Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How Coral Reefs Work

Episode Date: February 9, 2019

Coral reefs are the largest organic structures on Earth, yet they're created through a symbiotic relationship between creatures about 3 millimeters long. Learn more about the the world's coral reefs (and how to protect them) in this episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey there, everybody. It's me, Josh, and for this week's SYSK Selects, I've chosen How Coral Reefs Work from 2012. I think March of 2012, and it's a good one. It's got a lot of science.

There's a lot of interesting marine biology to learn. And plus, it's just good to get to know this very rare form of life that we are very rapidly erasing from the global biosphere. So I hope you enjoy this very eye-opening episode on Coral Reefs. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with me. As always, it's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and that makes this Stuff You Shouldn't Know. I just noticed your cold has cleared up. Yeah, a little bit. I still have the, an interior lining, a very thick. All right, that's good.

Flem. Other than that, I'm fine. Yeah, you sound fine, though. That's all I care about. You know what it was? Tons of emergency used to wash down tons of vitamin B stress, which is like tons of just different vitamin Bs. I eat solar ray.

And. Scotch. Right. Single malt scotch. That's my secret ingredient. And a lot of lysine. Couple of lysines every time. Like thousands and thousands of percentages of daily value.

Like just, it just makes the FDA cringe that I take this much. That's what I do. I just load up on like everything. Just like triple it. Yep, there you go. Take that body. So I'm fine.

Good. Now Yumi has it. Oh, does she? I don't know, poor thing. That's the exact thing. And she doesn't like when I tell her to take vitamins. Yeah, but that, you know, you live together, you drink after one another, you suck face.

I just like, I'll leave like emergency here. They're like laying around. Oh, did I leave that there? Oops, that's already dissolved in the water even. And it's going down your gullet. Chuck. Yes. Did you know that I am a certified scuba diver?

I sure did. Oh yeah, you did. I thought for sure you were going to be like, no, I didn't. No, we've talked about this. Yeah, and we've even scuba dived together, haven't we? That's right. That was the first time I heard about it.

I'm not the sharpest tack in the package. That's all right. But I say that to tell you that I was certified at a place called Islamowaris off the coast of Cozumel, which just so happens to also be the home of the second largest barrier reef. Oh, really? Known to man.

What's it called? Known to humans. I don't know. It is not called anything because there's the Great Barrier Reef and then there's all the other reefs. All the other ones. But this is the second largest, which is pretty big

because there's a lot of barrier reefs. There's a lot of coral reefs in the world. But after reading this article, I found that there is a lot about coral reefs that I didn't know. Fortunately, we had Jennifer Horton, who I'm sure you'll remember, worked at the site for a while.

Yeah, she's a great writer. We had her to explain it to us and I get coral reefs now. In fact, Jennifer has written many of the animal-related podcasts that we've done. Octopi, Bison, I think, maybe? Did you write that one? Probably.

She wrote a lot of the animal stuff. Animal Migration? Yeah. Lots of good ones. I miss you, Jennifer. Hope you're well. If you listen. I wonder.

Who are they? I don't remember those guys. I hated those two. All right, coral reefs. This was all new to me. The rainforest of the sea? Of the equatorial seas. Home to about 25% of all fish species?

Yeah. That's crazy. In fact, the Great Barrier Reef has more kinds of coral on one single little outcropping of it. Then you'll find in the entire tropical area of the Atlantic Ocean. Wow.

That's amazing. I don't know why I just said that there. The Aussies are gonna be so stoked with this podcast. Probably. Anytime they can claim to something like that, they're just like, yeah. Yeah.

Drink. Exactly. They're gonna go pour beer on the Great Barrier Reef. It's the coral reefs are very beneficial to humans in a number of ways. Yeah. Economically. Sure, because there's a lot of sea life

and thus people fishing for shrimp and lobster and things like that. Right, and all sorts of weird ways which we'll get to later. Yeah. They also protect the beach from erosion. They act as natural buffers from huge waves, wave action. That's right.

These little tiny guys. Yeah, well, let's talk about that because when you think of coral, you think of huge Great Barrier Reef. It's enormous. It's like, I think there's 18,000 miles. Total. Of coral face.

Wow. Face. That is crazy. On the Great Barrier Reef. Actually, an individual coral called a polyp is about three millimeters long. Yeah. That's small.

Super tiny. For those of you in America. They are, well, science got it wrong early on. We should go ahead and say that they, at one point, fairly understandably thought that it might be plant life. Right. Because it sort of looks like it. Yeah, like the coral fan.

