Saving Coral

By Zoe Cormier

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The question is not if we can save the coral reefs, but if we choose to.

As ecological catastrophes go, it’s hard to find anything more bleak or depressing than the
coral reef bleaching crisis. We’ve known for 30 years that climate change leads to the death
of entire coral reef ecosystems, and yet we’ve done almost nothing to save them.

Fully 16 per cent of the world’s tropical reefs died in 1998, and 2016 was even worse: 70
per cent of the world’s reefs were damaged, some irreparably. Fully 30 per cent of the
Great Barrier Reef turned into barren wastelands that year – climbing to 50 per cent of
Australia’s crown jewel by the next summer.

So far we’ve lost half the world’s reefs, and one of the biggest threats – climate change –
shows no sign of abating. Scientists say if we do nothing, 90 per cent of the world’s tropical
reefs will be gone by 2050, along with all the fish, wildlife and humans that depend on
them.

“The most shocking thing about watching this crisis unfold was having to hear people say
again and again that if we just put big boundaries around the world’s reefs - enclosing them
in national parks, marine protected areas and ‘no-take’ areas - they would be fine,” says
Dr Ruth Gates, Director of the Hawai'i Institute of Marine Biology.

“Well, 2016 taught us starkly that this isn’t true: that is the best managed reef in the world,
and we lost a full third of it in one summer.”

Is there any hope? Yes, says Dr. Gates, if we let go of outdated ideas about wildlife
conservation and start to actively intervene. “We have to stop thinking that if we leave
nature alone and treat it with the utmost respect that is sufficient. It’s not,” she says.

Not all hope is lost, she says: we just need to apply the science, ingenuity, manpower and –
above all – money, while we still can.

“It might seem hopeless – but look at the hole in the ozone layer,” she says. “We identified
the problem, acted to remove harmful gases from the atmosphere, and boom: the hole
closed. That’s remarkable, and it shows that we can fix these things, we just have to start
acting now.”

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And the place to start is not with reserves, but with research: understanding the complex
biology of these strange animals and finding ways to protect them. “We just need to apply
cutting edge science to this,” says Dr Gates.

Why are corals are so vulnerable?

Understanding why corals are so vulnerable to climate change involves understanding a
particular quirk of their biology: while most people think corals are plants (or even rocks),
they are in fact animals. Not just animals, but clonal organisms that live in clusters of
genetically identical units, called polyps. Adding to their complexity, those polyps live in
symbiotic relationships with algae that reside in their tissues and photosynthesize sunlight
like plants, functioning as tiny cellular batteries. These algae provide up to 90 per cent of a
coral’s energy, providing them with both nourishment and pigmentation.

When summer temperatures remain just a few degrees warmer than the normal maximum,
stressed corals respond by ejecting their energy-producing, colourful algae. Multi-hued
underwater tapestries of branching, bulbous, feathery corals transform within days into
barren landscapes of white skeletons. Bleached corals can recover if the water temperature
drops within a week or two: the remaining algae can repopulate, and reefs return to good
health. But if cooler climes fail to return in time the bleached corals die. Their soft tissues
rot away, and white skeletons become smothered with brown seaweed and slime. Fish,
turtles and other animals vanish, leaving the grisly graveyard to wither indefinitely. Vibrant
ecosystems become dismal wastelands.

The first recorded bleaching took place in Florida in 1911, and again the strange
phenomenon was observed in Australia in 1929. It was seen a handful of times for the next
half century, until the 1980s when it began to occur with worrisome regularity. By 1990,
scientists warned that bleaching was directly linked to climate change, and would only
increase in scope and severity, possibly wiping out all reefs within decades. The warnings
fell on deaf ears, and catastrophe has struck again and again, just as predicted.

Now half the world’s reefs are gone.

Human assisted evolution

While biologists can’t do much about greenhouse gas emissions, they can help the reefs
that remain by applying the exact same strategies we have been using for thousands of
years in agriculture and animal husbandry: identify hardy strains, selectively breed them in
the lab, and fastidiously cultivate them in the wild.

It makes logical sense: if humans have been able to breed cows, corn, chickens and
chocolate for high yields and disease resistance for millennia, why can’t we do the same for
coral?

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“We simply need to understand what makes some corals thrive, see if that can be applied to
other species, and try to develop corals that are bred to be one step ahead of climate change
– this is just harnessing basic biology,” says Dr. Gates. “We are simply accelerating what
nature can already do.”

