Science Friday - Degrees of Change: Coral Restoration. Nov 22 2019, Part 1

Episode Date: November 22, 2019

A quarter of the world’s corals are now dead, victims of warming waters, changing ocean chemistry, sediment runoff, and disease. Many spectacular, heavily-touristed reefs have simply been loved to death. But there are reasons for hope. Scientists around the world working on the front lines of the coral crisis have been inventing creative solutions that might buy the world’s reefs a little time.  Crawford Drury and his colleagues at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology are working to engineer more resilient corals, using a coral library for selective breeding experiments, and subjecting corals to different water conditions to see how they’ll adapt.  Some resilient corals are still in the wild, waiting to be found. Narrissa Spiers of the Kewalo Marine Laboratory in Honolulu found one such specimen hiding out in the polluted Honolulu Harbor.  Other scientists, like Danielle Dixson of the University of Delaware, are experimenting with corals that aren’t alive at all—3D-printed corals. The idea, she says, is to provide a sort of temporary housing for reef-dwellers after a big storm or human damage. Dixson likens these 3D-printed structures to the FEMA trailers brought in after a hurricane.  Dixson’s team is experimenting with these artificial corals in Fiji, to determine which animals use them as housing, and whether they spur the growth of new live corals too.  Two huge challenges remain. For any of these technologies to work at scale, we need quicker, more efficient ways to plant corals in the wild, says Tom Moore, the coral reef restoration lead at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Listen to this chapter of the series, Degrees of Change. Plus, California Governor Gavin Newsom imposed a moratorium on new fracking permits in the state. An independent scientific board will now need to review each project before it is approved. Reporter Rebecca Leber talks about what this state initiative tells us about the national debate on fracking. And, a look at the new members of the bipartisan Congressional Climate Solutions Caucus and their strategy for addressing climate change.   Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. The climate is changing, and because we need to deal with it now, we open the next chapter of our series, Degrees of Change. Our series explores the challenges of a changing climate and how we as a planet and a people are adapting to the crisis. Coming up, we'll talk about some hopeful experiments with scientists on the front lines of the worldwide coral die-off. But first, we check in on the gatekeepers, the decision makers, the controllers of the purse strings. Every year for the past 25 years, countries converge at the United Nations climate change or COPP to talk about big climate change policies. The conference was scheduled to start on December 2nd in Chile, but it had to be moved due to the civil unrest happening in that country. Here to fill us in on how COP25 will continue, and what's on the agenda is Rebecca Lerner,

Libre. She's the climate and environment reporter at Mother Jones based in Washington, D.C. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me back on. It's nice to have you back. Let's talk about COP 25 moving to Madrid. How will the sudden change of location affect the conference, do you think? Well, it certainly hasn't happened in this conference's history the past few decades. So it definitely throws a wrench into things that just a few weeks out, the thousands of negotiators that descend on this. Cup have to readjust their plans. You have the activist Greta Thunberg having to literally cross the ocean to get to this conference in time. So it is certainly happening in this larger context of uncertainty around the future of the Paris Climate Agreement. And it is a pivotal year because every year is pivotal in figuring out how to implement this agreement. So give us an idea of what's on the agenda for this conference this year.

Well, since the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015, countries have had to fill out the rulebook, fill out how they would implement their promises to cut carbon pollution. And they're also starting to gear up towards a really pivotal moment in 2020 when countries ideally take stock of where their carbon cuts are and try to ramp up that ambition and see how they can get us closer to keeping warming to under, to, under, to, degrees Celsius. Right now, the world is nowhere near meeting those goals that country, that world leaders have set out the past few decades. And in 2020, that will be the time that these leaders are supposed to step up. And this year is basically the prologue to that. We know that President Trump is withdrawing or aims to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement. Do we have any attendees at this conference that may be perhaps? over a lap. So I think there's a bit of a misunderstanding about the U.S.'s involvement in the Paris

agreement. We are still involved until the day after 2020 election when Trump can officially pull out of the agreement. So the U.S. has been sending negotiators to these conferences year after year. Whether the U.S. is taking on an active role at these conferences is a completely different story. we see a country going from being a world leader on this issue to taking a backseat. And in some cases, you have Trump trying to spoil these kinds of agreements. But we're still sending career diplomats to negotiate and to work behind the scenes. And there is a level of U.S. involvement. The problem is when it comes to future commitments. And that's what these agreements really rest on is the future promises and reliance on the U.S.'s word. That's all what's been thrown in uncertainty.