Yeah. It's a bunch of those little three millimeter corals building up into a fan. Yeah, it looks like a plant. That looks like a plant, yeah. So they got it wrong and they're actually, not only are they real living little sea creatures, but they're carnivores.

Yeah. Which is, you know, you would never think about that. No, but they're in the Phylum Cynidaria. Nidaria. Why would they put the sea there? It's silent, man. You know. I appreciate a silent letter.

I'm smarter than my pronunciations would suggest. I started looking this up because I feel like an idiot a lot of times. So they're in the Phylum Cynidaria, which means that they have stinging cells, barbed stinging cells called nematocysts. That's right. So they use this to capture their prey,

but the prey kind of has to come to them because they're also sessile, which means they're fixed to a certain spot. Yeah, sessile. Seriously? Yeah. So it is understandable also that they got it wrong because coral has a unique property.

It is almost half plant because there's this algae in the cells. I want to pronounce it. Okay, go ahead. It's called Zuzanthole. You're right. Very nice. It starts with a Z and there's an X in there somewhere.

Yeah, and then it ends in a E. So what happens with, there's a very mutually beneficial relationship between the algae and the polyp. They do a little exchange, the polyp itself will supply, I'm sorry, the algae will undertake photosynthesis. Yes, as algae tends to do. As algae will do.

And it will say, hey, Mr. Polyp, why don't you take all this stuff that I've made within your cell walls and convert it to proteins and fats? It poops out like amino acids for the polyp. And in return, why don't you give me a nice shelter and you can also produce some carbon and nitrates and phosphate that I need to produce the photosynthesis to give you the proteins and fats that you need.

So that's what you might call a symbiotic relationship. Exactly. One's helping the other. And you can make the case that the coral is getting the better end of the deal because the coral gets about 90% of the energy produced through photosynthesis by the Zuzanthole, right? Yeah.

But that also makes the coral more dependent on the Zuzanthole. True. And the Zuzanthole is an algae of very little needs. It's not needy, it's not grabby. It's not gonna call you up every Friday not wondering what you're doing and why you aren't here. Are you talking about me?

No, no, no. Jerry, you like that one. So the symbiotic relationship between the Zuzanthole and the coral polyps also produce coral reefs. The polyps use some of that energy, some of that amino acid to create something called calcium carbonate. And that's the hard stuff, right?

That's limestone, my friend. Boom. Yeah, they produce limestone out of their buttocks to create a cup, a little shelter for the polyp to stay in. And since the algae stays in the polyp, it creates a shelter for both, right? Yeah. And this limestone secretion can keep building

and building and building. Because again, coral stays in the same place, they're Cecil. That's right. And as long as they're still secreting limestone, the limestone structure they build will just keep getting bigger and bigger eventually. Love it.

That's just one, three millimeter long coral. Yes. What you wanna do is get thousands together. Strength in numbers. Yeah, then you have a coral fan. Yeah, or a colony. Yes. And then those colonies will eventually meet up

with other colonies and say, hey, you guys interested in forming a wreath? Because we're pretty indestructible, although that's not quite true. We're more indestructible if we all hook up, my brothers. Like you said, strength in numbers. Yes. And when they hook up, their limestone secretions

can start to join together forming a wreath. But they're also connected by a thin piece of tissue. You got this one? Call day. Cena sarc. That's what I was gonna go for. I was just tired of humiliating myself for this episode. I would have called it a cone of sarc.

So I was way off. I'm really glad to look that one up. It's a sealicanth. Yeah, it's a cena sarc. And that's how the coral themselves are, through limestone secretions and through this tissue called the cena sarc, they're connected. Right, but how would they grow?

Well, there's two ways, man. Okay. They can reproduce. Yeah, a couple of ways though, right? Asexually or asexually. I know which one I'd choose, asexual. Yeah. Because your cloning, that's pretty remarkable.

Yeah. Anyone can just get together and mate. Right, sexually it's like, here's some sperm. And in other words, like here's some eggs. And then they get together and then it's just, there's not much to it. All right, asexually though, they actually do divide and produce identical clones of themselves.

And that's one way they can grow. And the other way is just to keep pooping out limestone. Yeah. And that will connect with each other and it just forms a big, oh, yummy wreath. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to HeyDude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast

and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. This is not a fast process, though. Like if there's a couple of chorals that are a few inches away, say three inches away. Yeah. And they're like, I would like to hook my senesark up to your senesark

and let's poop some limestone on it together and get this reef going. That's beautiful. It's going to take them about a year to get together. Can you imagine how frustrating that is? To be three inches away and be like, I'd really like to consummate this. Right. I'll see you next June. I'm not convinced that choral can experience frustration.

