Ologies with Alie Ward - Smologies #13: CORALS with Shayle Matsuda

Episode Date: June 22, 2022

Another kid-safe, short episode of Smologies! What IS a coral? Where do they grow and what do they eat and why are they so pretty? What kind of tools do coral scientists use? Why are they so many colors? And what is bleaching? Will changing your sunscreen save coral reefs? The wonderful and charming Cnidariologist Dr. Shayle Matsuda took time out of his busy schedule during a coral spawning event to chat about how magical and beautiful coral can be and why reef health is important. More Smologies episodesFull-length non-Smologies Cnidariology (CORALS) episode — with some swear wordsMore links at: https://www.alieward.com/smologies/coralsFollow Dr. Shayle Matsuda on TwitterDonations went to Paepae o He’eia and Point FoundationGreat episodes for Pride MonthMore Smologies episodesSponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, masks, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by  Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio Productions & Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media and Steven Ray MorrisTheme song by Nick Thorburn & remix by Harold Malcolm

Oh, hello, it's that frog singing on your porch alleyward and welcome to Smologies. Here's the deal. Smologies are small. They're shortened versions of our full length episodes. We chop them all up, we make them fit for your Smologites. So they are all ages and classroom friendly. We've cut out all my swear words, kid friendly. So this is an episode from 2019 with some supplemental updates from literally today.

But if you're not around kids, if you are a full blown adult and you can handle some swear words and you have some time, hit the full length original version in the show notes because it's worth it. It's such a good episode. But this is a Smologies version. It's rated G for general audience and it's really good and it's shorter. So this episode was recorded in beautiful Hawaii, ever heard of it? A few weeks ago, you're about to just get an earful of coral.

Now all I want to do is stare at videos of coral. Honestly, I used to just consider them to be like the really plucky, kind of quirky settings of a snorkeling jaunt, kind of like a splashy backdrop in a community theater play. Like, oh, that's nice. But you know, what's happening in front of them? What kind of fish do we have? Oh, contrary. After this episode, you'll be like, move out of the way, fish.

I'm staring at a polyp. And yeah, it's totally fine. If you don't know what a polyp is, we will get to that. OK, Nidariology. Totally a word. It's a well documented, legit term. It's a study of animals that are over 10,000 species who have nitocytes, which are these specialized cells for catching prey.

And where does this lovely, silent, consonant, weird word come from? It looks like when your mom tries to weasel a fake term into a words with friends play and you're like, no way, Nancy, that's not enough vowels. But it comes from the old Latin, Nide, which means a nettle. And it might also have ties to old Latvian and Lithuanian words, meaning to itch and to tickle. So corals are Nidarians. They're underwater animals that poses these kind of beautiful plant looking things from Mars and they want to just tickle you to death.

I'm already sold. I already love them, but let's hear more. Thisologist got his bachelor's at UC Santa Cruz, double majoring in environmental studies and feminist studies, got his master's in biology and ecology, evolution and conservation biology in San Francisco and is working toward his PhD right now at this famed Gates Lab at the University of Hawaii, Manoa and the Hawaiian Institute of Marine Biology. Just a little update on July 16th, 2021, this PhD candidate became a doctor

successfully defending his PhD via the Gates Lab. The Gates Lab is a coral lab. This dude has his hands full. The coral were in the middle of a spawning event that very weak, but he is amazing and took an hour out of his day to come to my hotel and chat about corals. We talked about what coral even is, why they're important, what a dead reef looks like, what's up with sunscreens, what is bleaching and what else can we do to help our hard squishy pals beneath the sea?

So anchor down, get ready for a wave of coral info with the amazing Nidariologist, Dr. Shale Matsuda. And you are a Nidariologist. Did I say it right? Sure. I was thinking about that or a coral Nidariologist, maybe.

I mean, is our corals Nidaria? Yeah, the Nidarians are the final part of and what unites all of those animals is their stinging cells, their nitocytes. Oh, that's the common thread. We must be related. Yeah. So like anemones or jellyfish and corals all produce these little stinging cells that they use in defense or prey capture.

I've already learned so much about corals. I didn't know that they got little stinkies. And so what exactly is a coral? That's a great question that we think about all the time, actually. So corals are animals, first and foremost. But the corals, when you think of a coral reef corals, they're much more than like the sum of their parts. So the coral animal looks white, they have clear tissues and they secrete a white

calcium carbonate skeleton. But the reason that when you're snorkeling around a coral reef, they don't appear white to us is because they have a symbiotic algae, which live inside their tissues that provide up to like 95 percent of their daily nutritional needs and the algae's color themselves are what we're looking at when we see corals. Oh, my God. And just like you and me, corals also have a microbiome. They have bacteria that live inside of their tissues that also play a lot of

really important roles. Now, what is with them being a skin bag? This is this is like the hardest question. I know. It's like, oh, man, like we have a term for this. It's called the coral holobiont, and that is like the coral animal itself. It's symbiotic algae, it's bacteria, they're fungi, they're archaea. They're a lot of different obligate symbionts that these corals have that are critical for their life and function.