Let's move on to another topic, and that is California has stopped giving out new fracking permits. What is that all about? Well, Governor Gavin Newsom this week announced a moratorium on fracking permits and also looking at this process for injecting steam into oil and gas wells. And this is a really interesting announcement because it comes amid this national debate over the future of fracking and the future of oil and gas. His predecessor, Jerry Brown, issued over 20,000 of these permits during his administration, even as he was held up as this leader on climate. And I know a lot of people might not think of California as a major oil and gas producing state, but it's actually seventh in the country. and over 5 million Californians actually live within a mile of one of these wells.

So his announcement basically takes a step back and says, we're going to have scientists audit the process and look at how safe it is. Also see about establishing buffer zones so you don't have schools right next to these new oil and gas wells. And I think it does represent this larger moment where we're having this debate over the future of fossil fuel production. Do you think other states will be looking to see how it turns out in California because there's a lot of fracking going around in other states? Well, California is certainly in a unique position that it has a very strong democratic presence and also has positioned itself as this leader on climate, especially as the Trump administration. has rolled back the U.S.'s leadership. So as far as other states taking cues from this, this certainly goes further than most states have looked at. And when you look at the fracking strongholds

in other states like Pennsylvania, I'm not sure we're about to see this level of action, but it is California has demonstrated itself as a leader. And it certainly has a major, major implications for the wider industry as a big economic force. Okay, let's move on to another topic, and this is a bipartisan congressional group called the Climate Solutions Caucus, and it just got a few new members. Tell us about this caucus. Well, this caucus is really interesting because it began in the House and now has started this mirror body in the Senate, and the idea behind it is bipartisan action on climate. And we don't really talk about that much these days because there isn't much bipartisan action. But the Senate caucus that just started up recently gained six new members in the last couple weeks.

That includes Lisa Murkowski and Mitt Romney and Lindsay Graham on the Republican side. And the idea behind it is for both chambers is that lawmakers meet, they discuss where there is common ground on moving forward on climate. So that can include economic incentives, the role agriculture can play. And generally talking about clean energy, which is a more pop. popular talking point for both Republicans and Democrats. What's unclear here is whether that that agreement and the minority of the Republican caucus meeting on this really can move forward to legislation, and that's been the biggest test here. The caucus in either chamber hasn't quite proven it can be effective in leading to action, but we, this movement certainly shows a

counter-narrative to the Trump administration that you have some Republicans starting to look at this more seriously. Do you think any of this has to do with the upcoming elections or some of the Republicans going to be up for re-election next year? And as climate change or climate crisis becomes more popular, not only with Democrats, but with the regular population, they want to be able to say, look, I supported the need to look into climate change. That's probably one of the biggest criticisms of this approach that it's more a cover for the Republican lawmakers while they don't actually have to do very much here. And the House saw this. They lost a lot of members this past year because the more moderate Republicans lost their re-election battles. And certainly it is,

it can be a win-win if you're an election year to show that you are defying the party by by talking more reasonably about this issue instead of having your head in the sand. Yeah, so you might be able to just talk about it, say we talked about it, but never really passed any legislation. That's going to go anywhere. Yeah, that's definitely been a big criticism of it, and I think the jury is still out on what happens here. Let's move on to another topic. There was a bill introduced this week in Congress that would be a climate, quote, stress test. You know how the banks are always having stress tests.

What criteria will the banks need to meet to pass this test? Well, yeah, so banks have looked at this before, but for climate change, it's a really interesting and complicated scenario where you can have different futures, anything ranging from a more, I guess, reasonable level of warming to run away out of control, hot house, Earth. And this bill that was backed by nine Democrats, including Elizabeth Warren, looks at forcing banks, basically, through the Federal Reserve to take stock of these scenarios and see how they would, how the bank's assets would, would survive major disaster and flooding, wildfire, how that affects the financial system. This is not a new idea. This has been gaining ground in the

financial sector. We've seen a lot of reports show how climate change takes points off the GDP. And the UK and Netherlands have also looked at this for their central banks of how you conduct these stress tests. So the U.S. here is a little bit behind the times. And this bill is forcing a conversation here. And it's definitely one that by proactively looking at this rather than waiting for a financial crisis because of climate-induced disasters. That's what Democrats are aiming to avoid here. I've always felt that when banks or insurance companies or whatever get into the act, when they become active about crises, whether it's shipping over the North Pole or ocean rise, you follow that money, you know that things are being taken seriously about the climate crisis.

