:54.090
would be probably like 21 meters.
1161
00:52:54.090 --> 00:52:57.623
Sorry, let me do feet, 65 feet to like,
1162
00:52:58.676 --> 00:53:02.593
I don't know how many meters, 50, 150 feet or something.
1163
00:53:03.838 --> 00:53:06.860
And they do tend, they spawn around the same time.
1164
00:53:06.860 --> 00:53:08.840
So there does seem to be spawning synchrony between
1165
00:53:08.840 --> 00:53:11.300
the depths, but I can only speak from the Flower Gardens,
1166
00:53:11.300 --> 00:53:13.070
I don't know of any research actually
1167
00:53:13.070 --> 00:53:18.070
that's monitored deep water Caribbean coral spawning.
1168
00:53:18.850 --> 00:53:20.420
And I think the reason for that
1169
00:53:20.420 --> 00:53:23.300
is because, I told you, it's so predictable and it like is.
1170
00:53:23.300 --> 00:53:26.460
But you imagine, for anyone out there that's a diver,
1171
00:53:26.460 --> 00:53:29.260
even 65 feet is quite a challenging depth
1172
00:53:29.260 --> 00:53:31.850
to dive for a long time. Like, we dive with nitrox
1173
00:53:31.850 --> 00:53:33.900
and that gives us about 45 minutes underwater
1174
00:53:33.900 --> 00:53:34.973
at like 80 feet.
1175
00:53:36.460 --> 00:53:38.670
But if you wanted to dive the mesophotic,
1176
00:53:38.670 --> 00:53:40.960
you'd have to be a technical diver to be able
1177
00:53:40.960 --> 00:53:43.210
to monitor the coral spawning, otherwise, you'd get like,
1178
00:53:43.210 --> 00:53:46.310
you'd run out of air, you'd need a rebreather.
1179
00:53:46.310 --> 00:53:48.670
So you'd need a lot of like technical expertise.
1180
00:53:48.670 --> 00:53:51.030
And then you couple that with like doing tech diving
1181
00:53:51.030 --> 00:53:51.863
at night.
1182
00:53:52.800 --> 00:53:57.100
So it's, the spawning dives are quite intense
1183
00:53:57.100 --> 00:53:59.640
'cause you're going down in this Flower Gardens,
1184
00:53:59.640 --> 00:54:02.780
this blue water diving, 'cause you're going down 60 feet
1185
00:54:02.780 --> 00:54:04.280
until you get to the reef cap.
1186
00:54:06.160 --> 00:54:09.880
And then you lose all visibility because they're spawning,
1187
00:54:09.880 --> 00:54:11.170
so not a lot of people have done
1188
00:54:11.170 --> 00:54:13.170
deep water spawning observations
1189
00:54:13.170 --> 00:54:16.060
for these logistical reasons, but that's why the ROV work
1190
00:54:16.060 --> 00:54:16.910
was really cool.
1191
00:54:16.910 --> 00:54:19.310
And we did show that they spawn around the same time.
1192
00:54:19.310 --> 00:54:20.143
Yeah.
1193
00:54:23.586 --> 00:54:26.350
Next question, do corals only communicate
1194
00:54:26.350 --> 00:54:29.330
with each other via spawning, are the signals planned,
1195
00:54:29.330 --> 00:54:30.760
and what conditions need to happen
1196
00:54:30.760 --> 00:54:32.083
to stimulate the spawning?
1197
00:54:33.000 --> 00:54:35.240
Can you read the first part of the question again?
1198
00:54:35.240 --> 00:54:36.770
Do corals only communicate
1199
00:54:36.770 --> 00:54:40.250
with each other via spawning, or maybe only during spawning
1200
00:54:40.250 --> 00:54:41.350
maybe is what they mean?
1201
00:54:41.350 --> 00:54:42.810
Yeah, great question.
1202
00:54:42.810 --> 00:54:45.993
So we definitely think there's other things in the water
1203
00:54:45.993 --> 00:54:47.373
that cue spawning.
1204
00:54:48.410 --> 00:54:50.630
So obviously, it's like the lunar light,
1205
00:54:50.630 --> 00:54:52.660
so the daylight and the lunar light interact
1206
00:54:52.660 --> 00:54:55.650
to tell the coral ish when to spawn.
1207
00:54:55.650 --> 00:54:59.930
But what's interesting is that if you like hold your light
1208
00:54:59.930 --> 00:55:01.810
on a coral, like it won't spawn for you,
1209
00:55:01.810 --> 00:55:03.550
it's really annoying 'cause you're like waiting for it,
1210
00:55:03.550 --> 00:55:07.670
you can see that they're set, you can see the gametes
1211
00:55:07.670 --> 00:55:09.650
in its mouth and you're like waiting.
1212
00:55:09.650 --> 00:55:12.223
And then you take your light away and then it goes.
1213
00:55:13.130 --> 00:55:15.170
But some really fascinating work that was done
1214
00:55:15.170 --> 00:55:19.070
by Don Levitan from Florida State University in Panama,
1215
00:55:19.070 --> 00:55:21.840
where they like looked at corals up and downstream
1216
00:55:21.840 --> 00:55:24.000
from each other and when they spawned.
1217
00:55:24.000 --> 00:55:27.240
And there was definitely this, like, spawning
1218
00:55:27.240 --> 00:55:29.110
that happened through space.
1219
00:55:29.110 --> 00:55:32.050
So like, so there's some, I think,
1220
00:55:32.050 --> 00:55:33.800
queuing off of actual gametes,
1221
00:55:33.800 --> 00:55:36.110
so like maybe if one goes early,
1222
00:55:36.110 --> 00:55:39.160
the coral next to it's like, oh, that guy already went.
1223
00:55:39.160 --> 00:55:40.110
I should go too.
1224
00:55:40.110 --> 00:55:42.440
So I think there's some like cuing on spawn,
1225
00:55:42.440 --> 00:55:45.010
but I think there's also potentially like
1226
00:55:45.010 --> 00:55:48.100
water-soluble like hormone-like chemical,
1227
00:55:48.100 --> 00:55:51.100
some sort of chemical signature too that, like also tells it
1228
00:55:51.100 --> 00:55:52.910
to spawn, because one of the things we've noticed
1229
00:55:52.910 --> 00:55:55.530
is that when...You can do ex situ spawning,
1230
00:55:55.530 --> 00:55:57.960
so you can take a fragment of a coral
1231
00:55:57.960 --> 00:56:01.670
and take it to the surface and it'll spawn.