So it's kind of like a skeleton, a soupy mix of goodness, and then like a little transparent skin over it. And the transparent skin is the animal itself. I feel like what is an obligate symbiont? Those are giant words. I hear you. That's why I'm here. So it essentially means a friend that I could not live without. So all these critters that live in the corals body are its best friends.

They are obligate. That means they're super necessary symbionts. They live together. So let's recap. So if just like trees that grow in the forest, if you count their rings, you get an idea of how old they are. Corals actually work the same way where they are constantly secreting this calcium carbonate skeleton and growing and researchers will actually take a core of

that skeleton and you can actually count the different layers and get an idea of the age of the corals and also what was going on on the planet at the time. Oh, my gosh. If you're wondering, where are corals? I asked corals.org and it said essentially around the equator plus where currents flow out of the tropics, like in Florida and southern Japan. It's a little bit warmer. They make up point two percent of the ocean floor, but they're home to this

bloom of mind, 25 percent of marine life. What? So if sea animals were like the cool kids, the coral reefs would be like the mall if this were a movie from the 80s. When you're doing research, is it ever difficult for you to say, OK, all right, Gilt, we're done. We're get out of the water. Are you like one more thing? Oh, yeah, absolutely.

So it's always still really nice to go out when you're not working and just really appreciate how lucky we are to be able to see these environments. You know, I've worked with researchers who, you know, I'll go to a coral reef and I'll say, this is beautiful. Look at all the diversity here. And they'll be like, you should have seen it 20 years ago because we're seeing these changes at such a rapid pace that we're witnessing them in our lifetimes. And that's that's new.

Yeah. So we haven't really talked about what coral bleaching is. So corals have these symbiotic algae that are obligate. That means they're required for the corals to live. They provide up to 95 percent of their daily nutritional needs. And when the temperatures are good, everything is happy. You know, the corals get what they need, the symbiotics get what they need. But when the water temperature rises, just even slightly above that

thermal maximum that the corals can handle, the corals are starting to stress out. I'm freaking out. And one of their stress responses is to expel these algae. So kind of how we get sick, we'll get a fever. And that's good. It's how it's our body's way of helping protect us. But if that fever gets too high or goes on for too long, that can actually be detrimental to us.

And the same thing is true with coral bleaching. So as the corals are purging out these algal symbiotes, it's not just all at a time. Like you can watch a coral start to pale, losing its color, right? Because as the symbiotes leave, that white skeleton is showing through. And then as that's happening, the longer it goes on, the corals aren't getting the energy and they can begin to starve. OK, so under temperature stressors, corals toss their internal friends and they bleach because they lose that color.

So they're not dead, but they're certainly weaker and they're in danger. It is not cute. Shale says that some corals even need both bacteria and certain viruses present to survive these thermal events. So the symbiotic connections go deep. They get complicated. Things that a coral party just aren't the same without both bacteria and viruses. And what you'll see is if you go into the coral reef when this is happening,

if you see these corals that are white, you're seeing that skeleton through the tissue, but the tissue is still there. The corals are still alive. And if that stressor leaves, the corals have a chance to recover. Those symbiotic communities can proliferate again in the corals. They'll repigment and be OK. But if that stressor goes on too long, the corals can die. And we've seen this happen on massive scales on a reef.

And also some corals aren't aren't bleaching. Some individuals like in Kanioa Bay during the 2014 and 2015 bleaching events that we had, there would be two corals, the exact same species right next to each other, like touching on the reef. And one of them would be bleached and one of them would be visibly totally normal. And so when you're looking at, say, two different examples of coral next to each other, are those different individuals genetically or are those different groups of a bunch of individuals when you're looking at a fan of coral?

How many people are you looking at that are coral? Yeah, that's a good question. So a coral colony is a coral. You can think of a coral of itself as a coral polyp. What is a polyp? Well, it's a squishy little bugger with a feathery head and it secretes calcium carbonate and it's based to anchor it on a surface, kind of like a cup holder filled with one of those gas station windsock dancers only made out of jello salad.