Yeah. The financial system and investment, They've long been talking about this. Seriously have been looking at how this affects the bottom line. Even oil companies look at this, how climate change affects their assets. So this conversation is definitely happening. And I think with ideas like this, the idea is push this forward, make this a more systematic approach. So you don't accidentally introduce another financial crisis like we've seen. I get it.

Thank you, Rebecca. for taking time to be with us today. Yeah, thank you. Rebecca Lieber is the Climate and Environment Reporter at Mother Jones based in Washington. We're going to take a break and let me come back how scientists around the world are tackling the coral crisis. Coral reefs are dying very rapidly around the world, but people, there is some good news in trying to slow it down. We'll talk about what they are doing and possibly what you can do if you want to try to do something about that. Stay with us.

We'll be right back after the break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. This month's chapter of our Degrees of Change series about the climate crisis is about a tragedy that's unfolding out of sight underwater. It's the worldwide death of coral reefs. Back in a day, I remember when I first learned to scuba dive, my first open water dive was in a reef in the Caribbean.

In the Caribbean, it was so full of staghorn coral that this novice diver, me, and we had trouble navigating the living coral antlers, but I was very recently sad to learn that the reef has since died, along with 25% of all the coral reefs in the world, and the deaths have not gone unnoticed. We asked you for your recollections, and here are some of what you had to say

on the Science Friday Voxpop app. Hi, this is Mindy. I live in Hila, Hawaii. I took a break from snorkeling when my son was born in 2005 and after not going snorkeling, I hate to say this for three whole years. When I went back, I went home crying telling my husband, half the reef has died. That was 2008. Now at 2019, it's hard to go snorkeling because I see so much of it is gone. And that's what I've seen here in Hilo, Hawaii.

80% of our local reef looks dead to me and it just makes me cry. It's been a while, maybe 20 years, but I used to go snorkeling on Panangsaamah Beach in Malbawal on Sabu Island in the Philippines. It used to be very beautiful, but the last time I was there, it was all decimated, gray charcoal, and just absolutely nothing to see. Everything was dead. And as I surfaced, I found out why. The fishermen were throwing dynamite sticks in the water for fishing and blowing up. up the coral reefs. I have seen coral reefs dying. I took my family to a place that's at the very bottom of Mexico, very close to Belize, about five years ago, a place called Ikshalot, and we snorkeled.

We went there to snorkel, and I had my young son, and he loved it, and I saw at least 80, 85, 90% of the reef, brown and gone. We definitely saw fish, but nothing like what I saw when I was working as a scientist in Belize, and I snorkeled the reef back in the early 1990s. It was amazing, colorful, beautiful, exquisite. I was quite sad. I wish we could do something about climate change and stop the warming. That was Kaz from Idaho, Avram from Irvine, and Mindy from Hawaii on the Science Friday Box Pop app. And I'm sure some of you have your own stories like that, but this hour we're going to accentuate the positive. Focus on some reasons to have hope. We'll be talking with scientists on the front lines of this coral crisis who have a lot of

innovative ideas to offer. And if you have a question or something to suggest or a coral story you'd like to share, give us a call 844-724-8255-844-Sy-Talk or tweet us at Cy-Fry. Dr. Tom Moore is coral reef restoration lead at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in St. Petersburg, Florida. He joins us from the studios of WUSF today. Welcome to Science Friday, Dr. Moore. How are you doing today, Ira? Give us a quick snapshot of where we are in the health of the corals around the world. Yeah, unfortunately, it's not been a story of positivity over the course of the last 20 years or so. So in the mid-1980s or so, we started to see reefs around the world start to die off or at least so signs of coral bleaching.

And coral bleaching is when a coral turns stark white after releasing all the algae that live in symbiosis inside of it. It's that algae that provides that coral its color. And it's that same algae that helps corals feed. And so when the water temperatures get too warm, that algae gets released from those corals. and if they stay out of those corals for more than just a week or two, that bleaching quickly turns to death. And as we've seen warmer water temperatures around the world with increasing frequency,

we're seeing increasing frequency of these bleaching events. Are we talking about the corals that people see when they go snorkeling, the shallow water corals, or are the deep-sea corals dying off also? We're talking predominantly about the shallow water corals. The deep-sea corals are certainly, they have some threat. themselves, but the direct threats from climate change are predominantly with our shallow water corals. And you already have divers who were going out today trying to patch reefs back together after storms, right? Yeah, so actually where we got our start when we were thinking about reef

restoration to begin with about 20 years ago was really thinking about refrestoration to fix things that were broken, ship groundings, after storms, things like that. It was actually some techniques that we found while doing that type of work that led us to begin to say, roof restoration and rebuilding of reefs actually may be a more viable option at a bigger scale. Give us an idea from a diver's eye view. How do those repair missions work? What are the techniques? Yeah.

