Science Friday - Pregnancy And Coronavirus, Good News For Corals. August 21, 2020, Part 1

Episode Date: August 21, 2020

There’s no guidebook for how to have a baby during a pandemic. Experiences like having loved ones present at the delivery, or inviting grandparents over to meet a newborn have not been an option for everyone during this time. Lockdowns across the U.S., and varying procedures at hospitals and clinics, have created a whole new set of limitations and concerns for new parents. Many new parents are dealing with changed birth plans, less in-person health, and the realization that there isn’t much data about how COVID-19, pregnancy and childbirth mix. Joining Ira to talk about what it’s like to have a baby during COVID-19 are Oge Emetarom, a birth doula and certified lactation counselor at Your Baby Your Birth in Brooklyn, New York, and Mati Hlatshwayo Davis, a clinical instructor at the Infectious Diseases Clinic at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Davis is also a physician at the John Cochran Veterans Hospital. Plus, over the past few years, news about coral reefs around the world has largely followed one theme: bad news. Coral populations are declining dramatically, with climate change remaining a big threat. But this month, we got some good news about corals in the Florida Keys. Researchers at the Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium in Summerland Key found propagated coral they had outplanted in the ocean spawned in the wild. This is a big deal, as it’s the first time restored corals like these have been observed to reach this sexual reproduction milestone. Joining Ira to talk about this big breakthrough is Hanna Koch, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium in Summerland Key, Florida, and Hollie Putnam, assistant professor of biology at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston. And on Monday, Interior Secretary Secretary David Bernhardt announced the plan that would auction drilling leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Yasmin Tayag of Medium’s OneZero talks about the details of the leases and criticisms of the plan—and checks in on wildfires in California from station KQED. 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. Later in the hour, we'll talk about what it's like to have a baby during the COVID-19 pandemic. And good news for Florida's corals. But first, lightning strikes this weekend set off a series of wildfires in California, leaving areas like Vacaville scorched. The whole property, it looks like war. A war zone. That's the only way to explain it. Tom Walter is the caretaker of La Farm Soley, a family-run organic farm in Vacaville.

I can't put the words together. My heart is hurting. My mind is numb. Tom's trailer and everything he owned was completely destroyed, and he was forced to evacuate. Emergency centers are popping up to house evacuees like Tom. Red Cross volunteer John Williams has the added challenge of the pandemic, and organizing groups of people indoors. Have social distancing. We're wearing masks. Even our feeding procedures are different. Governor Newsom has declared a state of emergency to aid in the firefighting and relief efforts. Those interviews are from KQED reporters Peter Acuney and Kevin Stark. And now for the rest of the news roundup.

The Trump administration has approved a plan for drilling in part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The plan would open up 1.5 million acres in the air. oil companies and drilling proponents have been eyeing the area for decades. My next guest is here to fill us in on the plan and other science headlines from the week. Yasmin Tayig is a senior editor at 1-0 and writer at the Medium Coronavirus blog. She is based out of New York. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much, Iris. Great to be here. Nice to have you. Let's talk about this. Interior Secretary David Bernhardt announced that the plan is in the final stage.

What does this cover? How would it work? Fill us in on this. According to the Interior Department's new plan, they can start auctioning off drilling leases within the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as early as the end of this year. What this means is that companies who buy these leases will have the rights to the property and any minerals that they find there for the set period of time. And it's up to these companies who buy the leases to do test drilling to see if be. these areas are actually worth investing it. What kind of wildlife? What's the area like? Give us a little picture of that area. So the refuge itself is 19 million acres of pristine land. It's considered one of the largest stretches of wilderness left in the U.S. And it's home to animals like polar bears and

porcupine caribou, who importantly have their calving grounds there. And these animals are really important to some indigenous tribes in the area, both for food and for some. spiritual reasons. And tell us about the politics here. The governor is in favor of this? Yes, a lot of Alaska lawmakers are in favor of this, as well as some local energy firms and some other indigenous groups. There's this argument that opening up this land for drilling will bring in much needed jobs and revenue for Alaska, where oil production has been down since the 80s. And Republicans have been fighting to open up this land for decades. There are a problem. There are a opponents to this plan, are there not? Will this move forward or will it get tied up in lawsuits, do you think?