So you look a little mouth, kind of like if you took an anemone, that kind of structure in the middle, tentacles on the outside. And as the coral grows, it buds off and creates a genetically identical polyp. And as those polyps continue to multiply and spread and grow, you've got a coral colony that is made up of polyps that are one genetic individual. And now what about their their stinkiness? They're little stingers, stingers, stingers, stingers. How is that helping them survive or thwart predators or are their predators

just a coral other than just human mishaps? They they use their stinging cells a lot to in prey capture. So if you see, if you like stare at a coral long enough under the scope and, you know, if you piece of plankton swims up, you'll you'll see it almost like kind of like a venous slide trap. You'll see the plankton get stuck to the coral tentacles and then the coral tentacles will pull it into its mouth and suck it in and digest it. It's really neat to watch.

So but those the stinging cells, if you touch a coral, which you shouldn't do, it will try to sting you too. But our skin is too thick. But, you know, other animals like, you know, Portuguese man of war, for example, like there are stinging cells that can affect us too. But corals are pretty safe. Don't touch them. But. Warning. Bummer question. Bummer question ahead.

And what do you think is the biggest coral bummer for the coral? Would it be a rise in temperature or ocean acidification pollution? Like, is there what's their big what's their big sad trombone? So corals are dealing with a lot of threats right now. The biggest one being the impacts of climate change. And we're seeing this on reefs today in form of sea surface temperature warming and ocean acidification. As you mentioned, why this is so bad is that we're seeing an increase

like even in our lifetimes of these massive coral bleaching events worldwide. And a coral bleaching event can wipe out entire reef ecosystems in like one season. We're seeing them not only, you know, it's not just like a one off anymore. And here in Hawaii, we've had we had the events in 2014 again in 2015. The Great Barrier Reef has also experienced these successive events. And so while, you know, we're seeing corals that are able to survive one round of this warming and recover, it's like you keep on hitting them, what is that affecting?

And you add things like the local stressors like, you know, overfishing or sedimentation and pollution runoff from a lot of the local environments that are at those are like kind of the the added pressures that that corals are facing. And it's if it is so good, like it is so good and so important to to mitigate some of these local stressors, right? Like, you know, diverting pollution and sedimentation. Really important, like a coral can't live if it's covered in sediment. So, yes, get the stuff off the coral, but the biggest help that they need.

The most important thing that we need to address if we want corals in the future is climate change. And why are coral reefs important? They're really important for a lot of different reasons. They're one of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the world. They're a bank for biodiversity. And within that, you know, the coral reefs themselves are the breeding grounds and homes for tons of marine life.

We've got animals that will come in from like the deeper oceans to to breed. Fish is a really important food resource for a lot of coastal communities. It's their main source of protein, main source protein for many people in the world. And the reef environment is where a lot of those larger game fish reproduce and come back to coral reefs and a lot of our coastal ecosystems are really important for mitigating coastal damage. They absorb a lot of that, you know, wave action, that wave power that's coming in. We've all seen really awful things that have been happening

in a lot of our coastal communities around the world because of, you know, flooding and coastline erosion and things like that. And especially like here in Hawaii, the coral reef ecosystems are incredibly important culturally. And there's a lot of history. There's a lot of stories, a lot of history wrapped up in these these ecosystems. You know, there's a lot of reasons to protect them. And also before Patreon questions, it's a big day for you

because they started spawning last night. What? Yeah, they did. They spent spawn, it's spawn of Palooza right now. It is. It is. So something really amazing about corals, there's not enough amazing stuff, is is coral spawning events. And so corals, right, you're a sedentary animal. You're not moving around to find your mates, how you're in the ocean.

How are you going to reproduce, you know, besides fragmenting off? And so the way it works is it's a combination of cues. It's the moon cycle, it's the temperature, it's like the pressure in the environment that will all come together and cue the corals to release their gametes into the water column. And for the coral species that we study, the rice coral, Montipra capitata out here in the lab, they spawn two to three months during the summer on the night of the new moon and a few

nights after. And if you're lucky enough to be out in the bay, you kind of peer over at around eight forty five p.m. And you'll start to see these little cream colored bundles slowly floating to the surface of the water with the size of a pinhead. It was so little. And on a really big night, like the entire surface will be just like covered in these little white dots. And, you know, in the next day or so, there will be swimming

coral larvae, these little itty bitty jelly beans. And then those larvae will then, you know, swim around and look for some suitable substrate to metamorphose into the first polyp, which will hopefully grow into to many of to form the next colony. Shayle Riddle blog post last June about coral spawning. And in it, he describes setting out on the night of the new moon with life jackets and a first aid kit and headlamps. They use red lights so they don't interfere with any lunar cues for the coral.

And they have as many two and a half gallon buckets as will fit on the floor of a small whaler boat. And he says in it, our tools are not glamorous, but they get the job done. And there are photos of these milky trails of coral bundles popping to release eggs into the water and a glimpse of what field research looks like. So for more of that, I'm going to link the post in the show notes and on my website. Now, we're about to ask your Patreon questions.