So the first thing to understand is actually a little bit about how corals reproduce themselves because what we're trying to do with restoration is actually just speed up the natural reproductive process. And so corals reproduce in two ways. One is sexually where they release eggs and sperm, usually one night a year, a few days after the full moon. And those eggs and sperm will cross with each other. But those corals have to be in really close proximity for that to happen. And so the more we've seen corals die off, the more we haven't had them in that close proximity. But the other way they reproduce is what we refer to as as as sexually.

So the same way somebody that has a greenhouse may grow plants. When they break one plant, they break it into two or three. and they're able to use those two or three plants to then repopulate somebody's garden or repopulate a forest. We can do the same thing with reefs. So we'll take a small section of a particular coral. The stag corn coral that you talked about earlier is one we do quite a lot of work with in the Caribbean. And we'll take that one coral and we'll break that coral up into, say, 20 pieces. Those 20 pieces will be suspended in the water column and what we refer to as a coral tree.

and those 20 pieces over the course of a year will then grow from being maybe the size of your pinky finger to be in the size of a basketball. And so we'll then take those basketball-sized corals and take them up from growing in an underwater coral farm and we'll put them onto a boat and we'll take them to our restoration site. When you get to that restoration site,

you're going to jump in the water with your basket full of corals and you're going to start swimming along the reef and you're going to look for a segment of the reef that needs restoration. Unfortunately, that's becoming. large swaths of the reefs today. And you'll actually then take that coral, find a nice place for it on the bottom, scrape off the algae that's there, make sure things are right just the same way you'd be planting something in your garden, and go ahead and reattach their coral back to the reef,

using either cement or an underwater epoxy. And then that coral will start to take hold over the course of the next year. It'll regrow over that epoxy and start to secure itself and hopefully continue to flourish. And so we're doing that now, not with just one, but hundreds of thousands across individual reefs. So you can zip tie it down. You can, it sounds like the guys walk through the house of Holm Depot and bringing that stuff underwater, you know. So the tools you need that would help you, you find them in regular stores.

Well, so I like to joke that our coral reef biologists have become real experts at using PVC pipe, duct tape, and zip ties to get their work done. Unfortunately, though, we need to do this work at a much larger scale than we're doing it at right now. So we're doing great work in things that are the size of a building to maybe even a little bit larger than that. But we need to get to a much bigger scale. And so to get to that bigger scale, we've got to stop using just duct tape and zip ties to do our job.

We're going to need to think a little bit more creatively and get some engineers involved in the conversation. Yeah, I agree with you. I'd like to bring on another guest now who is using material science. to tackle the coral crisis by 3D printing corals. 3D printing corals. How does that work? Daniel Dixon knows.

She is a behavioral ecologist, science children's book author, Associate Professor at the University of Delaware in Lewis, Delaware. She joins us by Skype. Welcome, Dr. Dixon. Hi, thank you for having me. You're welcome. You've been experimenting with 3D printed coral as a way to restore reefs. How does that work?

Yeah, so these are projects that two of my master's students have been working on, Emily Ruhl and Alex Good. And we've been taking just normal 3D printers that are, you know, available to anyone. And using a biodegradable filament and then 3D printing actual corals. So using an iPhone, you can take a lot of pictures of an actual coral skeleton. And then you can create a model through software that makes a, print file that you can then print the actual coral. So the benefit of this is it has a lot of structural complexity or lots of little holes for fish and other invertebrates to hide in. A lot of our artificial reef substrates that we put out now like a sunken ship or a bridge that's been

blown apart or something like that. They don't have a lot of small habitats for little animals. And by 3D printing the actual coral, you're replicating the habitat with an artificial substrate. The idea behind it is that real coral will then settle on real coral babies or coral spat, will settle on the 3D printed coral and turn it basically into a coral. So it becomes like kind of a scaffolding inside the reef eventually. That's really interesting. You've talked about these 3D printer corals as the FEMA trailers for reef animals after a storm or a damaging event. Why is it important to keep them around?

Yeah, so I always, I liken these to FEMA trailers. So when like a big hurricane like Hurricane Katrina hit, it wiped away houses for people. And without FEMA trailers, people wouldn't have been able to stay in the location and do their jobs to rebuild the, you know, New Orleans area. Same kind of thing happens with a reef. A reef is a very populated, dense area of animals. So less than 1% of our ocean surfaces are coral reefs and more than 12.000. 25% of the ocean animals actually live on that habitat. So lots of, lots of animals live there.