Opponents of this plan, which include indigenous groups and a lot of environmental activists, are expected to file a lawsuit for every one of these leaked sales. So there's going to be a lot of litigation in the months ahead. How does this fit into Trump's administration energy plan? Trump has been trying to secure America's energy dominance for a long time. So basically, he wants America to be self-sophobic. in terms of energy, in part by having its own oil. So opening up this refuge opens up a path to do that. It's just a really weird time for this to be happening. There's an oil flood because of pandemic. You know, on top of that, the PR of drilling in Alaska is just terrible. You know, banks like Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase have even said they're not going to finance drilling there.

But I think the most interesting feature in all of this is that it's not even clear that there is oil down there. Wait a minute. They're going to drill, but they're not sure there's oil there. Yeah, there's some evidence from the 80s that suggests there could be several billion barrels of oil down there. But that data is kind of old. It's not considered to be very clear how much oil is actually down there. So this is sort of a bit of a gamble. Can this be overturned by the next president?

Yes, well, the Interior Department appears to want to quickly sell these leases before the election, because if Democrats and Biden regain the White House, they could block sales. We know that Biden has called to permanently protect this refuge. But even if he wins, it'll be really hard for his administration to overturn leases if they've already been sold. Let's move on to a COVID-19 story. There have been headlines pointing to a mutated strain. That is becoming more prevalent. Take us through what is behind that story. There have been a lot of scary headlines in the news lately declaring that there's this new

mutated form of the coronavirus that was detected in Asia and that this mutant form might be more contagious and more dangerous. These headlines are in the news because, yes, there is a mutated variant of the coronavirus and it recently was detected in Malaysia and Philippines. However, there isn't compelling evidence yet that this variant is actually more contagious and more dangerous. And it's also not new. It was first detected in April. It was flagged in a preprint that later got published in the journal cell. And this paper described as one mutant form. It's a mutation called D614G, which is a reference to the amino acid sequence of virus. But for now, it's not clear what the mutation actually does to the virus.

So the cell paper shows that this mutant form is now the most dominant form in the world. And it has been in Europe and the U.S. and Oceania for a while. And they hypothesized that the mutant form became dominant because it's more infectious. And that's the fear, right? But the critics of this paper say there's just not enough evidence to support this. And the big question now is, if this strain isn't more infectious, then how did this mutant variant become the main form? And there are other explanations why that could be. That's interesting. There's a big race now to make a vaccine, as we all know, Will this mutation affect that process? It could, in theory, the mutation affects the virus spike protein, which gets talked about a lot

because it has this critical role in infection. But the critics think it's unlikely because the mutation affects the part of the spike protein that may not be critical for the immune response. And other research teams have found that antibodies from the original coronavirus and antibodies from the mutated form can cross-mutualize. So that's more evidence that it's not super critical to the immune response. I know that you cover many stories about vaccines, and there are many vaccines that are so-called genetic vaccines. What are these genetic vaccines?

They're not your typical vaccines. So while traditional vaccines usually use a killed or a weakened form of the actual pathogen to elicit the immune response, a genetic vaccine uses a small piece of genetic material from the pathogen, so that's DNA or RNA. And this piece of genetic material goes into a person's own cells to make one of the proteins from pathogens. And that's what ultimately elicits the immune response. I understand that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention is starting to look at

wastewater in the fight against COVID-19. We've looked at this before, but is it being now more seriously looked at? On Wednesday, the CDC announced the plan to start tracking. tracking data on the coronavirus in our poop. They're working with states and municipalities to look at the concentrations of viral RNA in sewage to potentially track where in the country there is an outbreak of COVID-19. Of course, I say this is not a new idea. We've talked about this. Give us an idea of how this works and has it been done for other diseases, too. Yeah, this technique has been used in the past to track polio, pathogen.

with anti-microbial resistance, even drugs. And the way it generally works is that for the coronavirus, we know it gets into the gastrointestinal system, which means that it gets into our poop, and bits of its RNA gets shed there. And because everybody poops, scientists who look at concentrations of viral RNA and sewage to capture the scale of an outbreak on a population level. But do we know yet if COVID-19 can be transmitted through poop,

through feces? There is no clear answer for that. So it's not known whether it is infectious if it is in the poop. But so far, we can take cells in the fact that so far nobody has been reported to get infected in this way. All right. We're going to move now from poop to cow farts and cow burps. We hear this idea a lot that cows are contributing to methane. Tell us about how this might work.