1232
00:56:01.670 --> 00:56:05.680
But if you do it like many days early, it's like
1233
00:56:05.680 --> 00:56:08.450
it didn't receive enough info or something,
1234
00:56:08.450 --> 00:56:10.080
so they often don't spawn.
1235
00:56:10.080 --> 00:56:13.180
So you almost need to like take the coral off the reef
1236
00:56:13.180 --> 00:56:16.850
like the day before or the day of spawning
1237
00:56:16.850 --> 00:56:19.370
to get them to spawn ex situ.
1238
00:56:19.370 --> 00:56:20.220
The other cool thing you can do
1239
00:56:20.220 --> 00:56:22.070
is when you're doing spawning ex situ
1240
00:56:22.070 --> 00:56:25.270
is that you can bamboozle them and cover them
1241
00:56:25.270 --> 00:56:30.270
with black plastic to like simulate like the sunset.
1242
00:56:30.740 --> 00:56:32.720
And then they'll spawn early, which is really nice
1243
00:56:32.720 --> 00:56:34.760
'cause some of those corals spawn at like midnight.
1244
00:56:34.760 --> 00:56:36.780
So then you're spawning all night and making cultures
1245
00:56:36.780 --> 00:56:38.500
and you're up to like five in the morning.
1246
00:56:38.500 --> 00:56:40.610
But this way, you can like bamboozle them
1247
00:56:40.610 --> 00:56:42.920
and they'll go a little bit earlier for you.
1248
00:56:42.920 --> 00:56:44.830
So that's, I think I answered the first part
1249
00:56:44.830 --> 00:56:47.897
of the question.
1250
00:56:47.897 --> 00:56:49.830
The other part of the question was, you know,
1251
00:56:49.830 --> 00:56:52.080
what are those cues that tell corals to spawn,
1252
00:56:52.080 --> 00:56:53.920
so I think you kind of answered the whole thing.
1253
00:56:53.920 --> 00:56:54.753
Okay, cool.
1254
00:56:55.590 --> 00:56:56.600
Folks, at this point,
1255
00:56:56.600 --> 00:56:58.400
we are nearing the end of our time,
1256
00:56:58.400 --> 00:57:01.180
but Sarah has agreed to stay on for a little bit longer
1257
00:57:01.180 --> 00:57:04.430
about another 10-15 minutes past our scheduled end time
1258
00:57:04.430 --> 00:57:05.770
to continue answering questions.
1259
00:57:05.770 --> 00:57:08.510
We have a whole list still going for you, Sarah.
1260
00:57:08.510 --> 00:57:10.340
But what I'm gonna do now in the interest of people
1261
00:57:10.340 --> 00:57:12.347
who do need to leave at 7:30 is I'm gonna wrap up
1262
00:57:12.347 --> 00:57:15.650
the presentation and let you know the final details
1263
00:57:15.650 --> 00:57:18.050
that you need to know about what's coming up next.
1264
00:57:18.050 --> 00:57:19.920
And then we will come back to Sarah
1265
00:57:19.920 --> 00:57:21.820
and the question and answer period,
1266
00:57:21.820 --> 00:57:23.490
so if you'll hold on a second,
1267
00:57:23.490 --> 00:57:25.640
I'm going to start showing my screen again.
1268
00:57:32.400 --> 00:57:33.770
And there we go.
1269
00:57:33.770 --> 00:57:35.740
So for those of you who do need to leave
1270
00:57:35.740 --> 00:57:38.530
and for all those of you who've been here all this time,
1271
00:57:38.530 --> 00:57:42.120
thank you so much for attending this Seaside Chats
1272
00:57:42.120 --> 00:57:46.240
about the Sex Lives of Coral: From Spawning to Conservation.
1273
00:57:46.240 --> 00:57:48.930
This is the first in a series of four presentations
1274
00:57:48.930 --> 00:57:50.400
we are offering this month.
1275
00:57:50.400 --> 00:57:52.360
We invite you to register for the remaining chats
1276
00:57:52.360 --> 00:57:57.360
by visiting us on the web at flowergarden.noaa.gov.
1277
00:57:57.490 --> 00:58:00.040
We promise the other topics will be just as engaging
1278
00:58:00.040 --> 00:58:02.340
and informative, and you can see them listed here
1279
00:58:02.340 --> 00:58:03.610
on this slide.
1280
00:58:03.610 --> 00:58:06.440
Next week, we'll be talking about the future of fisheries
1281
00:58:06.440 --> 00:58:08.203
in the climate-driven Gulf.
1282
00:58:09.320 --> 00:58:12.030
The following week, we'll be discovering climate history,
1283
00:58:12.030 --> 00:58:14.460
in the skeletons of living corals.
1284
00:58:14.460 --> 00:58:17.240
And on the 23rd, we're gonna go to Hawaii
1285
00:58:17.240 --> 00:58:20.550
and talk about how humpback whales feed the ocean
1286
00:58:20.550 --> 00:58:23.090
around Hawaii, not how it feeds the people.
1287
00:58:23.090 --> 00:58:24.300
It's not about people eating whales,
1288
00:58:24.300 --> 00:58:26.760
so please don't get confused, but how those whales
1289
00:58:26.760 --> 00:58:28.640
are important to the overall environment
1290
00:58:28.640 --> 00:58:30.083
around the Hawaiian islands.
1291
00:58:31.080 --> 00:58:33.990
If you have, we welcome any feedback on this
1292
00:58:33.990 --> 00:58:36.970
or any questions you have, please submit them by replying
1293
00:58:36.970 --> 00:58:39.440
to the follow-up email you'll receive after the webinar
1294
00:58:39.440 --> 00:58:43.893
or by emailing us at flowergarden@noaa.gov.
1295
00:58:44.940 --> 00:58:46.870
Today's presentation has also been part
1296
00:58:46.870 --> 00:58:49.130
of the National Marine Sanctuaries Webinar Series,
1297
00:58:49.130 --> 00:58:50.460
as I mentioned earlier.