One of the most promising areas of research: cultivating strains of coral that are adapted to
higher temperatures. At the simplest level this can be done by growing arrays of different
species and strains in exceptionally warm tanks of water, identifying the ones that thrive,
and then breeding those en masse to out-plant in the wild. “There’s absolutely no reason
why this shouldn’t work – and I’ve been surprised at how easy it has been,” says Dr Gates.

In 2015, she published a call-to-arms outline for how to breed such “thermally tolerant”
corals in the journal PNAS, subsequently launching a five-year plan to aggressively pursue
“human assisted evolution”, funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

Understanding how corals function

Breeding the right strains in warm water is just the first step. The next is to go even deeper
into understanding the intricacies of coral physiology and working out how to harness this
knowledge.

One key area: the microbiome, the enormous range of bacteria, fungi, viruses and other
microorganisms that live within the tissues of coral and are integral to their survival.
Research into the human microbiome – from the bacteria that live on the surface of our
eyeballs to the fungi that dwell within our guts – has exploded in the past decade, and
corals are no different than us in requiring an array of symbiotic microbes to survive. Dr
Gates has just begun to scratch the surface on the communities of microbes that live within
coral, which she described in the journal Trends in Microbiology last year.

Even more tantalising, she says, it might be possible to breed resilience into corals through
“epigenetics”: heritable alterations to the ways genes are used, rather than changes to the
genes themselves. In 2016, Dr Gates published in the journal Evolutionary Applications
preliminary evidence that “DNA methylation” changes can be induced from environmental
pressures and then passed onto the next generation.

“If you briefly expose the coral to something that stresses them out a bit but doesn’t kill
them, you can build resilience into a species – and that adaptation can actually be passed
down through generations,” she says. Early days yet, but cutting edge and promising.

“It’s thrilling to be in a field where you know the work you are doing has a purpose,” says
Dr. Gates. “It’s that purpose that keeps me going: we are doing everything we can, and we
are trying everything we can.”

Simple techniques can save corals right now

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But even without the cutting edge science, there are shockingly simple techniques we can
already use to help save coral reefs right now. Dr Gates points to the work of Dr David
Vaughan of the Mote Marine Laboratory in Florida who has been working on a technique
called “microfragmentation”.

Simply dividing a single piece of coral the size of a golf ball into 25 or even 100 smaller
fragments dramatically increases the speed of growth – up to 40 times the normal rate, says
Dr Vaughan.

The trick is to arrange those tiny pieces in a grid an inch or two apart – the distance they
would grow during that period of accelerated growth. Because coral are clonal animals,
microfragments will fuse together when their edges join, forming one single mass of coral.

Four microfragments of Acropora palmata, photographed over 12 weeks, each image one
week older than the last. After the initial period of accelerated growth, four tiny fragments
can eventually fuse to form a single coral mass far larger than could be grown from a single
fragment in that time. © Dan Mele.

“Normally it would take a single larvae several years to grow into a piece the size of a golf
ball, but if you take a piece of coral the size of a golf ball and cut it into 20 pieces, each the
size of a pencil eraser, those each grow into a golf-ball sized chunk in a few months instead
of a few years,” he explains. “If they fuse together, you can create a coral head the size of a
basketball in just two years – when normally it would take around 75 years.”

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Dr Vaughan has not released data on the his coral farms he and his team have planted near
Cancun in 2013 using this technique, but their paper is under review and should be
published this year. “This restoration project should be one of the first classical success
stories that will prove to the world that you can make a difference”

A mass of Acropora palmata grown from the microfragmentation technique in Fragments

of Hope nurseries, which are located in the sea, and outplanted in the wild nearby at three
months of age. © Lisa Carne.

What’s more, some of the elk horn coral (Acropora palmate) they raised in the lab and
planted in the wild have grown to sexual maturity and spawned.

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That same Acropora palmate outplant, now at 13 months of age. © Lisa Carne.

Not willing to leave things to chance, Dr Vaughan and his team have cross bred genotypes
to produce new genetic combinations. There may be only 25 genotypes in the wild – but in
Dr Vaughan’s lab they have created 5,000 new ones which they are testing with high
temperature and high acidity (another consequence of high carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere) to see which could flourish in our future climate.