Well, the popular idea is that cows fart out methane, which is a greenhouse gas, and that's one of the reasons why they're so bad for the climate. And recently, this was a part of a Burger King ad that aired in July that really ruffled others amongst some scientists and farmers because it said, yes, cow farts are causing global warming, and if we feed lemon grass with these cows, it could maybe reduce the methane in those parts. So a lot of scientists were like, that's not actually how it works. For one thing, it's actually cow burps that are responsible for 80 to 95% of the methane that cows emit. But scientists argue that, you know, there's so much new research showing that there are ways to reduce emission from livestock.

And you need to take them seriously and to cool it with the jokes because there are real ways in which the science can be applied. And what would be some of those ways? The big thing is called bead additives. And, you know, like the lemongrass that the Burger King ad reference, these are, things that you can feed to cows that reduce the amount of methane they produce. One of the big frontrunners in this field is red seaweed, which really reduces their methane by a lot. Lemongrass is unproven, so that's one of the reasons Burger King was under fire a little bit. Don't cows contribute a significant amount of methane into the environment? They are responsible for 62% of the total

emissions from livestock globally, so they're not perfect. They're not innocent here. But The scientists want us to consider this idea that cows can be raised and fed better and don't necessarily need to be demonized. They've been in pop culture. There's no question that cows contribute a lot of emissions, but the amount of food that's produced per cow varies by country, and we should be aiming to get the most meat or dairy per bird. And so ultimately, the scientists just want us to stay open to this idea that science can change the food systems that we have now. and we've just got to stay open to it, even if it feels counterintuitive. Well, that's a good place to end because we have run out of time. Yasmin Tayag is senior editor at 1-0 and writer at Medium Coronavirus Blog.

Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you so much for having me. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we'll talk about what it's like to have a baby right now, and we'll hear from some of you listeners. This was a time where I was stripped of all of the support systems that I would normally have, It was enormously worrisome and isolating. I felt like my pregnancy was hijacked, to be very honest.

Stay with us. We'll be right back after this short break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. I don't know about you, but everywhere I turn, I see someone who is pregnant or due to have a baby this year. It's like a COVID baby boom. But here's the thing. Some joyful parts of having a new baby, like having loved ones present at the delivery or inviting grandparents over to meet the newborn aren't always possible right now. The lockdown has created a whole new set of unsatisfying limitations and concerns. About a month ago, we asked you on our

Science Friday Vox Pop app if you were going through a pregnancy or childbirth during the pandemic, and for you to share your experiences, we heard from a lot of you. I was pregnant during the first few months of coronavirus and I gave birth in May to a son and it was crazy. They screened me for coronavirus when I was actively in labor at the doors of the hospital. My husband and I wore masks the entire time. The strict limitations on visitors during the pandemic has been the difficult part. My wife had to go into the hospital at 32 weeks pregnant due to complications and spend two weeks in the hospital, most of which she could not have any visitors at all. I was able to be there for the delivery, but none of my or her family have been able to meet our daughter yet due to

those visitor limitations. I'm about to become a first-time mom, and we were really excited until we got basically locked down into our house. So we've been quarantined in Houston, Texas now, for a hundred and some odd days, and this pregnancy is definitely not what we had thought that it would be. Those messages were from Jessie in Baton Rouge, Matthew in Fresno, and Sarah in Houston. Thanks to everyone who shared their experiences on the SciFRI Vox Pop app. Joining me to talk more about what it's like to have a baby right now are my guests. Dr. Mati Klashuayu Davis, clinical instructor of infectious diseases at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis,

She's also a physician at the John Cochran VA Medical Center. Thank you for having us. And Oge Emeteron, a birth dula and certified lactation counselor at your baby your birth in Brooklyn, New York, Your Baby Your Birth.com. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Maude, I want to first say you have a personal knowledge of this issue because you recently had a baby. Congratulations. Thank you so much. I have a three-month personal experience with this. this. So I was pregnant and had our second daughter, Nan Nizzo, on May 16th. So experienced what it was

like to be pregnant right at the beginning of this hitting and then have been on maternity leave until last week during this. And also just happened to be an infectious diseases physician on top of that. So it's been an interesting year. Wow. Yeah, I want to know from your perspective what it's like to be someone who's involved with infectious diseases and giving birth during this pandemic, must be out of this world. Out of this world is exactly the right way to describe it, because the juxtaposition between what it would normally be like to be an infectious diseases physician in response to this, and understand this is the nature of our job.