1298
00:58:50.460 --> 00:58:53.170
And while Seaside Chats last just one month,
1299
00:58:53.170 --> 00:58:56.130
our national webinar series continues throughout the year
1300
00:58:56.130 --> 00:58:58.090
to provide educators with educational
1301
00:58:58.090 --> 00:59:01.080
and scientific expertise, resources, and training
1302
00:59:01.080 --> 00:59:04.610
to support ocean and climate literacy in the classroom.
1303
00:59:04.610 --> 00:59:07.710
Be sure to check the National Marine Sanctuary's website
1304
00:59:07.710 --> 00:59:09.760
for recordings of past webinars
1305
00:59:09.760 --> 00:59:12.060
and the schedule of what's to come.
1306
00:59:12.060 --> 00:59:15.670
As a reminder, our recording from today will be posted there
1307
00:59:15.670 --> 00:59:17.580
and a link to that will also be posted
1308
00:59:17.580 --> 00:59:18.970
on the Flower Garden Banks
1309
00:59:18.970 --> 00:59:20.723
National Marine Sanctuary website.
1310
00:59:22.720 --> 00:59:24.530
Following this webinar, all attendees
1311
00:59:24.530 --> 00:59:27.950
will receive a PDF copy of a certificate of attendance
1312
00:59:27.950 --> 00:59:30.030
that provides documentation for one hour
1313
00:59:30.030 --> 00:59:32.980
of professional development for today's presentation.
1314
00:59:32.980 --> 00:59:36.300
This includes our Texas CPE provider number
1315
00:59:36.300 --> 00:59:38.700
for those of you who are Texas educators.
1316
00:59:38.700 --> 00:59:40.740
If you are an educator outside of Texas,
1317
00:59:40.740 --> 00:59:43.380
please use this certificate to help get your hours approved
1318
00:59:43.380 --> 00:59:44.940
in your district.
1319
00:59:44.940 --> 00:59:46.730
If you require additional information,
1320
00:59:46.730 --> 00:59:51.123
please feel free to contact me at flowergarden@noaa.gov.
1321
00:59:51.990 --> 00:59:54.600
There will also be a short evaluation that has questions
1322
00:59:54.600 --> 00:59:57.280
for you to answer following today's presentation.
1323
00:59:57.280 --> 00:59:59.640
Please complete this survey immediately
1324
00:59:59.640 --> 01:00:01.610
after signing off the webinar.
1325
01:00:01.610 --> 01:00:03.650
It should only take about three minutes to complete
1326
01:00:03.650 --> 01:00:05.620
and we really appreciate any feedback
1327
01:00:05.620 --> 01:00:06.893
you are willing to share.
1328
01:00:09.280 --> 01:00:11.910
Thanks again to Sarah Davies for a great presentation
1329
01:00:11.910 --> 01:00:13.410
about the Sex Lives of Corals
1330
01:00:13.410 --> 01:00:15.550
and their implications for coral conservation
1331
01:00:15.550 --> 01:00:18.110
in Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary
1332
01:00:18.110 --> 01:00:21.150
and the rest of the world, and thanks to all of you
1333
01:00:21.150 --> 01:00:23.350
for taking the time to join us.
1334
01:00:23.350 --> 01:00:27.480
This concludes the official part of the webinar,
1335
01:00:27.480 --> 01:00:29.470
but we are going to stay on for about another 10
1336
01:00:29.470 --> 01:00:33.080
to 15 minutes to continue answering a few more questions
1337
01:00:33.080 --> 01:00:34.430
that people have for Sarah.
1338
01:00:37.390 --> 01:00:39.660
All right, Sarah, are you ready for some more?
1339
01:00:39.660 --> 01:00:40.880
Yeah, I'm ready.
1340
01:00:40.880 --> 01:00:42.540
Okay.
1341
01:00:42.540 --> 01:00:43.853
Next question.
1342
01:00:46.790 --> 01:00:50.040
How possible is it to grow corals in tanks in the classroom
1343
01:00:50.040 --> 01:00:52.823
and have them transplanted to reefs for restoration?
1344
01:00:56.120 --> 01:00:59.580
I wish I could say it would be really a great idea.
1345
01:00:59.580 --> 01:01:03.980
So all the aquaria are challenging,
1346
01:01:03.980 --> 01:01:08.980
so it's probably one of my biggest stresses in my job,
1347
01:01:11.190 --> 01:01:14.850
is making sure that I don't like kill all the corals.
1348
01:01:14.850 --> 01:01:17.470
So we have a system that's like automated through WiFi
1349
01:01:17.470 --> 01:01:20.170
that sends me a text message whenever the temperature
1350
01:01:20.170 --> 01:01:22.560
is like, so the temperatures need to be maintained
1351
01:01:22.560 --> 01:01:24.510
at very consistent happy temperatures,
1352
01:01:24.510 --> 01:01:25.710
and if it gets too cold, they bleach,
1353
01:01:25.710 --> 01:01:27.360
if it gets too warm, they bleach.
1354
01:01:28.330 --> 01:01:30.983
So all of our systems are on like backup power.
1355
01:01:31.993 --> 01:01:33.220
So my feeling is that
1356
01:01:34.790 --> 01:01:37.830
it wouldn't be a great classroom activity. That being said,
1357
01:01:37.830 --> 01:01:39.610
I didn't talk at all about corals
1358
01:01:39.610 --> 01:01:41.450
that live up here in New England.
1359
01:01:41.450 --> 01:01:44.980
But there are some facultatively symbiotic corals,
1360
01:01:44.980 --> 01:01:46.140
which means they can live with
1361
01:01:46.140 --> 01:01:48.540
and without their symbionts naturally.
1362
01:01:48.540 --> 01:01:50.870
We just dive for them off the coast here,
1363
01:01:50.870 --> 01:01:52.710
which is a lovely little system, and during COVID,
1364
01:01:52.710 --> 01:01:55.780
we really studied these corals a lot.
1365
01:01:55.780 --> 01:02:00.780
And they are much more resilient than the tropical corals
1366
01:02:01.480 --> 01:02:03.480
and much easier to keep in aquaria.
1367
01:02:03.480 --> 01:02:06.250
That being said, they're not actively used for restoration,
1368
01:02:06.250 --> 01:02:08.760
but if you wanted to use them for like teaching,
1369
01:02:08.760 --> 01:02:10.780
you could monitor their growth.
1370
01:02:10.780 --> 01:02:14.380
They have really big polyps, so those like anemones,
1371
01:02:14.380 --> 01:02:17.550
so you can like feed them brine shrimp.