You don't think so? I don't. I think that's all they experience. Nothing but frustration. Either they're like really, really patient. But that three inches of growth a year has to take place under very specific conditions. Remember we said that coral reefs are in equatorial waters?

Yeah. Not the coral themselves, but the zoo's anthilley are actually very fickle and picky little organisms. And they like specific conditions. And as long as the conditions are right for them, then the coral can grow. Because remember, the coral are dependent on the zoo's anthilley to produce the calcium carbonate. That's right.

So what are the conditions, Chuckers? Well, you said equatorial, specifically 30 degrees north or south, if you have ever dived in the Bahamas and said, no, that's 32 degrees north. And they have plenty there. It's because the warm gulf waters spitting out toward the Bahamas, which is one reason the Bahamas is such a popular spot, I would imagine. Yes. I've never been there, you?

No. My folks drove my car back from the Bahamas, though, once. You had a car in the Bahamas? You're supposed to say you're kidding. You're kidding? I must be. The Bahamas are islands. So it's a dead milkman song.

It's Bitchin' Camaro. Oh, that's from Bitchin' Camaro? Yeah, it's the beginning. Jeez, I'm a dummy. That's all right, Chuck. I'm not hip. I'm not hippy either, Chuck. Sunlight is another thing that they need because, and it makes sense,

if you're going to undertake photosynthesis, you need sun. So if the water is rich in nutrients, believe it or not, that's not great for them. No, because if you've ever looked through, if you've ever been under water and seen like a lot of plankton everywhere, it filters the sunlight, it's dappled. That's right. And also, as we learn later, the more nutrients there are, the more it will attract competition for those nutrients, and that's not good for them either. No, they don't like competition.

Basically, they're just little prima donnas, as these anthillae are. So the water, since you're near the equator, should be between 73.4 and 84.2 degrees Fahrenheit? Yeah. And ultimately, if you put all these factors together, ample light, clear water, and between 73 and 82, or 23 Celsius and 29 Celsius, you can get up to about 10 centimeters or 3.9 inches of growth in a year. Twice as much on sunny days. Yes.

Which is remarkable. But they're still not going to exceed that 3.9 inches, most likely. No, because it's not going to be sunny all the time. But what's cool, then, is if you think, well, that's crazy. There's some coral that, I've seen coral reefs, and they're big. And if it takes a year to grow about 3.9 inches, say, horizontally or vertically, maybe even diagonally, if it was like a crazy year for them. It must take thousands of years for coral reefs to build up.

You would be right, my friend, which is why scientists very affectionately consider coral reefs the old growth forests of the sea. Because when you're looking at coral reefs, you're looking at something thousands, if not tens of thousands of years old. Which is why. My question is, how long does the coral live? So one thing I didn't get out of this article, did you? Oh, how each individual coral, each polyp?

Right. Boy, I don't know. Are their cubs, the protective cubs that they secrete, are they inhabited by successive generations, their clones, maybe? My guess, and I'm guessing here, is that there are so many hundreds of thousands and millions of these packs so tightly together that if one of the little guys dies, it ain't no big thing. Because he's surrounded by his living brothers and sisters.

Gotcha. But I don't know how long each one lives, though. That's a good question. I don't know. Coral sand, if you look at the reef and you think, hey, coral is obviously the skeleton here of this great reef, it's not just the coral. Coral sand, from what I understand, is little remnants, tiny pieces of coral that are either eaten and pooped out, or just chipped away because of erosion and waves crashing and

bad weather and stuff like that. Right. Is that right? Yeah. That doesn't necessarily go anywhere, it can fill in gaps or holes, and then, as luck would have it, there is a type of algae called Coraline algae that goes and covers it up, and the structure of the algae acts as like an adhesive that glues the coral sand. So basically, it's like this self-sustaining repair process that's always going on.

That's awesome. So with the coral and the coral sand, certain types of fish chew the coral into coral sand, the sand just drifts into little pockets where it gets caught, and the algae lays over it. Bam. Strong coral. Well, and coral sand is mined, which is one of the threats to reefs because they use it for bricks and cement and road fill.

So if you're mining the coral sand, there's not going to be that natural spackle to fill in the holes, and thus the reef is jeopardized. Which is just one of many ways that reefs are in jeopardy. Apparently, one estimate is that 40% of the world's reefs could be gone in the next few decades. That's scary. It is. Very sad.