And when something wipes out the reef or wipes out structural complexity, those animals all have jobs that they're performing. And they need to stay in that area to keep the reef going and to help recover it. So I kind of look at our 3D printed corals as like temporary habitats, just like FEMA trailers are to people, where the fish can still do their jobs. So you can keep herbivorous fish there, and those are fish that eat algae, and algae can overgrow corals and cause more death.

But if you keep the algae population down, then the coral population can start to increase. In no way am I arguing that we can 3D print reefs as a solution to climate change or anything like that. But it's a tool in our toolbox that hasn't really been conventionally tested, and along with some of the outplanting measures that have already been discussed, could be really beneficial. We have a photo on our website at ScienceFriety.com slash coral crisis of a brittle star that actually moved in to live on one of these 3D printed corals. It's really cool photo, science friday.com slash coral crisis.

Let me get to the phone, see if I can get a phone caller to win. Let's go to Tallahassee. Marcos, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thank you for taking. Thank you, my call. Sure, go ahead. Well, first I just want to say thank you to your guests for all the work that they're doing. I think it's fantastic.

I just had a quick question. From what I've read and heard and seen in documentaries is that another cause of coral reef destruction is ocean acidification. That's caused from the animal agriculture industry. And I was just wondering what you guys think about that. Dr. Moore, what do you think? Sure. So I'm not very familiar with the topic of ocean acidification from the animal agriculture industry. So I'll actually kick that to Danielle and see if she's got some background on that. That is actually what most of my research actually focuses on is ocean acidification.

I specifically look at how ocean acidification affects the behavior of animals. And I was part of the first group to actually show that fish are impacted quite heavily by ocean acidification. So what happens to a fish when they're raised in future ocean acidification levels is they become more bold. So they spend more, they spend a lot more time away from their habitat. And coral reef fish generally like to stay in their habitat. They also have a problem detecting understanding sensory signals.

So, for example, a fish currently under current conditions, If I give it the smell of a predator versus the smell of a non-preditor, it can tell the smell of a predator and it stays away from that water that smells like a predator. A fish under ocean acidification conditions can't distinguish between a predator and a non-preditor. So it'll spend equal time in either water choice. And as a result, we've seen a five to nine-fold increase in mortality in fish that we've treated with ocean acidification versus fish. So we have not. Wow. Amira Plato.

This is Science Friday from WNIC Studios. Talking with Danielle Dixon and Tom Moore about, another question about ocean acidification. You know, that's really an interesting question about the acidification because we just hear about the oceans getting warmer. And, you know, we don't realize that the carbon dioxide is sinking is like a sink for the ocean. And it turns the ocean more acidic. Yeah, that's one of the things that as we think about how we do refrestoration, it's actually becoming a bigger challenge because we rely on good ocean chemistry to allow corals to actually calcify, to accrete, to grow. And so as we have increased ocean acidification, we've got the

potential that the corals that we're either growing in restoration or the corals that are naturally on the reef are becoming more brittle. Daniel, how much do you think that 3D-printed corals will make an impression in the coral reefs? How much of a chunk of it can can we hope for? We're currently doing research on that right now. So we have 3D printed kind of experimental plots out in Fiji, and we have them at different mixes with live corals. So we have some that are 100% 3D printed,

some that are 100% live, and then we have mixes of 50-50 or 75-25 or 25-75, and we're trying to investigate how the 3D-printed coral actually interacts with live coral. and how the animals interact with it as well. So right now I can't really predict how the extent that we could use it. But I think given the fact that a lot of people have 3D printers available to them, kind of one of the ideas behind the project that we started was, you know,

schools have 3D printers available to them. So this could almost be an outreach project where you supply the schools with the filament and then they can print for you and then you can put them out on the reef or things. like that because putting them out is the easy job printing them takes time. But hopefully we'll know more soon on kind of the extent that it can be, that it could be used, especially in conjunction with some of the other outplanting work. So you'd print some corals, outplant some live corals, and then you hopefully could keep a functioning reef happening while the reef kind of rebuilds itself. All right. That's quite interesting. Thank you, Dr. Dixon, for taking time to be with us today.

Thank you so much. Special Danielle Dixon, a behavior ecologist and associate professor, University of Delaware in Lewis, Delaware. And we have pictures of her 3D-printed Carls and her team working underwater. Pictures up at our website at ScienceFriety.com slash Carls. Check it out. We're going to come back and talk more about restoring Carls after the break. If you have a question about how we're bringing Carls back, give us a call 844-8255. One question that I want to ask, and I see phone calls are coming in. What can you do? What can you do?