1372
01:02:17.550 --> 01:02:19.360
So those would probably be like the best option.
1373
01:02:19.360 --> 01:02:22.770
There's also, we use a model for coral bleaching,
1374
01:02:22.770 --> 01:02:24.530
this Aiptasia anemone.
1375
01:02:24.530 --> 01:02:28.710
If you Google Aiptasia, it's A-I-P-T-A-S-I-A.
1376
01:02:28.710 --> 01:02:32.660
And it's like a pest, so that you could definitely keep
1377
01:02:32.660 --> 01:02:35.250
in a classroom, and they also bleach.
1378
01:02:35.250 --> 01:02:36.572
So they have a symbiotic relationship
1379
01:02:36.572 --> 01:02:39.823
with algae in the same family as corals do.
1380
01:02:41.130 --> 01:02:44.090
And those are very, I use those for teaching a lot.
1381
01:02:44.090 --> 01:02:46.540
And students love them, you can like feed them
1382
01:02:46.540 --> 01:02:49.690
and they can like, they're fun too.
1383
01:02:49.690 --> 01:02:51.430
But I wouldn't suggest tropical corals
1384
01:02:51.430 --> 01:02:56.180
in a classroom setting, the tanks are quite a lot of time
1385
01:02:56.180 --> 01:02:57.013
for upkeep.
1386
01:02:58.960 --> 01:03:00.640
Okay, next question.
1387
01:03:00.640 --> 01:03:03.400
Oh, when the algae leave corals during warming events,
1388
01:03:03.400 --> 01:03:05.240
is the algae that decides to leave
1389
01:03:05.240 --> 01:03:08.960
because they would die inside the polyps
1390
01:03:08.960 --> 01:03:10.713
or is it the coral that expels it?
1391
01:03:11.923 --> 01:03:13.680
Yeah, so that is like the best question
1392
01:03:13.680 --> 01:03:15.950
and that's like really the crux of what our lab
1393
01:03:15.950 --> 01:03:19.250
is really interested in, is like, what's the mechanism
1394
01:03:19.250 --> 01:03:22.880
of what's called dysbiosis, when the symbiotic relationship
1395
01:03:22.880 --> 01:03:24.270
is lost.
1396
01:03:24.270 --> 01:03:29.270
And there's hypotheses, so we think that what happens
1397
01:03:29.490 --> 01:03:33.522
is that when algae get angry, so when it's too hot,
1398
01:03:33.522 --> 01:03:38.522
their photosynthetic apparatus starts malfunctioning
1399
01:03:38.620 --> 01:03:41.270
and produces something called reactive oxygen species.
1400
01:03:41.270 --> 01:03:45.653
And these reactive oxygen species, or we call it ROS,
1401
01:03:46.850 --> 01:03:51.150
will infiltrate into the coral and it's toxic.
1402
01:03:51.150 --> 01:03:53.160
So it actually poisons the coral.
1403
01:03:53.160 --> 01:03:57.340
And then this hypothesis, this reactive oxygen hypothesis,
1404
01:03:58.480 --> 01:04:02.740
thinks that it's the coral that makes the decision
1405
01:04:02.740 --> 01:04:04.113
to expel their algae.
1406
01:04:06.240 --> 01:04:08.780
There's other hypotheses that think it's the algae
1407
01:04:08.780 --> 01:04:10.620
where they're, like this home sucks,
1408
01:04:10.620 --> 01:04:12.886
it's really hot and I don't like it.
1409
01:04:12.886 --> 01:04:14.650
The interesting thing about
1410
01:04:14.650 --> 01:04:17.800
the tropical coral algal symbiosis
1411
01:04:17.800 --> 01:04:21.970
is that the tropical coral, like I said,
1412
01:04:21.970 --> 01:04:24.240
without the algae, it will eventually die.
1413
01:04:24.240 --> 01:04:25.940
What I didn't tell you is that the algae can grow
1414
01:04:25.940 --> 01:04:28.543
in culture for like ever, they live in sediments,
1415
01:04:29.508 --> 01:04:31.960
they can infect other hosts on the reef,
1416
01:04:31.960 --> 01:04:35.503
like not just corals, they infect clams and sponges,
1417
01:04:36.860 --> 01:04:39.800
other little critters on the, like worms.
1418
01:04:39.800 --> 01:04:42.453
So they can live in a variety of hosts.
1419
01:04:43.900 --> 01:04:47.810
So they're maybe less obligate than the coral is.
1420
01:04:47.810 --> 01:04:51.220
So there is, but it's an area of active debate.
1421
01:04:51.220 --> 01:04:53.490
So I think that like, if you asked me
1422
01:04:53.490 --> 01:04:56.043
which like camp I sit in, I think it's like,
1423
01:04:58.310 --> 01:05:00.680
I think what happens, I know no one asked me
1424
01:05:00.680 --> 01:05:02.813
what camp I'm in, but I'm gonna tell you what camp I'm in.
1425
01:05:03.690 --> 01:05:06.290
I think what happens during bleaching
1426
01:05:06.290 --> 01:05:09.660
is that the coral loses control
1427
01:05:11.243 --> 01:05:12.743
of the symbiont's environment.
1428
01:05:14.430 --> 01:05:17.530
And then that makes the symbiont go crazy.
1429
01:05:17.530 --> 01:05:20.320
And then the coral is like bleugh
1430
01:05:20.320 --> 01:05:21.710
and then like spits it all out,
1431
01:05:21.710 --> 01:05:24.650
but I think it starts with like the coral not being able
1432
01:05:24.650 --> 01:05:28.760
to tightly regulate that symbiont's space and that,
1433
01:05:28.760 --> 01:05:30.860
because I think it's the variation
1434
01:05:30.860 --> 01:05:33.760
in how good a coral is at doing that.
1435
01:05:33.760 --> 01:05:36.480
That explains a lot of the variation
1436
01:05:36.480 --> 01:05:39.810
of bleaching we see between, like, species or populations,
1437
01:05:39.810 --> 01:05:43.000
like the questions about, like, which corals
1438
01:05:43.000 --> 01:05:44.980
are more stress-tolerant.
1439
01:05:44.980 --> 01:05:46.430
It's like, there's a lot of variation out there,
1440
01:05:46.430 --> 01:05:49.100
and I think how good a coral is at regulating
1441
01:05:49.100 --> 01:05:52.070
its symbiont's environment explains a lot
1442
01:05:53.206 --> 01:05:54.930
of bleaching patterns.