I say every year to two years, we have something. In fact, when I was pregnant with my first child, who's three and a half years old, Zika was around. And so this is the nature of our jobs as infectious diseases physicians. but to then have to be pregnant during a pandemic that by definition there was just not a lot of data in the beginning. The first and only thing in my mind is protecting the health of my unborn child. It was very difficult to reconcile those two positions. You said we didn't have a lot of data at the beginning. Have we collected enough data to know now

with any sort of certainty how COVID impacts pregnancy and childbirth? Certainty is very difficult words to use in science because we never get to a certain point, I would say, especially by the evolving nature of these types of infections. But what I would say, I don't know that anyone is comfortable giving slam dunk recommendations on how things are impacted because we haven't had enough longitudinal experience with the virus to know how it affects pregnant women and certainly how it affects newborn babies. Is that because we don't prioritize this to collect the data? No, I think it's just a timing thing, right? We've only been dealing with this since the top of the year, at least in this country. I will say, though, that decisions that could have been made in the beginning by the national leadership in regards to how we approach this could definitely have us in a much better

position to exploit these options, but by the nature of science, you just need longitudinal experiences to be able to collect and analyze the data that we would need to. to know. Okay, as a birth dula, what are the biggest concerns you're hearing from your patients? I mean, more so from Mati's perspective, understanding that is, is this virus going to affect my baby? If I go into hospital settings, am I at risk? You know, now people are deciding to have homebirths or, you know, birthing centers instead of going into the hospital setting because they are concerned. And it's a big fear that arises within my clients of this is a virus that's attacking anybody. At first we thought it was, you know, a certain demographic, but it's anyone right now.

And so obviously already being pregnant, as it is, you're already at higher risk for certain things to affect you. And now having this virus, they're concerned about their babies. And that concern, does that extend to you actually being present in the room with your clients? I mean, or is this being done remotely like everything else is? It definitely at the start of the pandemic within New York City, there was mandated that doulas could not go into the hospital setting to support their clients. And actually, at first, their partners weren't allowed to go into the hospital settings as well. So people were birthing alone in this environment.

I've had to adapt and be able to support my clients virtually in certain hospital settings where they aren't allowing doulas to be present. And how does that affect your one-on-one relationship? relationship with your clients? In so many ways. For me, but do the work is such an intimate relationship with my clients. I'm face-to-face with them prior to COVID interacting with them on a personal level.

So now we kind of remove that into this virtual space where I'm having prenatals via Zoom. Or, you know, when someone's in labor, I still go to their homes to help them labor at home. But then I'm taking an Uber ride with them to the hospital and saying, okay, let's switch over to a virtual, you know, connection if it's a FaceTime or Zoom or whatever way, but hospitals, again, the Wi-Fi, they may or may not be able to hop onto the Wi-Fi, but having to navigate that while laboring is something that clients weren't usually used

doing prior to COVID. So for me, it's just taken away the human aspect of being able to connect with my clients to help them breathe, you know, give them certain positions to go into. I can still do that virtually, but it's just completely different. We asked our listeners to tell us how they were dealing with the situation, and we got lots of messages from listeners who had gone through pregnancy or childbirth during the pandemic, and we found that there was a common theme for a lot of them, and that was that they felt really stressed and anxious. I want to play a reaction from Alex in Minneapolis.

Here she's talking about getting ready to give birth. I had insane anxiety, not knowing if my husband would be able to be present, having my close friend as a backup in case my husband was showing signs, having a fever, et cetera. Okay. What are you hearing about emotional and mental well-being from your clients? Oh, I'm getting these calls. Like, I have huge amounts of anxiety. I don't know if I should be going outside to get sunlight, you know, even though it's important for pregnancy. I don't know if I should step outside and potentially. contract this virus from someone passing by me. So just already the anxieties that build up with first-time parents or even second-time parents, you know, or multips, like I am about to raise a child in this environment. And now on top of that, you have an environment where there is a pandemic happening.

So I mean, within my practice, I encourage meditation and mindfulness during pregnancy to connect with baby. And I've just been noticing a lot more of this conversation. if I just have this fear on top of birthing, but now I have this fear of contracting a virus that could potentially transfer utero. I can so relate to that caller because when we were planning for my birth,

there was so much uncertainty around what was going to be allowed and what wasn't. So in the same way that Oge is talking about the policies changing on the support system for folks being allowed in the hospital, I remember vividly reading the newspaper articles around people in New York not having their partners with them. And I was only a couple weeks away from having our baby. So I immediately was anxious about the fact that my husband wouldn't be allowed in the room.