What can you do as an individual to help solve the Carl crisis? We'll talk about it after the break. Stay with us. Hey there, Ira here. Coming at you with some great news about how you, yes, you can make a big impact right now. Science Friday has a dollar-for-dollar donation match in effect, which means that if you make a donation right now, it will be doubled. Yes, I said doubled. You heard me say this before.

Any size donation makes a different. and that's never been more true than now. I know you care about Science Friday, so don't wait on this opportunity. Go to ScienceFriday.com slash give and double your impact. Thanks. This is Science Friday.

I'm Iraflato. It's the latest chapter of degrees of change, our series about how we as a planet are adapting to climate change. We're talking this week about corals and some of the innovative ways scientists are tackling the worldwide die-off of corals. Still with me is Dr. Tom Moore, Coral Reef Restoration Lead at the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration in St. Petersburg, Florida. I want to go to the phones, Dr. Moore, because you're talking about coral reef restoration, and I want to go to Blake, Kentucky in Kentucky with an interesting question.

Blake, hi. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thank you for having me on. My question is this. I am actually, and have been for a long time, a coral enthusiast in the hobby section. And my question is, for biodiversity, I know there are giant networks of hobbyists. And I wonder if that could be used on the aspect of scale. That's a good question. As someone who used to grow corals in my own aquarium in my living room, I want to hear the answer to that can we crowdsource this out?

People grow in corals for a hobby. That's a great question. So it is something we're starting to have some conversations about, about how we can incorporate the hobbyist industry and community in this, because they know some of the most about growing corals than anybody else out there. And so there are some challenges. We've got to think about biosecurity and making sure that the corals that would be great. grown, if they want to be reintroduced to the wild, that those are completely safe and healthy corals, that they don't harbor any diseases or things like that. And that can be a big challenge because coral disease is one of the other big threats that's happening to reefs around the world.

And so we've got to be careful we don't reintroduce those. But one of the places that I actually think the hobbyist community can help us the most with is think about some new techniques for both growing corals and in particular planting them on the reef. So actually the growing and the underwater farms is a relatively straightforward process. We've gotten pretty good at it over the course of the last 15 years. Where we have a lot of challenge and what really slows us down is actually getting those corals to the reef we want to plant them at and that physically planting them on the reef. When you think about the scale of this problem, we've got to work at such large scales that things that take even a minute, if they could take 10 seconds, that thing could be 10 times faster.

And so where the hobbyist community, I think, can help us is starting to think about some new tools that will allow us to plant those corals much faster on the reef. I'd like to bring on another guest now who's working to engineer corals that are able to withstand warmer waters by using a coral library in the lab. Dr. Crawford-Drewry is the Coral Biology Research Program Manager

at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology in Kaneo Hay, Hawaii. He joins us from Hawaii Public Radio. Welcome to Science Friday, Dr. Jury. Thanks for having me. Happy Friday. Happy Friday to you. You're trying to breed Supercarls? How do you do that?

Right, so we are trying to have kind of a way to develop some tools and be really forward-facing for the climate issues we're dealing with. So we use the assisted evolution framework, and in our work that largely revolves around selective breeding, and conditioning or stress-hardening corals. Go ahead. We actually have this kind of biological library, like you mentioned, of individual coral colonies that we have been following for years.

We tag them. We know how they behave. We know a lot about their history. And then we can go out and collect from those corals and breed them to create a next generation that is more thermally tolerant. And how easy is it to substitute the new or better breeds that you're coming up with, the ones that are there now? So a lot of our research right now is focused on understanding how this might be a tool and also the kind of basics of the stress response, the biology and ecology of it.

We do have an eye toward substituting these in actual restoration activities in the future, and we've just started a project doing this. But there's a lot of tradeoffs and other kind of aspects of this process that we need to understand. We know that corals lose their symbiotic algae during, you know, when the ocean changes. Can you switch out the algae that they need for a harder species that you're looking into? Yes, that can happen. There's a lot of people doing really awesome research at University of Miami and elsewhere looking at kind of trading out different types of algae for those that are more thermally tolerant,

and we have seen that that does make a difference in the coral downstream. With our work on selective breeding, we're also focusing on the host animal, right? So we know that if we take those parents and cross them, we can actually produce an offspring that is more thermally tolerant. And in the future, we have an eye toward potentially combining these different strategies in an additive way. Dr. Moore, let's say that we are able to do a lot of these things and we come up with creative solutions. Are we going to be able to save the coral or are these like band-aids if we don't do something about global warming, a global crisis, climate change in the long run? Yeah. I'm glad you asked that question because it really is the,