1443
01:05:54.930 --> 01:05:56.400
But we don't know.
1444
01:05:56.400 --> 01:06:00.233
If you knew that, you'd be like a very, very cool scientist.
1445
01:06:02.010 --> 01:06:03.497
Cool.
1446
01:06:03.497 --> 01:06:07.380
Can corals be farmed or is the animal-plant symbiosis
1447
01:06:07.380 --> 01:06:09.503
only possible in a natural environment?
1448
01:06:10.720 --> 01:06:13.130
No, so, I mean, they're actively being restored,
1449
01:06:13.130 --> 01:06:13.963
so there's like, if you Google
1450
01:06:13.963 --> 01:06:17.290
like coral restoration Florida, for example,
1451
01:06:17.290 --> 01:06:18.890
they can totally be farmed.
1452
01:06:18.890 --> 01:06:21.770
They can be farmed ex situ, so where you have tanks
1453
01:06:21.770 --> 01:06:22.913
and you grow them up.
1454
01:06:22.913 --> 01:06:26.930
So Mote Marine Lab in the Florida Keys
1455
01:06:26.930 --> 01:06:29.040
does this really cool technique where they,
1456
01:06:29.040 --> 01:06:30.710
it's called micro-fragging.
1457
01:06:30.710 --> 01:06:33.750
So they cut the corals into like the tiniest little pieces
1458
01:06:33.750 --> 01:06:35.333
and then they grow super fast.
1459
01:06:37.050 --> 01:06:39.000
We don't know why, but it's super cool.
1460
01:06:40.430 --> 01:06:44.160
So that's like ex situ restoration.
1461
01:06:44.160 --> 01:06:47.590
There's also in situ restoration where they,
1462
01:06:47.590 --> 01:06:49.840
it's super cool, they have like little,
1463
01:06:49.840 --> 01:06:53.170
they call them coral trees, I think,
1464
01:06:53.170 --> 01:06:56.730
and they hang them out in the ocean like
1465
01:06:56.730 --> 01:06:59.810
above like a sand bar kind of thing,
1466
01:06:59.810 --> 01:07:02.140
like out in like really clear water,
1467
01:07:02.140 --> 01:07:05.370
they have like these white trees,
1468
01:07:05.370 --> 01:07:07.700
and then they hang all these corals,
1469
01:07:07.700 --> 01:07:09.960
and they grow super fast on them and they,
1470
01:07:09.960 --> 01:07:12.193
there's like, I mean, I wish I had a photo.
1471
01:07:13.350 --> 01:07:14.890
But it's fascinating.
1472
01:07:14.890 --> 01:07:18.040
So yes, you can do this and people are doing this
1473
01:07:18.040 --> 01:07:22.670
and it's an area of very rapidly evolving research.
1474
01:07:22.670 --> 01:07:24.220
Yeah.
1475
01:07:24.220 --> 01:07:25.220
Wonderful.
1476
01:07:27.157 --> 01:07:28.890
Good question here.
1477
01:07:28.890 --> 01:07:31.040
While it's great that some corals are resilient
1478
01:07:31.040 --> 01:07:33.250
to warming temperatures that can be associated
1479
01:07:33.250 --> 01:07:36.220
with climate change, are there enough resilient species
1480
01:07:36.220 --> 01:07:38.833
to maintain sufficient biodiversity globally?
1481
01:07:43.030 --> 01:07:46.397
That's a tough one, so based on what we know,
1482
01:07:49.590 --> 01:07:51.040
which isn't everything, you know,
1483
01:07:51.040 --> 01:07:53.100
I feel like we've just scratched the surface
1484
01:07:53.100 --> 01:07:56.733
about how the mechanisms by which corals can evolve.
1485
01:07:57.670 --> 01:07:59.090
One of the things I didn't even touch on
1486
01:07:59.090 --> 01:08:01.880
is there's the coral host, there's the algal symbionts,
1487
01:08:01.880 --> 01:08:05.040
but there's actually also a consortium of microbes
1488
01:08:05.040 --> 01:08:09.190
that live in and on top of the coral and the algae.
1489
01:08:09.190 --> 01:08:12.053
So there's this, just like we have our human microbiome,
1490
01:08:13.570 --> 01:08:15.710
there's coral microbiomes, and those have been linked
1491
01:08:15.710 --> 01:08:17.390
to resilience too. So if we think about,
1492
01:08:17.390 --> 01:08:20.130
there's like these three partners and all of their,
1493
01:08:20.130 --> 01:08:22.450
and by three, I mean like the micro,
1494
01:08:22.450 --> 01:08:24.090
I'm lumping all of those thousands
1495
01:08:24.090 --> 01:08:26.780
of bacteria type into like one.
1496
01:08:26.780 --> 01:08:29.630
And so all of those possible interactions
1497
01:08:29.630 --> 01:08:32.773
create opportunities for evolution,
1498
01:08:33.785 --> 01:08:35.350
all of those in interactions between all
1499
01:08:35.350 --> 01:08:36.750
of those possible partners.
1500
01:08:36.750 --> 01:08:41.750
So my job, my lab jokes I'm like a serial optimist.
1501
01:08:42.690 --> 01:08:45.930
So I like to think that we just don't understand enough
1502
01:08:45.930 --> 01:08:50.173
about how these interactions might modulate evolution
1503
01:08:51.360 --> 01:08:55.253
of the coral holobiont, meaning like all of it together.
1504
01:08:56.820 --> 01:09:00.370
And I do think that there is reason for hope,
1505
01:09:00.370 --> 01:09:04.000
places like Flower Gardens are one of them.
1506
01:09:04.000 --> 01:09:06.200
But if you read the literature
1507
01:09:06.200 --> 01:09:07.950
and looked at the modeling studies,
1508
01:09:10.920 --> 01:09:14.650
I think that, based on the information that we have today,
1509
01:09:14.650 --> 01:09:19.293
the projections for business as usual are very bad.
1510
01:09:21.280 --> 01:09:26.200
Very few remnant reefs, only highly resilient species
1511
01:09:26.200 --> 01:09:30.590
of very low species diversity, and reefs not functioning
1512
01:09:30.590 --> 01:09:32.800
in the form that they function in today.