But before we do a few words from sponsors of the show, these sponsors make it possible for allergies to donate to a charity of each ologist choosing. And this week, Shayle picked two. The first one is Pepe Ohai'i. It's a private nonprofit organization caring for an ancient Hawaiian fish pond located on Oahu, and its vision is to perpetuate a foundation of cultural sustainability and to provide intellectual and physical and spiritual sustenance for their community.

And a second donation went to Point Foundation and PointFoundation.org is the nation's largest scholarship granting organization for LGBTQ plus students of merit and Point promotes change through scholarship funding, mentorship, leadership development and community service training and links to both those charities and to our sponsors who make that possible will be in the show notes. OK, some things I'm liking this week. OK, your questions. Now, first question we got from Laura Kruppens and a bunch of other folks

asked, how harmful is sunscreen to coral? This is a big question. It's a tough question. It's a tough question. So people definitely, you know, seen movements in different coastal communities to ban unsafe sunscreen. And like this is a field of research that is beginning to grow. It's a new thing that we're seeing. And it's like really important to consider these kind of like stressors

of these daily things that we're doing that may or not be harmful to reefs. Right. Considering what sunscreen you use, just like considering any type of chemicals that you're inducing introducing to a natural environment is a really important thing. However, where, you know, a lot of what what we are concerned about is that, you know, in the grand scheme of the impacts facing corals, it is a very small drop in the bucket compared to climate change. And the danger is when that's where we stop, right?

Like, you know, considering your sunscreen choice is a really great point of departure. But if that's the stopping point, that's a really dangerous thing because, you know, just changing your sunscreen is not going to slow down our loss of reefs. Right. So don't just change your mineral sunscreen and be like, nailed it. Yeah. So this next question was also asked by listener Grace and Allegra Violetta Benisman wants to know what role does concrete truly play in the health of our coral? And I know nothing about this concrete composition.

And we'll look this up is it has a lot of same attributes as like calcium carbonate coral skeletons. It's a really great substrate because it's also kind of porous. So a lot of times you'll see, like, I think it is in Mexico, where they have that underwater sculpture installation made of concrete that different corals and sponges and whatnot are all recruiting to. So it can actually act as a pretty good substrate. It's a really great substrate for artificial reefs.

So he's talking about an underwater museum in Cancun, Mexico. It consists of nearly 500 sunken sculptures and they serve as a base for new coral. Why did they make this, you ask, because too many tourists were snorkeling in the natural local reefs and destroying them. So they were like, hmm, hey, hey, look over here. Look over here. Look at these sculptures. And it worked. So people go there now and coral can grow on it. Perfect. What's your favorite part about your job?

Or about corals? Oh, man, you do a whole podcast like that. Um, my favorite part of my job is I'm getting I'm answering it in two part, which I know you're supposed to do. No, answering however many parts you want. It's it's like it's the daily life in the people I work with, for sure. Like in the community, when you're working on issues, that's this important. People are really passionate and really excited.

And because we're trying to solve something on a really quickly, it's a very creative place to be. And then also I take a boat to work every day. I can just like walk into the water and see the reef. And while that's amazing for research and asking questions, it's also just it's a luxury. I feel so lucky to be able to be in a place where my study environment is right here. And I can appreciate the just the beauty of the reef on an everyday basis.

You're doing such great work. I'm so excited that I got to talk to you. Thank you for taking us deliver of your time. I know that it's a busy day for Coral. Are you going back out tonight? I am. Yeah, excited. Very excited. If you can, please vote. Let's just let's try to turn this boat around.

Also, for more about Shale, you can follow him at wrong underscore whale on Twitter, that will be linked in the show notes. We're at allergies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at Ali Ward with one L on both. We love to keep these small g's episodes pretty small. So the full list of credits are in the show notes. But thank you especially to Mercedes Maitland, Jared Sleeper and Zeke Rodriguez Thomas of Mind Jam Media for all the edits on this.

A ton more small g's episodes can be downloaded for free at alleyward.com slash small g's. That link is in the show notes for you. And if you stick around to the end, I give you a piece of life advice. And this week it's that if you like hard boiled eggs, try putting hummus on them. It's so good. This might even make you like hard boiled eggs if you don't. And another favorite hard boiled egg topper secret of mine is called Farakaki.

And it's Japanese seasoning. Kind of goes, it's shaky, shaky, shaky on. And it has sesame seeds and yes, it has seaweed and a little salt, a little sugar. Oh, it makes everything you put it on taste like a sushi roll. It's so good. So these tips, I know they're excellent. OK, bye-bye, small g's.