I hope you're scared. I am scared. This is where I got a little confused was, well, let's talk about the kinds of reefs because I'm not confused about that. There are basically three categories depending where they form. The fringing reef, it's most common, it's directly from the shore, and they form a border projecting out to the sea. Yeah, it's kind of like if you go to like Marblehead in Ohio, there's a lighthouse.

I think it's limestone, it's like it just comes right off of the land. I don't understand how that would be because it's in Lake Erie, which is not freshwater, but who knows. It's very similar to that. It's like just a rocky projection jutting out from the land, but it's a coral reef. Or if it were a coral reef, that's a fringing reef. Interesting. Reef attached to land.

Very reef, very similar to the fringing reef, but it has a gap of water between the land and the reef. Is that correct? Yeah. And then my favorite, of course, the atoll, which is when at one point there was an island or volcano and it sunk, but you still have the circular reef with, I guess, like a lagoon or something. But the reef keeps building, but the mountain is now submerged.

Pretty cool. Yeah. So you got your three types, fringing, barrier, and atoll. Right. The zones is where I get a little confused. So all of these reefs are kind of broken down into zones. Like you remember the biospeleology? How could I forget?

Okay. So you've got like the different zones. Of the cave. Sure. This is very similar to that. You've got the back of the reef and the back is the side closest to shore. I think that's what confused me, and then I just never looked back. Yeah, it is a little confusing, but it's from the viewpoint of the sea.

That's right. So you've got, just imagine like a line and then a bump and then another line, and that's our reef, right? Okay. On the shore side of the bump, that's the back of the reef, and this is actually where the most life is. The flat zone. Yeah.

Sometimes it's left high and dry by low tide, but most times it's just this little shallow area that's got tons of sunlight, so there's tons of plankton, which means there's tons of fish, there's a feeding frenzy, there's diurnal temperature changes. It's just very pretty. It's what most people think of when they think about diving on a coral reef, right? Close. Safe. Then that bump, that's the ridge or the crest, okay?

That part, the crest is always exposed at low tide, and it may be exposed even at high tide sometimes depending on how big, but it's the tallest point. It also serves as the wave break for that function of reefs that protect the land. Okay. Sure. This is what the waves smack into. So it's going to be more easily eroded and probably have more of that natural speckle, right?

Yes. That was it, Coraline algae? Probably. Is that what it's called? Coraline, yes. Okay. Or Coraline, whichever, however you want to say it, Chuck, I'm not going to stress you out.

All right. Then there's the four reef, that's the ocean side, the sea side. In that part of the four reef on the other side of the crest, the sea side of the crest, there's the buttress zone, which is awesome if you ask me. That's where you're going to find, if you're shark hunting, that's where you're going to find sharks and barracuda and interesting things like that, right? But does it buttress, is that why they call it the buttress zone? So the buttress, consider a buttress is just like a jutting projection of coral limestone,

right? Just jutting out. And then in between these projections are little channels, holes that can go all the way through. I'm not quite sure what the physics are of it, but basically, once a wave goes through this coral reef and hits shore and then gets drawn back out to sea, these channels funnel these spent waves back out to sea and by funneling them, it gives them more energy. So then they crash into oncoming waves, which reduces the oncoming waves velocity.

So all this is in an attempt, naturally, to combat the erosion of pounding waves? Yes. Awesome. Yeah, it's pretty cool. It's also a really excellent shelter for little fishies and things like that that want to go into the channel. So Josh, we've talked about the Great Balearia Reef here and there, but we should give it its proper due as the largest living structure on the planet, seen from outer space.

Everyone loves to throw that back around. Yeah. You can see it from outer space. And that made me look something up, Chuck. It's the largest living structure. Okay, so if a coral reef is in organisms, do you know what the second largest living organism is? It's a fungus in Oregon named Amaryllae oiste, 8,600 years old, takes up four square miles

or 10 square kilometers, single organism. Where is it? Oregon. Oh, Oregon. Yeah. Wow. It's at our friend Van Nostrand's house. So it's a big mushroom?

Yeah. Isn't that gross? That is gross. So the Great Balearia Reef, we're talking 1,429 miles or 2,300 clicks and it is not a single reef. It's about 3,000. I got 2,900, so I'm not sure if that number had declined since this was written or not. But Jennifer points out, and like you pointed out earlier, the full edge of the reef is

about 18,500 miles. So she says, if anyone's ever told you they've dived the entire Great Balearia Reef, they're dirty liars. Yeah. She said they're lying. Because there's no way you couldn't do it in a lifetime, she said. I wonder if somebody told her that and she inserted it in the article. I don't know.