1513
01:09:32.800 --> 01:09:35.310
So as you get less species,
1514
01:09:35.310 --> 01:09:37.890
you get less structural complexity,
1515
01:09:37.890 --> 01:09:40.720
so you get less opportunity for other reef invertebrates
1516
01:09:40.720 --> 01:09:43.930
and larvae to like live and associate with the reef.
1517
01:09:43.930 --> 01:09:46.150
So that's like, structural complexity and species diversity
1518
01:09:46.150 --> 01:09:48.560
is like a really important thing for like the ecology
1519
01:09:48.560 --> 01:09:50.673
and function of the ecosystem.
1520
01:09:52.080 --> 01:09:56.790
And so we think that under a business as usual scenario,
1521
01:09:56.790 --> 01:09:58.980
the reef structure and the diversity
1522
01:09:58.980 --> 01:10:03.980
will be very low or remnant if we continue on our path.
1523
01:10:04.470 --> 01:10:06.240
That being said, I'm an optimist,
1524
01:10:06.240 --> 01:10:08.160
and I think that there's things that we don't understand
1525
01:10:08.160 --> 01:10:10.100
and ways in which corals might evolve
1526
01:10:10.100 --> 01:10:11.550
that we don't understand yet.
1527
01:10:15.660 --> 01:10:17.083
Next question.
1528
01:10:19.290 --> 01:10:22.623
Are there ways that we could increase recruitment on reefs?
1529
01:10:25.840 --> 01:10:28.780
Yeah, and people are doing stuff like this,
1530
01:10:28.780 --> 01:10:31.220
like restoration things.
1531
01:10:31.220 --> 01:10:33.720
So people are doing like larval transplants,
1532
01:10:33.720 --> 01:10:38.500
so taking like big chunks of spawn and moving them and,
1533
01:10:38.500 --> 01:10:41.573
or like outplanting recruits onto there.
1534
01:10:43.040 --> 01:10:44.740
You know, crustose coralline algae tends
1535
01:10:44.740 --> 01:10:48.170
to be the major signal to settle in corals,
1536
01:10:48.170 --> 01:10:52.030
so this is this coralline algae, it's pink.
1537
01:10:52.030 --> 01:10:54.930
And it's kind of like the glue on the reef.
1538
01:10:54.930 --> 01:10:59.930
If you look at a reef aquarium, you'll see like pink stuff,
1539
01:10:59.970 --> 01:11:02.690
that's like what corals use to cue
1540
01:11:02.690 --> 01:11:04.270
that that's a healthy reef.
1541
01:11:04.270 --> 01:11:08.650
So I could imagine things that are manipulating
1542
01:11:08.650 --> 01:11:11.590
the crustose coralline algae on the reef,
1543
01:11:11.590 --> 01:11:12.490
that would be good.
1544
01:11:12.490 --> 01:11:16.000
We know that herbivore, so things that remove algae,
1545
01:11:16.000 --> 01:11:17.800
are very good for coral recruitment,
1546
01:11:17.800 --> 01:11:21.600
so things like controlling fishing pressures
1547
01:11:21.600 --> 01:11:23.660
can interact with coral recruitment.
1548
01:11:23.660 --> 01:11:26.710
So No Take Zones and things like that
1549
01:11:26.710 --> 01:11:28.063
can facilitate recruitment.
1550
01:11:29.360 --> 01:11:32.890
But I think the question that the listener is more asking
1551
01:11:32.890 --> 01:11:37.280
is like, more like engineering technologies.
1552
01:11:37.280 --> 01:11:40.140
And there's been a little bit of work into like biofilms
1553
01:11:40.140 --> 01:11:41.973
that can attract corals.
1554
01:11:42.860 --> 01:11:45.040
So that's like an active area of research,
1555
01:11:45.040 --> 01:11:47.590
or certain chemical signatures that attract corals.
1556
01:11:48.840 --> 01:11:51.190
Colors, so certain colors, like weirdly,
1557
01:11:51.190 --> 01:11:54.370
corals can tell different colors,
1558
01:11:54.370 --> 01:11:56.370
even though they don't have proper eyes.
1559
01:11:57.267 --> 01:12:01.033
And so that's an active area of research as well, so,
1560
01:12:02.490 --> 01:12:04.760
but yeah, I don't work in that area,
1561
01:12:04.760 --> 01:12:06.280
but these are all the things I've, like, heard about
1562
01:12:06.280 --> 01:12:07.430
that sound really cool.
1563
01:12:10.890 --> 01:12:14.010
Okay, is there any fear that transplanting corals
1564
01:12:14.010 --> 01:12:16.280
may be detrimental to the current population
1565
01:12:16.280 --> 01:12:17.920
you're replacing them with?
1566
01:12:17.920 --> 01:12:19.410
Absolutely.
1567
01:12:19.410 --> 01:12:23.490
Yeah, so there's lots of fear, you know,
1568
01:12:23.490 --> 01:12:26.923
human intervention is, if we look historically, is not,
1569
01:12:28.300 --> 01:12:31.810
we tend to have very little foresight
1570
01:12:31.810 --> 01:12:35.890
into the types of bad things that might happen.
1571
01:12:35.890 --> 01:12:39.640
So the way that like I think about restoration
1572
01:12:42.003 --> 01:12:44.300
is it's a last option, right?
1573
01:12:44.300 --> 01:12:47.050
So the majority of reefs that are being restored
1574
01:12:48.079 --> 01:12:49.970
are very bad.
1575
01:12:49.970 --> 01:12:52.653
So they have very low coral cover.
1576
01:12:53.700 --> 01:12:58.680
So it's like the risk of, it's not, it feels like less
1577
01:12:58.680 --> 01:13:01.050
of a risk because there's really not a lot
1578
01:13:01.050 --> 01:13:03.310
of diversity there, so one of the things we worry about
1579
01:13:03.310 --> 01:13:08.310
in restoration is that you will bring a genotype, let's say,
1580
01:13:08.410 --> 01:13:10.840
so like a genetic background to that reef,
1581
01:13:10.840 --> 01:13:13.070
and then it will swap out all of the diversity
1582
01:13:13.070 --> 01:13:15.040
that was already there.
1583
01:13:15.040 --> 01:13:18.930
And the argument like against that is, well,
1584
01:13:18.930 --> 01:13:22.300
there was very little diversity to start with.