Already my mother, who lives in South Africa, was not able to be with me. And so this was a time where I was stripped of all of the support systems that I would normally have. and it was enormously worrisome and isolating in a way that I didn't expect. I felt like my pregnancy was hijacked, to be very honest. I was fortunate that they changed the policy just before I had our daughter, and so my husband was with me, and I was also extraordinarily fortunate to have a team of nurses and a long-standing relationship with my OB,

where I felt very supported on the day. But to Oge's point, not every woman has that, and it can be extraordinarily damaging, to not have the support of doulas like her and other people in your support network available for you to have this extraordinarily important experience. Okay. Are you hearing the same thing about hospital policies through your clients? Yes, I mean, things are changing, honestly, daily. And so clients are told that they will be tested.

The birthing person will be tested once they get into the hospital. Sometimes maybe 24 hours in advance if it's an induction. but they will be tested and their partner will have their temperatures checked. And so they're not getting tested. And what's interesting is that they go into the labor and delivery room and they're laboring after being tested. And they may not get their test results until three, four, five hours after they may have already had their baby.

And so if a result comes back that they're positive, baby most likely goes into NICU. And so they're losing that immediate skin-to-skin first-hour connection with their babies. And it's interesting as well that the partners aren't getting tested. And so in the space of having that, but now going back and forth with, oh, your partner can come. No, you're going to have to, you know, it's only one person in labor delivery room. You may or may not be able to bring your doula. So it's honestly, every single hospital, it's changing. And once you get there, you won't know until you get there. You know, it was interesting to hear from Marty that she felt her pregnancy was

hijacked. Is that something you're hearing from your clients too? I've heard that actually a couple times because already as it is, a birthing person wants to feel like they have, it's their baby and it's their birth, even if it's in a hospital setting. And so now having the idea of, okay, I may or may not be able to have my partner, I may not be able to have the support that I need. And then, you know, nurses or OBs or the provider, just letting them know that, okay, this is what has to be done. And it completely takes the humanity from it and just being able to say, okay, this is what I want for my birth. But, you know, there's regulations and policies in place now just to make sure the staff is protected and the birthing person's protected. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

In case you're joining us, we're continuing our conversation about what it's like to have a baby during the COVID-19 pandemic with our guests, Dr. Matty, Kalashweyo-Davis, clinical instructor of the infectious. diseases, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. She's also a physician at the John Cochran Veterans Hospital, and Ogey Emeteron, a birth dula and certified lactation counselor at Your Baby Your Birth in Brooklyn, New York, Your Baby Your Birth.com. Do you expect we might be seeing something different, some different outcomes during COVID in terms of postpartum health being different? I'll just say that I absolutely do believe so. I think women have an unfair expectation placed upon them by society as it is in regards to having children and the responsibilities around that. There's already studies that have come out at Washington University

regarding how that's been amplified since COVID. And certainly one can see a link between that and mental health. But, Gay, you're probably in a much better position to speak to that than I am. Yes, for sure. There definitely has been an increase in just people requesting for postpartum dual support. As Mati mentioned, not having the support of her mother. And if they don't have that connection, that village to support them,

they're just left in the space in their homes with their partner or alone. And so the support, especially within the first month, two months, three months, is very, very important for, one, for their mental health. too, like Mardi mentioned, to just be able to get some sleep and feel like a human being, maybe even take a shower. And so in the space for me, in my experience and in my work, I've seen a lot of people requesting, you know what, are you able to support postpartum and knowing that I've already been exposed to them and with them in the space during their birth, depending on if they're birthing in the hospitals or at home, they've already been with me.

So in that space of like, okay, then, you know, this, Dula can be our postpartum dual and being able to support them in that way. But not everyone is open to that as well with the concern of the virus. And so again, support has shifted virtually. And so I'm supporting people for lactation visits over Zoom, seeing if they're getting their latch right, you know, talking with them. If they're, you know, they just want someone to talk to. They've been in this house with their babies. They want to be able to connect with another person and, you know, let out their emotions. But for Dula, we're concerned with postpartum depression. after birth, after labor and birth.

And so I'd be interested to see what the numbers and any reports look like in terms of the increase in postpartum depression. O'Gay, do you expect to be delivering a lot of babies nine months from now? I actually do. I've been already getting some inquiries that people are due in January, February. So this pandemic is going to possibly have a baby boom because of COVID. which is interesting to think. Mari, do you think that we're going to be talking about this years from now as this will be

COVID babies? People of this generation will be known as COVID babies. I joke about this all the time. I think it can go either way, right? I mean, I think there's a significant mental health component to this and how people respond could be very much in one direction or the other, right? Where for some people, it's certainly not incentivizing them to go that route. But for some people, that's really, you know, we're at home, we're with our families, we have these opportunities and we'll see this baby boom too. I'll be very interested to see the way where it goes. I'll honestly say, though, that I anticipated that a lot of people who were at least making plans for growing their families would choose not to do so because of the current climate.