It's definitely an accusation. It is. It's just a weird sentence. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

You'll leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough

or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one.

Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Uh, it's one of the seven natural wonders of the world. More than 400 coral species, 2000 fish species, 4,000 mollusks and six of the seven sea turtle species. All right there for the, for the Oogling. Nice. And the Oogling. Nice. Um, the, like you said, the Australians are going to be proud of this and they should

be. Of course. Uh, back in 1975, apparently it was in some jeopardy and the Australians moved to protect it as a national marine park, um, and that basically ensured its survival. Sure. Um, it's still, you know, kind of in rough shape here or there. Is it? As I understand, but, um, six years after that, so let's see, that's a 1981, it became

a World Heritage Site, um, and 1% of the 18 and a half thousand square miles or 18 and a half thousand linear miles, right, um, are open to the public except for that 1%. So just 1% is dedicated to research only? Just research. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Not very much. I guess that's all they need.

Bonafide scientists to dive that part. Uh, the rest of it, Jennifer points out is divided into national park zones, which is where you can go recreate and learn some things. Yeah. And then the rest of it is, uh, general use, which means commercial fishing, which, uh, I guess there's no better time to get into the threats than right now. Yes. Um, there are some coral reefs in trouble.

Um, the gray barrier reef, like I said, it's pretty well protected, but say if you look at some of the, uh, reefs in the Philippines, 70% have been destroyed and 5%, just 5% are in good condition these days. Um, 10% of the world's reefs are now beyond recovery, not just because of human causes, because of natural causes as well, because everything exists on a life cycle here on earth. Yeah. Um, 30% may die in the next 10 to 20 years.

So what are some of the natural threats are obviously, uh, harsh weather, like hurricanes. Yeah. Um, El Nino, a weird weather pattern. It's going to increase temperatures, mess with the salinity, uh, a lot more rainfall. So an El Nino season could, can do some serious damage. Yeah. Uh, bleaching, coral bleaching, when they experience as little as like one degree of degree rise in temperature, the algae will be ejected basically from the coral.

No. The algae takes off. Oh, it leaves? Yeah. It's like, see you in hell, coral. There's a fine line between ejection and, and self-leaving. There's a chicken and egg thing. Maybe.

You think? Yeah. So the algae gets the heck out of dodge, turns the coral white. And if you Google pictures, you can see a lovely coral with like white patches here and there. Mm hmm. And it's ejected out. Yup.

And if, if this keeps up long enough, the coral dies because again, coral has a symbiotic relationship where it's dependent on the Zuzanthinese algae. And if the Zuzanthinese leaves, then the coral dies. Very sad. Um, and like you said, it was just a, as much as a one degree temperature increase, right? Yeah. That's not much. There's also predators.

There's things that eat, um, the coral, the polyps themselves, crabs, worms, snails, barnacles, parrotfish. Yeah. Those are really pretty. Can't do anything about that pal. That's nature at work. Yeah. But there are things we can do such as not using dynamite when we fish on coral reefs.

It's a pretty good start. Yeah. I would say so. There's 40 countries in the world, over 40 countries in the world that allow blast fishing. People using explosives that they drop onto the reef to stun the fish so they can just swoop them up with the net and, um, basically, gaffal like a slack jawed yokel wearing nothing but overalls while they just bring their nets in. That's right.

If they just threw dynamite in the water to stun fish, well, the dynamite also has a deletrious impact on, uh, the reef structure as well. You're going to go to the grave with that one, aren't you? I saw on Facebook you, uh, put the apostrophe in y'all after the A again. I mix it up. You know what's weird is the iPhone corrects it incorrectly. Oh, really? Yeah.

Well, they don't know y'all. They're from California. I've always done Y apostrophe A-L-L. That's correct. You all. Y'all. No. See, someone pointed out to me on email that it was in fact YA apostrophe L-L.

No. It's you all. So I've been doing it right the whole time. No, you were doing it YA apostrophe L-L. Because someone told me to change it. You can't just listen to any Schmohu emails. Our fans have a deleterious effect on me. Deletrious.

Do you want to look it up right now? Let's talk about blast fishing again. Okay. Our cyanide fishing, which is the ugly stepsister of blast fishing, which is dumping cyanide onto reefs to kill fish. Again, you have to wear nothing but overalls. No shirt. Unbelievable.