1585
01:13:22.300 --> 01:13:26.800
And the trajectory of that reef was so bad that like,
1586
01:13:26.800 --> 01:13:28.470
that genetic diversity that was there
1587
01:13:28.470 --> 01:13:30.370
maybe wouldn't be there tomorrow.
1588
01:13:30.370 --> 01:13:32.720
So, you know, I think the places
1589
01:13:32.720 --> 01:13:36.290
where restoration's being actively pursued
1590
01:13:36.290 --> 01:13:40.120
are areas where the reef is in very bad shape,
1591
01:13:40.120 --> 01:13:44.200
so there's almost more risk in doing nothing
1592
01:13:44.200 --> 01:13:45.653
than trying something.
1593
01:13:47.340 --> 01:13:48.620
So that's one thing.
1594
01:13:48.620 --> 01:13:49.690
We do worry a little bit
1595
01:13:49.690 --> 01:13:51.610
about inbreeding depression, so that's the idea
1596
01:13:51.610 --> 01:13:54.110
that you might get like weird genetic combinations
1597
01:13:55.180 --> 01:13:58.623
if like a certain genotype outperforms everybody else.
1598
01:14:00.240 --> 01:14:03.410
But in general, like we think
1599
01:14:03.410 --> 01:14:05.530
that more genetic diversity is better.
1600
01:14:05.530 --> 01:14:08.810
So I think there's risks, there's also like,
1601
01:14:08.810 --> 01:14:12.400
you can also reduce risks by like transplanting larvae
1602
01:14:12.400 --> 01:14:14.510
that don't have all of the consortium
1603
01:14:14.510 --> 01:14:15.910
of microbes that we talked about,
1604
01:14:15.910 --> 01:14:18.160
so one of the things like that we worry about
1605
01:14:18.160 --> 01:14:20.890
is like moving disease between reefs, for example.
1606
01:14:20.890 --> 01:14:22.770
So there's been conversations about like,
1607
01:14:22.770 --> 01:14:27.200
should there be a period of quarantine where the coral
1608
01:14:27.200 --> 01:14:32.200
is taken into captivity, grown in, I don't know,
1609
01:14:32.230 --> 01:14:36.520
sterile water, and then transplanted after three months
1610
01:14:36.520 --> 01:14:39.560
of let's say it looking healthy, something like that.
1611
01:14:39.560 --> 01:14:41.740
But there's no way to know because it might be
1612
01:14:41.740 --> 01:14:43.000
that it was healthy, but then something
1613
01:14:43.000 --> 01:14:45.600
in that new environment triggered something,
1614
01:14:45.600 --> 01:14:47.100
and then now that coral is diseased.
1615
01:14:47.100 --> 01:14:51.000
So it's really, we don't know enough about it,
1616
01:14:51.000 --> 01:14:55.230
but the majority of restoration practitioners kind of feel
1617
01:14:55.230 --> 01:14:57.520
that like, we're to the point with some reefs
1618
01:14:57.520 --> 01:14:59.813
where there's a bigger risk of doing nothing.
1619
01:15:03.770 --> 01:15:04.770
Well said.
1620
01:15:05.707 --> 01:15:08.850
How long can corals live for and what percentage
1621
01:15:08.850 --> 01:15:12.140
of estimated total coral types have we lost forever,
1622
01:15:12.140 --> 01:15:13.423
as in extinction?
1623
01:15:15.720 --> 01:15:19.340
So we've, okay, I'll answer the first question,
1624
01:15:19.340 --> 01:15:22.240
so the first question is it varies depending on the species.
1625
01:15:22.240 --> 01:15:24.560
So some of the faster growing species
1626
01:15:24.560 --> 01:15:27.080
we think live like 50-100 years.
1627
01:15:27.080 --> 01:15:30.600
And then, one of the talks is actually on coral coring
1628
01:15:30.600 --> 01:15:32.860
where they can actually like age a coral.
1629
01:15:32.860 --> 01:15:35.070
So you should come to that next Seaside Talk,
1630
01:15:35.070 --> 01:15:36.620
I think it's like two from now,
1631
01:15:37.830 --> 01:15:41.820
where the woman's gonna talk about coral coring
1632
01:15:41.820 --> 01:15:43.520
where we can actually like age it.
1633
01:15:44.710 --> 01:15:47.040
And some of the corals that we've cored
1634
01:15:47.040 --> 01:15:49.350
have been hundreds of years old.
1635
01:15:49.350 --> 01:15:51.590
So the estimate is that there's like corals out there
1636
01:15:51.590 --> 01:15:55.143
that are like 500 years old, so they can live quite long.
1637
01:15:56.420 --> 01:16:00.420
And then the second part of that question, I forget already.
1638
01:16:00.420 --> 01:16:02.460
And a percentage
1639
01:16:02.460 --> 01:16:05.800
of estimated total coral types we've lost.
1640
01:16:05.800 --> 01:16:10.580
Yeah, so I think that's a really hard question to answer
1641
01:16:10.580 --> 01:16:12.450
because I think we're just scratching the surface
1642
01:16:12.450 --> 01:16:16.070
of understanding the way that coral genetic diversity
1643
01:16:16.070 --> 01:16:17.963
is partitioned across the seascape.
1644
01:16:19.858 --> 01:16:22.810
So there's no question that we're losing populations
1645
01:16:22.810 --> 01:16:24.330
of corals.
1646
01:16:24.330 --> 01:16:27.140
But as far as species, I mean,
1647
01:16:27.140 --> 01:16:29.530
you can get into a whole rhetorical debate
1648
01:16:29.530 --> 01:16:31.810
about what is a species.
1649
01:16:31.810 --> 01:16:34.670
But one of the things that our lab keeps finding,
1650
01:16:34.670 --> 01:16:37.940
for example, is that when we profile the genomes of corals,
1651
01:16:37.940 --> 01:16:40.000
we find this cryptic genetic diversity
1652
01:16:40.000 --> 01:16:41.100
that we didn't even know was there.
1653
01:16:41.100 --> 01:16:44.150
These two corals that look morphologically the same,
1654
01:16:44.150 --> 01:16:45.390
when we profile their genome,
1655
01:16:45.390 --> 01:16:47.300
they're totally separate species,
1656
01:16:47.300 --> 01:16:49.513
they haven't interbred in hundreds of years.