underpinning of everything we're doing here. We're trying to stabilize a system. We're trying to stabilize a system that in many cases has seen upwards of 90% decline. But we're stabilizing that system for ultimately a planet that starts to stabilize itself. And so we believe we can buy time and we can make sure we still have corals on the reef. But ultimately, we're never going to be able to restore every single reef out there. We have to set up a system to allow the reef to eventually recover itself as ocean conditions hopefully begin to stabilize into the future, even if those are warmer conditions, because as Crawford was talking about, we're hoping to be working with corals that will be a little bit more hardy over the course of the next 50 to 100 years.

And thinking of Hardy, my last question to you, Dr. Jory, do you think there are coral species hiding out there that are still doing really well and we just haven't found them yet? There definitely are, and there are some that we also know about. And, you know, kind of harnessing that resilience as a way to study and also to restore reefs is going to be something really important moving forward. Thank you very much, Dr. Dr. Dr. Rory, for joining us. Crawford-Joury is the Coral Biology Research Program Manager at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology in Kenei-Ohay, Hawaii.

Thank you very much. Thanks. Next up, we have another story from Hawaii, a tale of a superhardy coral, surviving in one of the least pristine places in the Hawaiian Islands, and then we're talking about Honolulu Harbor. Here with that incredible story is Dr. Nerissa Spees, a researcher at the Kiwalo Marine Laboratory in Honolulu.

She also joins us from Hawaii Public Radio. Today, welcome to Science Friday. Aloha, Ira. Thank you for having me. You found one of these resilient coral species in Honolulu Harbor. It's probably one of the least pristine places in Hawaii, right? Oh, definitely. It's disgusting water most of the time, and not a place one normally looks for healthy coral reefs. And did you specifically go looking there because you thought you might find one in a disgusting place? No, it was a complete accident, actually. Back in 2013, Hawaii had a molasses spill in Honolulu Harbor.

It's a byproduct of the sugar industry, and it's shipped to the mainland to make cattle feed. And this molasses just covered everything in the harbor, killed about 26,000 fish and a countless number of invertebrates. and the researchers in my lab were among the first to do surveys, and we found that there were actually corals there. Some of them were 70-plus years old. Unfortunately, they didn't make it, but there were corals that did survive, and a couple of those are the ones that I study

that show a great amount of resilience towards a number of stressors. And Hawaii is in another bleaching event right now, isn't that right? That's correct. We're actually, we went under a bleach watch back in early June, I believe, and went up to a level two bleach warning, which means things are likely dying out there. And as of this morning, I believe, we're back down to a watch. But still, that's a prolonged amount of time that these corals have had to survive without their symbionts. And this resilient coral species that you found in the Honolulu Harbor,

are we able to take them and have them reproduce out into other places? That is our hope, actually. When I first discovered that this might be something that was completely new to science, reached out to biologists with Hawaii's division of aquatic resources, and they actually have a coral farm here in Hawaii, and that is exactly what they're doing. They're micro-fragmenting corals and with hopes to place them out on the reef. One of our producers, Christy Taylor, recently sat down with the president of the Marshall Islands,

Hilda Haini, to talk about climate change. Here's what she had to say about corals there and her country's ability to assess the extent of the problem. It's lack of resources that is holding the plan from going forward in terms of a national assessment on coral impacts. We know that it's happening. We've seen it in some places, but we haven't been able to do a comprehensive assessment of the extent of the problem. So corals are the breathing grounds for our marine resources. If the coral go, then a lot of our marine life will also go with them. And we depend on the marine life to sustain ourselves, their food for us. But at the same time, coral is also needed to grow the islands.

Without coral, the islands will not be there. So we need to make sure that that doesn't happen. Tom, what are we doing to help the most affected nations like Pacific Island nations to assess and address this issue? Yeah, so it is a, this is a super complicated issue, and it's an issue that, as you noted in the top, that is often out of sight for a lot of people. And so even right in the shoreline, you may be looking out at that beautiful sunset and not realize the crisis that's happening underwater. So we are focused on trying to provide better tools to help people assess the impacts out there, but also to plan for larger scale interventions. So one of the things that we've started to do over the course of this last year is really define large-scale restoration strategies. Historically, when I was asked how much we need to do, the answer was always, we need to do a lot, and how much do you need? We need a lot more than we have. But that wasn't really making much

progress for us in terms of getting additional resources like the president was saying we need. And so one of the things we've started to do is really try to define these big strategies. So in actually about two weeks, we're going to be releasing a comprehensive restoration strategy for the Florida Keys. And we hope that that is the first of a number of restoration strategies that ultimately developed and really clearly define exactly what is needed at a particular set of reefs. And so if folks are interested in learning about that Florida Keys strategy, please follow NOAA on social media. And we're going to be talking a lot about it in about two weeks. Well, let's begin talking about what people can do. We always like to end these segments with a look at something our listeners can do to help solve this problem.

