Good News: We’re learning how to save the coral reefs

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Jordan Heath-Rawlings Look, if I really wanted to bum you out with climate clips to start today’s episode, I could shoot, we could do that every week here at The Big Story if we wanted to. And sometimes there’s no choice but to report increasingly grim news and that can feel relentless like we’re making no progress at all. But that’s just not true. You might even already know some of the big positive headlines that electric vehicles are taking over much faster than initially predicted that China and the United States are in a race to clean energy, changing the stakes for the rest of the world, and that investments everywhere in clean technology are surging as it becomes clear that’s where the future’s going, and more importantly, that’s where the money is. But I find it’s the little things that can really give you hope, that can show you the progress that we’re making that never really makes those big headlines, but happens every day around the world. Take coral for instance, you’ve heard some bad stuff probably that across the world it’s vanishing and it is, but it’s likely not vanishing forever because we’ve been working for decades now to find ways to preserve coral as well as other critical parts of other ecosystems, to learn how to cultivate them and to eventually reintroduce them to the wild. And with Coral this year, well, to put it simply, it kind of worked. I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. This is Good News Week on The Big Story where we give you some nice things to end your year with. Brent Foster is an independent science writer. He reported on the science of cryo-preserved corals for Hakai Magazine. Hello, Brent.

Brent Foster: Hello. Jordan This is a good news week that we are trying to do here. And I know this is a good news story, but we do need to establish some context around coral reefs around the world. How dire is the situation for them and just in general, how fast are we losing them and why?

Brent Foster: Sure. I mean, that’s an excellent question and to be frank, the situation is pretty grim for corals unfortunately. So I was doing some digging and in the last 60, 70 years we’ve lost about half of the corals worldwide. So substantial loss there. And then even in the last decade that’s kind of accelerated a little bit more. So we’ve lost around 14 or 15% on top of that. So it’s not looking great. And the biggest reason for that is thought to be environmental stresses. So increased ocean temperatures, higher ocean acidity and this metric that maybe some people aren’t as familiar with, but it’s called alga overload, and that probably ties back to the increased ocean temperatures where basically you have these algae that outcompeting the rest of the life in the ocean. And so all of those are providing quite a bit of stress on the corals and it’s making it so that they’re kind of in dire straits right now.

Jordan: I didn’t realize that this had been going on for 60 or 70 years, I confess. I thought it was a pretty recent phenomenon.

Brent Foster: So I mean, that’s interesting you say that because we started noticing it pretty recently and then we started doing something about it recently, but it’s kind of been an ongoing trend for quite a while now.

Jordan: So amid these dire straits, the reason we’re talking to you is there has been, I guess something of a breakthrough and we’ll kind of get into explaining how that happens. But first, what has Aura NIDA done?

Brent Foster: Sure. So NIDA’s Group in Taiwan, they’re cryo biologists. So what they’re doing is they’re taking coral larvae and they’re cryo preserving or they’re basically freezing these biological samples, storing them, and then kind of testing out different methods of the freezing and the thawing in an effort to preserve coral biological material. So they work with larvae. Some other groups will work with eggs and sperm. And what done specifically with this study that I reported on, she successfully froze and thawed coral larvae and then got them to grow up to be an adult. Now that’s kind of a big deal because before her, the coral tend to die pretty quickly after the cryopreservation, and so it’s not a very useful conservation tool if they don’t survive. And so that’s why I reported on it. It was a pretty big breakthrough in that these coral are starting to grow up. It’s just one step closer to having a viable tool to use. Now it’s interesting, they report a survival rate that might sound kind of low. She only got 11% of her coral to survive. And like I said, that sounds low, but when you consider that in the wild, only about 5% of coral larvae will grow up to be adults. It’s actually really promising to get that 11% in the lab after the stress of cryo-preservation.

Jordan: I’m going to ask what might seem a simple question, but I think some of our listeners maybe could use it, is just what is a coral really?