1657
01:16:50.820 --> 01:16:53.660
And so there's, I feel, like this wealth
1658
01:16:53.660 --> 01:16:57.470
of kind of like underestimated diversity out there so,
1659
01:16:57.470 --> 01:16:58.980
you know, when we lose a population,
1660
01:16:58.980 --> 01:17:01.420
are we actually losing a cryptic species?
1661
01:17:01.420 --> 01:17:04.610
Like, I don't think we have the answer to that question.
1662
01:17:04.610 --> 01:17:08.920
But, you know, corals are going locally extinct,
1663
01:17:08.920 --> 01:17:12.100
like that's a real thing that's happening, in Florida,
1664
01:17:12.100 --> 01:17:14.300
I think there's one colony of Dendrogyra,
1665
01:17:14.300 --> 01:17:19.083
which is the pillar coral, like it's locally extinct.
1666
01:17:19.930 --> 01:17:22.560
It is elsewhere in the Caribbean.
1667
01:17:22.560 --> 01:17:27.560
And then also Acropora cervicornis and Acropora palmata,
1668
01:17:27.798 --> 01:17:31.400
there's so few individuals that naturally live on the reef.
1669
01:17:31.400 --> 01:17:32.410
So those are the two species
1670
01:17:32.410 --> 01:17:34.760
that are like very actively restored in Florida
1671
01:17:35.880 --> 01:17:40.370
that it's like, I mean, so few individuals that you'd,
1672
01:17:40.370 --> 01:17:42.910
you know, there's one individual left
1673
01:17:42.910 --> 01:17:47.173
in the population, like that, unless it has sex with itself,
1674
01:17:48.310 --> 01:17:49.910
I mean, that population's extinct.
1675
01:17:49.910 --> 01:17:52.550
So even though there's one genotype,
1676
01:17:52.550 --> 01:17:55.163
it's extinct because it can't have sex with itself.
1677
01:17:57.470 --> 01:17:59.190
So I think that's, I can't say
1678
01:17:59.190 --> 01:18:01.510
whether we've lost species, but I can say
1679
01:18:01.510 --> 01:18:05.970
that we've grossly underestimated genetic diversity.
1680
01:18:05.970 --> 01:18:08.220
And so I think that we're probably missing,
1681
01:18:08.220 --> 01:18:10.580
we don't even know what we're losing.
1682
01:18:10.580 --> 01:18:12.910
So I'm a big proponent of sequencing everything
1683
01:18:12.910 --> 01:18:13.910
and figuring out what's there
1684
01:18:13.910 --> 01:18:15.993
so we can at least understand what we're losing.
1685
01:18:18.950 --> 01:18:19.783
All right.
1686
01:18:19.783 --> 01:18:21.270
Well, I just realized what time it was,
1687
01:18:21.270 --> 01:18:23.490
and we have already gone our 15 minutes over,
1688
01:18:23.490 --> 01:18:26.140
so that's gonna be the last question for this evening.
1689
01:18:26.140 --> 01:18:29.770
But folks, if you had a question that we did not get to,
1690
01:18:29.770 --> 01:18:31.617
I will look at it along with our staff here
1691
01:18:31.617 --> 01:18:34.520
and we will consult with Sarah as necessary to see
1692
01:18:34.520 --> 01:18:36.590
if we can't answer some more of those questions for you,
1693
01:18:36.590 --> 01:18:38.750
and when we get that accomplished,
1694
01:18:38.750 --> 01:18:40.440
we'll then send an email out to everyone
1695
01:18:40.440 --> 01:18:42.650
who participated with those responses.
1696
01:18:42.650 --> 01:18:44.850
And I know you've probably heard that before,
1697
01:18:44.850 --> 01:18:46.140
but we actually do it.
1698
01:18:46.140 --> 01:18:49.590
So you will get some kind of follow-up from us with,
1699
01:18:49.590 --> 01:18:51.510
'cause I can see a ton of questions there
1700
01:18:51.510 --> 01:18:53.550
that I know we can answer for you all,
1701
01:18:53.550 --> 01:18:55.870
and we'd like to do that as much as possible.
1702
01:18:55.870 --> 01:18:58.210
As a reminder, for those of you who are educators,
1703
01:18:58.210 --> 01:19:01.040
we have those two activities and a diagram
1704
01:19:01.040 --> 01:19:03.140
in the handout panel.
1705
01:19:03.140 --> 01:19:05.500
Download them now or forever hold your peace,
1706
01:19:05.500 --> 01:19:08.860
but if you didn't get them or it didn't work for you,
1707
01:19:08.860 --> 01:19:11.110
please email me at flowergarden@noaa.gov
1708
01:19:11.110 --> 01:19:12.390
and I'd be happy to send them to you,
1709
01:19:12.390 --> 01:19:15.290
or you can find them, at least the two Flower Gardens ones
1710
01:19:15.290 --> 01:19:19.273
are available on our website on the teacher page there.
1711
01:19:20.420 --> 01:19:23.310
That concludes our presentation for this evening,
1712
01:19:23.310 --> 01:19:25.990
thank you so much, Sarah, for your patience and time
1713
01:19:25.990 --> 01:19:28.420
in answering all those questions.
1714
01:19:28.420 --> 01:19:30.130
Thank you, everyone who participated,
1715
01:19:30.130 --> 01:19:32.200
for all of the great questions.
1716
01:19:32.200 --> 01:19:34.640
It's good to hear that you were really listening
1717
01:19:34.640 --> 01:19:36.900
to what she had to say and are very curious
1718
01:19:36.900 --> 01:19:39.410
about all different aspects, as are we,
1719
01:19:39.410 --> 01:19:41.220
because as Sarah mentioned, there's so much
1720
01:19:41.220 --> 01:19:44.020
we still don't know about coral and coral spawning,
1721
01:19:44.020 --> 01:19:45.620
even though many of us have worked at it
1722
01:19:45.620 --> 01:19:47.300
for a long, long time.
1723
01:19:48.340 --> 01:19:50.400
Thank you, everyone, for joining us, and we hope to see you
1724
01:19:50.400 --> 01:19:52.390
at the next Seaside Chat next Wednesday,
1725
01:19:52.390 --> 01:19:54.410
we'll be talking about the future of fisheries
1726
01:19:54.410 --> 01:19:56.020
in the Gulf of Mexico.
1727
01:19:56.020 --> 01:19:57.770
Thank you and have a great evening.