Tom, what would you suggest? Yeah, so the first thing everybody can do is make sure people understand that this is a problem. Make sure your friends understand this is a problem. Make sure your elected officials understand that this is a problem. But beyond that, we have a lot of organizations that are literally out there working on the reef every single day, day in and day out. And those organizations need support financially, but they also need support in terms of manpower and divers. So if you're a person that's going to take a vacation to a coral reef environment, do a little Google search beforehand and see who's doing restoration in that community. Many of our partners are actually starting programs that allow you as a diver coming from anywhere to engage and get in the water and actually help out with their work.

So it may be cleaning some algae at a coral farm. It may be planting corals out in the reef, but there's a lot more opportunities that are there to get involved. I'm Ira Plato. This is Science Friday from WMIC Studio. I know as a snorkeler and diver that people do not heed the danger, you know, they themselves are threats. I remember watching people standing with their snorkels and fins on top of a beautiful coral reef and ricking it. Hobbies and tourists do a lot of danger to coral sometimes, don't you? What are they doing wrong, Tom?

Well, so I think that there's a lot of things here. So it's important that we have balanced use, right? We don't want to find ourselves in a situation where we're telling people they can't go see these amazing resources. We want them to be able to go see those resources, but we want them to do it in a responsible way. So one of the things in some of our areas that have strong marine protections, things like the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, we've got vessels that are certified to go and take divers to the reef in a very responsible way. And so we encourage people to go and go out with those blue star operators that are already certified. certified as being able to interact with the environment in a responsible way.

And that means, you know, don't take a leak in the water, right? I mean, if you're on a reef and you can upset the chemistry of the water and the carls will feel it. You certainly can. And it's important to think about it at that scale, but it's also, many times it's actually more important to think about that leak you might be taken on land and the million other people that are doing that as well and making sure that you're in a community that has a well maintained an advanced septic system, or not septic system, but sanitation system, because even in some of

our biggest cities, we're unfortunately discharging not so clean water out onto the reef. And Nerissa, just in the closing seconds, what would you suggest? I agree. We need to reduce as many local stressors as we can, and that includes, you know, personal responsibility, things like wearing proper sunscreens. There are a number of sunscreens, things like oxybenzone that have shown that they do cause damage to corals. So, for example, I no longer use sunscreen when I go in the water. I wear a UV-protectant rash guard. That's a great idea. I'd like to thank both of you this hour. And there is a Spees researcher at Kiwalo Marine Laboratory in Honolulu and Tom Moore, Coral Reef Restoration Lead at the National Shenatic and

Atmospheric Administration in St. Petersburg. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today. We have... Thanks, Ira. You're welcome. We have pictures up of all the work you heard about this hour on our website at ScienceFriday.com slash Coral Crisis. I want to thank Lauren Young and Andrea Corona from our digital team for helping put this chapter of degrees of change together. You can read Andrea's personal story about coral up there too at ScienceFriday.com slash coral crisis. And for our New York listeners on Wednesday, December 18th at Caviad in New York, we are partnering with some amazing journalists to celebrate this year in Science News. I'll be there to round up 2019.

standout stories. Tickets and info at ScienceFriday.com slash headlines. Come on out to the caveat in New York, December 18th at ScienceFriday.com slash headlines. Charles Berkwist is our director. Our senior producer is Christopher and Taliazza. Our producer is our Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, and Katie Feather. We had technical and engineering help today from Rich Kim, Lisa Gosselin, and Kevin Wolf, BJ Leiton, composed our theme music. And check out the Science Friday Vox Pop app where you can share your

questions and comments about the show, we might even put your voice on the radio. That's Science Friday Voxpop app wherever you get your apps. And also, you can also email us. Our address is Science Friday. SciFri at ScienceFri.com. Have a great holiday weekend coming up on Thanksgiving, wishing you, you know, a safe and happy Thanksgiving. Next week, we're going to celebrate it along with you. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato in New York.