Brent Foster: So corals belong to a group, they’re called the NI Nigerians. So if you’ve ever seen the show Finding Nemo, you have Cies and they’re closely related to corals. And so corals are kind of like a C enemy that has a skeleton around it. So they have some soft parts, but then they have this protective skeleton that they form around themselves that offers some protection. It offers a home for other fish and wildlife in the ocean, and they’re generally colonial animals. And so you’ll have different, they’re called polyps. So polyps are basically the soft parts of the animal that are sticking out. They have the waving tend toles in the ocean, and then they’ll form this colonial group that basically they share resources amongst each other and then they’ll share this structure and they’ll form these really complex, beautiful structures that make up the coral reefs themselves. They’re hard, they’re large, they’re colorful. When you think of a coral reef and you think of the color in the coral reef, you’re probably thinking of corals.

Jordan: How long have we been freezing coral in an attempt to figure out how to preserve them or bring them back? When did we start doing this?

Brent Foster: So I’m going to back up just a little bit because we’ve been cryo preserving biological material for quite a bit now. We’ve only started doing it with corals in the last early two thousands. So the last 20 years or so, that’s right around the time when people started recognizing that, Hey, there’s this problem going on with our coral reefs. And I suspect that’s probably what spawned this interest in trying to cryopreserve them. How

Jordan: Do you, and I know this is probably a super complicated answer that I’m asking you to simplify, but can you explain the process of freezing and thawing and why I guess it’s been so difficult that this constitutes a breakthrough? What have we been trying to do with these coral?

Brent Foster: Sure. So the first part of that question, the process itself, it can vary. There are lots of different ways. So I’ll describe what was described in this paper that came out. If you had to divide it, there’s kind of three basic steps. Essentially you have a preparation step, the actual freezing step and the thong step. But before I get into those steps, I guess the whole idea with developing these protocols, when you freeze a biological sample, the ice that’s contained in that sample, and most animals today are made up of quite a bit of water, that water will freeze. And when it freezes, it forms its crystals and crystals are sharp, and cells don’t like sharp things because it’ll poke through the membranes and it’ll make all of their contents inside ooze out. It’s a big stressor. It can kill the cells. And so the idea with developing these protocols is to minimize the formation of those ice crystals in a way that the animal survives the freezing and thawing. Otherwise, it’s not very useful. I talked about those three steps. You have the preparation step, which is basically to replace all of the water inside of the cell with an antifreeze. The cryo biologists might call it like a cryoprotectant, literally something that protects against freezing, so antifreeze and that can actually be quite toxic to the cells. So there’s this troubleshooting step of trying to figure out how can I minimize the toxicity of this antifreeze while maximizing the protection that it offers against ice crystals? Right? So that’s the first step. Basically what NIDA did, she washed her coral larvae into this antifreeze, and then you have the freezing step where you take the coral and then you dip it into liquid nitrogen. And what that does is it pretty much freezes the animal almost instantly. It’s the same sort of thing that you might see in restaurants when they make their own ice cream or something like that, right? And then you’d have the thawing step, which can happen a couple of different ways if you don’t have a lot of money. Some groups would actually bathe their samples in this warm water, which will cool them slower, but that can be a little problematic. If they have more money, then they have a high powered laser that will heat the sample up much faster. And generally that’s preferred.

Jordan: Is that different from how we’ve done it in the past? I’m trying to get a handle on why this attempt has been so successful, at least so far.

Brent Foster: In a broad sense, that’s the process that everyone’s using now, what types of chemicals the people might be using for their antifreeze that can differ from group to group as they’re trying to figure out what works best, what combination works best? There are a couple of little tricks that NTA actually implemented. So in the antifreeze itself, I talked about how it helps prevent the ice crystals from forming, but she actually added gold nanoparticles into the antifreeze. And what that does is when you’re thawing the animal after it’s frozen, it’ll help the animal to evenly. And if that’s a little hard to understand, gold nanoparticles sound a little bit like it’s a bling operation. What those gold nanoparticles actually does, if you think about when you prepare food and when you’re camping and like a tinfoil dinner, you have your potatoes, you have your meat and all of that, you wrap it up in tinfoil, you shove it into the fire pit, that tinfoil will help distribute that heat evenly across your food so that all of that heats evenly. That’s essentially what the gold nanoparticles are doing for the coral that she’s freezing.