And that really hasn't been the response across the board, you know. I think now that unfortunately this is becoming a part of our new normal, people are planning for this, maybe not with the ideal plan they had in mind, but having made adjustments and moving forward. Well, thank you both for sharing your personal experiences and your insight. This has been very, very educational for all of us. I want to thank you again. Dr. Matty, Kalasueyo Davis, clinical instructor of infectious diseases, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. She's also a physician at the John Cochran Veterans Hospital. And Ogey Amerihan, a birth dula and certified lactation counselor at your baby, your birth in Brooklyn, New York, at the website of the same name. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today. Thank you. We're going to take a short break.

And when we come back, we'll talk about a big breakthrough in coral restoration efforts off the Florida Keys. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. Of the past few years, news about coral reefs around the world has not been good. Coral populations have been declining dramatically with climate change remaining a big threat. But this month, we got some good news about corals in the Florida Keys. Here to tell us about it is Dr. Hannah Cook, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium in Summerland Key, Florida.

Welcome, Hannah. Hi. Thank you for having me. All right, give us the good news. What's the good news? Oh, well, the great news is that we have documented for the first time worldwide restored corals of a slow-growing mountainous star coral species to be sexually, reproductively viable and spawned for the first time in nature. Where was this done? Tell me exactly what you did. So Mote has pioneered this technology called microfragmentation fusion,

which is where we will take a colony, we will cut it up into small replicate pieces, grow it in our land nursery, and then we will outplant those pieces onto a degraded coral head, and those replicate pieces will grow and fuse, so that's the fusion part of that methodology. And essentially, they will form a larger colony faster.

And the reason why that is so important is because for many stony squirrel species, sexual maturity is a condition of size, not age. So you can think of it like puberty. And so it just means that they have to reach a minimum size in order to produce the next generation of baby corals. And so with this breakthrough, we've basically been able to show that with this methodology, we can create reproductably viable corals of a slow-growing massive species within only a handful of years instead of decades, because it's in nature, wild corals would take about 10 to 20, 30, and so on, you know, decades to reach

sexual maturity and produce the next generation. So the fact that we can cut that down significantly to just a handful of years is really a breakthrough for coral restoration science in general and bodes well for the faster recovery of our reefs and of our restored populations. Have you tried to repopulate a dead coral reef with these new babies? Yes. So moat and engages in multi-species coral reef restoration, also resilience-based restoration. And so we outplant thousands of fragments of different species, species that are all key reef-building species. What that means is that these species are foundational species. They're the ones that create the backbone of our reefs. And we have been carrying out coral reef restoration for several years now

for a number of different species. And this year was really exciting because it was the first year that we had multiple populations of different species that we restored to the reefs actually become sexually mature and spawn. And what were the major hurdles that you had to jump over? Well, I mean, one thing is that, you know, corals grow slowly in general. And then, you know, we have to deal with the stressors that are happening naturally in the environment. So, for example, these corals that spawned, we outplanted them in 2015. And in 2015, there was a global bleaching event. In 2017, the Florida Keys experienced a category for Hurricane Irma. And in 2019, that site was hit by the stony coral tissue loss disease, which is the deadliest coral disease outbreak ever recorded on a contemporary reef and certainly for Florida's coral reefs.

So, you know, we are doing our best to restore these corals and these species and use a variety of science-based strategies. but we always have to deal with natural, unpredictable events that happen in nature. But the fact that our corals are surviving these natural, stressful events and able to have enough energy to put towards sexual reproduction is great. It gives us optimism and hope and shows that what we're doing is working and that it should continue to work as we move forward. These are really resilient corals, it looks like. Did you have to go find, this species or this kind of coral that you would expect to be able to overcome these hurdles? We'll find them in nature. So because Florida's coral reef has already experienced a number of

stressors over the last decades, many of the corals that are out there today are already considered resilient. You know, they've already gone through stressful events. And so there are survivors for a reason. And so we can use those survivors to propagate more corals. Another method is that we will expose these corals to different stressors or different combinations of stressors like high temperature or different diseases, find the strains that are resilient or resistant to these stressors, and then propagate them. And when we outplant and restore corals, two ways that we can ensure resilience is one, making sure that we put out high genetic diversity, right? So we're not putting out just a few of what are considered the best or the top performers, because