No shoes. Nothing. No service. Overfishing period has got a negative effect, obviously. Yeah, because you're basically affecting the food chain. You're like, oh, we like these guys because they're tasty and I'm sure they won't be missed. Whenever you take any key species out of an ecosystem, you're in trouble. No good.

There's also a runoff. It's a big one because, remember, they like clear light, the algae do, or clear water. And when the water's not clear, they shrivel up because they need sunlight for photosynthesis. Yeah, the pollutants, I thought it was going to be pollutants because just pollutants are bad, which they are, but really the reason is pollutants and sewage actually increase the nutrients. So that attracts harmful algae and competition and that's no good. And then we already talked about the mining.

So what can we do, Chuck? We've got a few things we can do. You can adopt a reef. You can. Tons of organizations will let you do that. In fact, if you want to go to adopt.nature.org slash coral reef, you can adopt a reef in the Bahamas, Dominican Republic, Puao, and Papua New Guinea. Nice.

Just like that. Yeah, you can funnel money to an organization that will take care of that reef. Exactly. And that's just one. I think you can do it through all kinds of places. Didn't you say that? Yeah, you can get your congressperson to lobby for stricter oversight of fishing methods. You can boycott products from countries that allow blast fishing or cyanide fishing, really

put the squeeze on the common man in the other country, make him go to his congressperson. You can not chip off bits of the coral when you scuba dive because it's just so pretty that you want to take it home. Yeah, that's a big one. Give it to your daughter. Yeah. Not good. There's a lot of stuff you can do that you probably should do if you want to save the

coral reefs. That's right. I got nothing else. Why would you save them? Do you say if you don't care about snorkeling or anything like that? Well, my friend, if you care about the economy, you will want to save coral reefs because they are valuable. The total value of the asset that is the reef systems in Florida.

Oh, in Florida alone? In Florida, $8.5 billion when you take into account not just tourism, which is a big part of it, but also the estimated 177,000 jobs that all the industries surrounding it create. That's just Florida worldwide just from tourism and recreation. Just tourism and recreation that reefs bring in $9.6 billion annually. If you like money, then you should support coral reefs. 12 to 15% of Bolivia's GDP is created by reefs. Wow.

Isn't that crazy? That is crazy. Yeah. If you don't have a heart about money, it makes you likey, then that should get you going on saving coral reefs as well. That's right. If you want to learn more about coral reefs, including seeing a diagram of where the fore and the back of the reef is, you can type in coral reefs in the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com.

It'll bring up this great article by Jennifer Horton. Since I said Jennifer Horton, it's time now for Listener Mail. All right. Listener Mail. Okay. All right. I'm going to call this a good cause from a good person. Hello, SYSK team.

I wanted to take a minute and thank you for helping me in a really big way. I've been working alone as a volunteer in Malawi, south of Tanzania. Malawi. Malawi. I've been a volunteer since September of 2009, and I happily passed the time listening to your show during my super long, super awesome minibus rides. I am building a library in a small village, and a big part of my library is an audio-video collection that I've been putting together for the past few years.

Many of the people in the village are illiterate, so a library full of books just wouldn't do the many good. So I started to think of ways I could include everyone in a learning activity. My answer was to incorporate documentaries and podcasts on a variety of subjects. So basically, we will choose a topic for the week and use the podcasts as a way of getting people interested, then direct them to read articles and books on the topic, or watch documentaries and have some group discussions. Wow.

Pretty cool. I really believe in the beauty of being inquisitive and interested in life, and videos and podcasts really help immerse people in new subjects. This is the first library of its kind in the country. Wow. And I'm really hopeful that it helps to open the world up to people who are so often cut off, fingers crossed, and that is from Diane Bowles, the founder of The Future Found. And if you want to check out Diane's awesome work she's doing, you can go to thefuturefound.org.

Excellent, Chuck. Very cool. That's Diane. Diane. In Malawi. Yeah. Building the only library of its kind in the country. That is so cool.

Thank you very much, Diane, for doing that. What do you want to hear? You want to hear of other people making a difference in the world? We always love that. Yeah. You're a sap for that kind of thing. Or some good harrowing scuba diving stories. One or the other.

Okay. So that's a great one, Chuck. Either doing good in the world or not doing anything whatsoever. Right. That could be directed to Chuck and I via Twitter at S-Y-S-K podcast. That's our Twitter handle on facebook.com, if you go to Stuff You Should Know's page, that's that. And you can also email us directly.

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