Jordan: And so what physically happens to the coral as it’s thought and afterwards? What are groups watching for? What does it look like when it succeeds?

Brent Foster: Yeah, so it depends on the material you’re using. Some people might try freezing eggs and sperm with that, you have the complication of you actually have to try to fertilize the egg with the sperm and hope that both the egg and the sperm made it through the crop preservation process. So that’s a little tricky that some people are working on. But NIDA’s group is working on the larvae itself. So when she has the larvae before she even freezes it, she checks to make sure it’s swimming. And that’s kind of a general indicator of this looks like a healthy larvae. It’s already healthy. We’re not starting with something that’s sick. She’ll go through that cryo-preservation with the antifreeze, the freezing and the thawing. And then once the larvae is thawed, she’ll check to see if it’s swimming again. If it is swimming, then she’ll observe it for a day or two and within a day or two, if it’s healthy, it’ll settle in the dish that she has. And so that just means that it’ll stop swimming, it’ll settle, and then it’ll start transitioning into its next part in the lifecycle.

Jordan: Yeah, explain how that works and where we ultimately want this to go.

Brent Foster: So the larvae itself, it basically just looks like a little swimming dot. They’re kind of cute when you see them swimming around, but there’s not a whole lot to see there. When they swim, they’re rod shaped, they’ll settle, they’ll kind of settle into this round ball, and then as they begin transitioning from larvae to juvenile to adult, they’ll form that ball and they’ll start forming that hard skeleton that I mentioned earlier. And then basically they’ll just grow from there and eventually they’ll reach a certain size, they’re considered adults, and if they’re healthy, then they’ll start producing their own offspring.

Jordan: That’s not where we’re at yet though. That’s where we’re going.

Brent Foster: That’s not where we’re at yet. So what Narita did is she managed to get her coral to grow up to what’s considered an adult size. Now, there are a couple of limitations there, but I mean the big breakthrough is they’ve survived longer than anyone else has been able to get them to survive. Now she still hasn’t been able to get them to produce offspring, so that would be one of the next steps. That survival rate is still kind of low, 11% compared to the wild is high, but in terms of feasible conservation thing, you’re losing nine out of 10 of your larvae that’s quite low. And so those are kind of two big steps that would have to happen for this technology to get to the point where we could say, yes, this is a viable one-stop shop for conservation.

Jordan: If that happens, and I realize it might not happen just yet, but is the goal then to just go to places where the coral once were and reintroduce them to the wild are I guess the conditions in the oceans now such that they might not survive because that’s what killed the original coral?

Brent Foster: Yeah, so I mean, those are two excellent questions. So I think of it a little bit like this. So I’m going to go off on a little tangent here, but I’ll get to the question that you asked there. So I think of it like if say you had an illness or a sickness or you got into a car accident and you needed an organ transplant, we have that technology and that technology will save your life, and we’re really grateful for that technology when it’s working. But really the best case scenario is to prevent the sickness or the accident if you’re able to. And then if you were to expand that out to the human race as a whole, organ transplants aren’t going to be enough to save the human race no matter however you slice that, and I kind of picture this coral cryo-preservation in a similar light. It’s a very useful tool that can be helpful in helping sick corals kind of get over that hurdle or that hump. But it’s not going to be an end all way of preserving or conserving corals, in my opinion. I think most people would probably agree with that. So the end goal here is while we’re developing this technology, if we get to a point where we lose corals, the end goal here is we will still have the material that if we can ever rectify that to the point where the oceans are healthy for new corals, then we have that material. It’s not lost. Kind of like a Noah’s a or say you have a sick coral reef. You could do some transplanting things to help try and supplement that, but then you would want a healthy coral that you’re transplanting. You wouldn’t want to transplant a sick coral the same way. You wouldn’t want to have a sick organ go to someone else who’s already sick. So to that end, NIDA’s advisor, cha and Lynn, when I was talking to him, he was talking about how he’s trying to develop these coral hospitals where you could either take a sick coral from the ocean and bring it into the hospital or say these corals that are recovering from the stress of cryo-preservation. You have these hospitals set up where you have these ICUs where you can take care nurse these corals back to health, help ’em get to a point where they’re healthy, move them through different wards until they get to the point where they’re now healthy enough to be transplanted back either onto the reef where they were or to restore a place where there’s no longer a reef.