the environment can always change. So we put out high genetic diversity, but we also put out corals and strains that we have tested in the lab using controlled experiments to identify those strains that are resilient to the different stressors. So we can make sure that we're putting out corals that have a higher chance of surviving. I'm sure you'll be keeping an eye on these outplanted corals for a while. It's a term outplanted. I hadn't heard before. What will you be looking for? So moving forward, part of my job as a coral reproduction scientist is to continue to monitor the health, the survival, the growth of our corals as part of our restored populations. Also to monitor the sexual maturity of these populations, looking at what proportion

becomes sexually mature over time. Are they continuing to reproduce sexually and produce the next generation of offspring every year? Also, we conduct multispecies restoration. So I will apply these monitoring assessments to all the species that we outplant and also monitor for other critical developmental milestones. So spawning is only one aspect of the sexual cycle. You still have to have fertilization and settlement, meaning the larvae will settle back down onto the reef, undergo metamorphosis, and develop into a coral that becomes a part of the adult population. And so every one of these aspects is critical to becoming a self-sustaining population.

And so moving forward, I will monitor for those other critical developmental milestones. I want to bring on another coral expert so that we can talk a little more about the state of corals in 2020. Dr. Holly Putnam is an assistant professor of biology at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thanks for having me. Good news that we're hearing out of Florida to you? Yes, I think it's fantastic news. I think in these times any positive news is good and any positive news for corals is definitely great. And do you think that you and other coral scientists can apply the specific method for coral populations around the world?

Definitely. I think that these kinds of restoration approaches are growing in capacity, growing in scale and growing in the science-based nature of them. And that's where really our work is focused in the science-based nature of these to not only grow with corals out in the wild, but track many of these features that Hannah is talking about to track their physiology, track their performance, track the generations as they move through. So being able to fragment corals, have them grow quickly, be outplanted or be housed in nurseries and then outplanted, provides this aspect for a variety of species and a variety of locations. We've been hearing so much bad news about corals over the past. past few years. How are they doing in 2020? That's a great question. I think sadly a lot of this

bad news is correct and is continuing. I think as we watch climate change continue to occur as seawater temperatures increase as we get more heat waves occurring as we get more tropical storms, we are seeing negative effects on corals. We're seeing those negative effects that are removing these large adult colonies from the populations. That makes it harder for corals to make a comeback after these perturbation or disturbance events. And so overall, while we still have thriving reefs around the globe, we definitely have hard hit areas, and we definitely have global trajectories that are in a negative decline. Hannah, what about in Florida where you are? As a scuba diver, I've gone back to places that I used to scuba dive in, and there are so many dead and dying corals in those areas. Give us an

idea of what the population is doing in Florida in your region. So, as Holly already mentioned, there are certain regions that have been especially hard hit, and Florida's coral reef is definitely one of those regions. Some of the key reef-building species in this area have experienced greater than 90% population declines and are now facing functional extinction, which basically means that the populations are so small that they can no longer provide critical reef habitat, structure, or shelter for other important marine organisms like fish. It also means that their populations are so small that they cannot effectively undergo sexual reproduction and produce the next generation of corals that can replenish depleted adult populations. So we have a number of

species that are facing this level. And we do have a species that are considered locally extinct. And I have to say that, you know, despite the sad state of corals here, I have to say that I think 2020 has provided a lot of hope, a lot of optimism. We've seen a number of organizations, come together, state, local, federal to engage in the NOAA seven Iconics Reef's mission. They're putting $97 million over a 15-year period to restore seven heathsites along floaters coral reefs. So Mo is a part of that initiative. As I said before, we documented for the first time that many of our restored populations

are sexually mature and spawning. And then I also want to add that for the mountainous dark coral species that we documented, committed for the first time to spawn after the microfragmentation fusion methodology. Some of the outplants that we did observe to spawn last week were outplants that I observed to contract the stony coral tissue loss disease last year. They were treated with the antibiotics and were able to recover from this deadly disease and still be reproductively viable the following year. And I have to say that that provides immense hope for us that we can make a difference and if we just continue to work together and, you know, engage in these science-based

restoration strategies that we will make a difference and, you know, and hopefully in a short amount of time than what we may have initially expected that we will see greater accomplishments for population recovery for these critical species. I'm Ira Plato, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. In case you're just joining us, we're continuing our conversation about the state corals in 2020 with Dr. Hannah Cook, postdoctoral research fellow at the Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium in Summerlin, Key, Florida. Dr. Holly Putnam, assistant professor of biology at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston. Dr. Cook, what was your secret sauce for getting these corals to grow so quickly in being able to collapse something that might take a decade

or more into just a few years? That's a great question. And we are still investigating the mechanisms behind this sort of increased growth response we see once we cut a coral. But when we take these colonies and we cut them in a smaller pieces, it elicits this growth response that allows them to grow faster. So if you think about you cut on your arm or something like that, you tend to heal quite fast, right? So it will heal over a few days and your cells will regrow and cover that wound. And so we're looking into what it is that really drives that response.