Jordan: What are the broader implications lastly of this technology for preservation or reclamation or just increasing the diversity of biology or protecting the diversity that we have?

Brent Foster: So I don’t have the statistics pulled up here in front of me, and I guess I could do a little digging, but I don’t think it’s necessary because it’s pretty well known that biodiversity across the globe is decreasing, and that’s problematic because generally the more biodiverse and ecosystem is, that’s one of the main measures of how healthy that ecosystem is. And so cryo-preservation then offers a tool to preserve genetic material that is that biodiversity to the point where hopefully as the technology continues to get better, it could be used in a way to restore that biodiversity and therefore restore ecosystems, maybe not necessarily to their previous health, but to help them recover.

Jordan: We just have to hold up our end of the bargain and not let them get worse while these things are frozen.

Brent Foster: I mean, I think that would be the optimal thing. Like I said, I mean preventing the sickness and the illness and the unhealthy ecosystem, that’s always a better option if you can, but we have a tool now. It’s looking promising. Everyone I’ve talked to, no one has rose cudd glasses, right? Everyone is always quick to say, there’s so much more that needs to be done before this can be like a viable tool. But at the same time, everyone I’ve talked to has been super excited about these kind of incremental breakthroughs. It’s been slow, it’s been a little agonizing. It’s been stressful, I’m sure for the people who are doing this, but everyone is excited with each incremental change, and that’s just how science works, right? You have one breakthrough at a time, and sometimes they might seem awfully small from one person’s perspective, but for the person who’s been working on it for 20 or 30 years, it can be huge. So everyone’s pointing out, we have a lot of work to do, but this is exciting and it’s fun to see that excitement and see them talk about it.

Jordan: Brent, thank you so much for this.

Brent Foster: Thank yo

Jordan: Brent Foster writing in Haki Magazine. That was good. Newsweek here on The Big Story. I hope you had as much fun listening as we did, making it. I hope you feel a little bit better about the state of the world as you head into your holidays and take a break and come back refreshed, ready for more bad news in the new year. We can always hope not. I’m just mentally preparing you. You can find The Big Story as always on Twitter at The Big Story Fpn. If you want to tell us what you thought of this week or any other week, you can hit us up via email at hello at The Big Story podcast.ca or just call us and leave a voicemail. 4 1 6 9 3 5 5 9 3 5. Joseph Fish is the lead producer of The Big Story. Robyn Simon is also a producer on the show. Stefanie Phillips is our showrunner. Mary Jubran is our digital editor. Diana Keay is our manager of business development. Sound design for The Big Story is handled by a whole crew of talented folks, Ryan Clark, Mark Angly, Robin Edgar, Christian Prodhome, and many others who step in from time to time. We appreciate every one of them. Most of all, we appreciate you for listening to this show and putting up with us and making this show a success as it heads into what will be it’s sixth year next year, and I cannot believe that either. I’m your host and executive producer, Jordan Heath Rawlings. Thank you so much for listening in 2024. We have a few treats, our favourite episodes in the feed for you next week. And as I mentioned, we’ll be back with fresh episodes starting January 2nd. We’ll talk then.