in terms of faster growth when you do cut a coral using appropriate techniques. And basically we've shown that through this microfragmentation fusion process, that when we do cut the coral, it elicits a growth response that allows them to grow 25 to 50 times faster than just a natural coral in the wild would grow. And so for a species that grows anywhere from half a centimeter to a centimeter a year, we're able to actually produce decades-sized colonies within only, you know, two to three years. That's amazing. That's absolutely amazing.

Dr. Putnam, tell us what the big issues we need to keep an eye on that are going to impact coral health around the world. Yes, I would say the biggest issues at this point are at the global scale. So the biggest issues we're seeing that are causing mass mortality are things like increased seawater temperature and marine heat waves. And these are driven by increases in atmospheric CO2 and greenhouse gas concentration. obviously that are driving the warming of the atmosphere, which is translating to driving warming of the ocean. And this change in the overall climate is creating these marine heat waves and creating greater high frequency and larger storms.

So we have an overall disruption to the environment that the corals are growing in. And the reason why heat is such a big deal for corals is because it can break down this relationship or this symbiosis that the corals have with their single-celled algae. living inside them. The coral expels or that algae leaves the coral, and you can see through the coral tissues, and that's what we call coral bleaching. And when the corals are bleached, they're essentially starving because they don't have that energy that's being generated by the single cell that algae inside the coral. And so that's how we can get basically a lower overall health of the coral. They can be more sensitive to things like disease and to pollution and to local effects. So the overarching driver of increases in temperature are driving coral bleaching and driving loss of corals on the reef when this heating and this bleaching is prolonged.

In addition to that, we have the concern of ocean acidification. The overall impacts on the reef are more variable while scientific studies show sensitivity for corals growing under ocean acidification, which is the uptake of CO2 from the atmosphere into the oceans that's driving a decline in the pH of the oceans, making it energetically harder for them to get. calcify and to get these building blocks of their skeletons. We see these declines in experiments in the lab, but there's a lot of variation there in different species out on the reef. So we're keeping an eye on ocean acidification and it contributes to the decline of coral calcification.

So I would take this global scale, we're talking about ocean warming and ocean acidification. And then at the local scale, we're talking about local human impacts. So nutrient runoff onto the reefs that can disrupt the balance of coral growth versus algal growth that can disrupt that such that algae are taking over all the space that's usually taken up by corals and can be smothering them.

We can have other pollutants running off on the coral reefs. And all of these things together are contributing to increases in diseases. So basically we're seeing this higher sensitivity because of both global and local stressors coming together. And so if we can take care of these global stressors, we have a better chance at dealing with local stressors,

Coral's dealing with local stressors, and we can actually take action again at the local level and mitigate those local stressors. So really global action is critical, and local action is crucial. Well, at least we got some good news today out of Florida and the restoration of the reefs there that might be applied to the rest of the world. I'd like to thank both of you for taking time with us today. Dr. Hannah Cook, postdoctoral research fellow at the Moat Marine Laboratory and Aquarium in Summerland, Key, Florida. Dr. Holly Putnam, Assistant Professor of Biombollah at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today.

Thank you so much. Thank you so much. And thank you for highlighting corals. You're welcome. One of my favorite topics. Charles Burkwurst is our director. Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, Katie Feather, and Kathleen Davis.

B.J. Leatherman, compose our theme music. Oh, one last thing before we go. On the Science Friday Vox Pop app, we want to pay tribute to our listeners in the online community's Second Life. Remember Second Life? They have been meeting there every week for over 10 years to listen to the show in that virtual world.

And if you were part of our original island, way back in the early 2000s, we want you to tell us about your favorite memory. Tell us about that on our Science Friday Vox Pop app, which you can find wherever you get your apps. Remembrances of Second Life on our Science Friday Voxpop app, please let us know what you recall. If you missed any part of the program

or you'd like to hear it again or tell some of your friends and family about it, you can subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.