the corals are the the trees of the
forest if you don’t have trees you don’t
have a force if you don’t have corals
building a reef you’re not gonna have
habitats the reefs of the Florida Keys
are not going to be able to keep up with
rapid sea level rise it’s a stressful
time on
so my obsession for the last 10 years is
you know how can we grow a lot of
quarrel in a short period of time and
then how can we train you know an army
of people doing this in Florida
throughout the Caribbean throughout the
world and what we do our first
collection of any genetic strain it goes
in the nursery and stays in the nursery
you could pick the perfect coral to work
with it would be staghorn or Elkhorn
coral because they grow really fast you
can cut them into you know pinky size
little branches and hang them on the
tree they’re easy to replant on the reef
it just works
you know those two corals are more
trouble than any other corals in the
Caribbean they have the most potential
to to have a recovery in our lifetime
you try replanting a reef with what we
think are may be heat-resistant corals
or disease resistant corals heat stress
is primarily the thing that gets them I
mean there’s a lot of different people
doing written different research as far
as why a coral is resistant to heat
I’ve been at this for eight or nine
years now we’re starting to generate
some evidence that some corals have the
ability to fight back looking for
colonies that showed signs of bleaching
and we’re driving numbered stakes
alongside them and then we’ll take
little clippings of tissue and analyze
those he purposely took bleach pieces
yeah we did some laboratory experiments
where we tried to induce bleaching and
corals where we increased the
temperature of the water up to 30 31
degrees and we held those conditions for
two months which is like the maximum
duration in nature and would have
normally resulted in high death of
corals but it didn’t
when they get stressed out we’re finding
that corals can actually feed on
plankton from the water column and
they’re using that food to store energy
or fat reserves we’re finding they
completely can make up for what they’ve
lost at least temporarily so good
analogy is a backup generator that they
can turn on when they’ve lost their
primary source the important part of the
field right now is understanding are
there species that are going to be able
to bounce back from that stress so the
future of reefs it’s really an open
question right now they’ve been around
for 200 million years and they’ve
survived at least eight glacial
interglacial cycles and some other huge
extinction events what’s unique is that
the climate change event that
precipitated those happened as much as
ten or a hundred times more slowly than
we think is going on now people ask me a
lot why am I doing this and I just I
feel like we can buy a lot of time by
intervening now but if we don’t do
something now when we have the
opportunity then we won’t have the
opportunity in 20 or 30 years we won’t
be able to start doing a lot of this
because we will have lost too much
forest if you don’t have trees you don’t
have a force if you don’t have corals
building a reef you’re not gonna have
habitats the reefs of the Florida Keys
are not going to be able to keep up with
rapid sea level rise it’s a stressful
time on
so my obsession for the last 10 years is
you know how can we grow a lot of
quarrel in a short period of time and
then how can we train you know an army
of people doing this in Florida
throughout the Caribbean throughout the
world and what we do our first
collection of any genetic strain it goes
in the nursery and stays in the nursery
you could pick the perfect coral to work
with it would be staghorn or Elkhorn
coral because they grow really fast you
can cut them into you know pinky size
little branches and hang them on the
tree they’re easy to replant on the reef
it just works
you know those two corals are more
trouble than any other corals in the
Caribbean they have the most potential
to to have a recovery in our lifetime
you try replanting a reef with what we
think are may be heat-resistant corals
or disease resistant corals heat stress
is primarily the thing that gets them I
mean there’s a lot of different people
doing written different research as far
as why a coral is resistant to heat
I’ve been at this for eight or nine
years now we’re starting to generate
some evidence that some corals have the
ability to fight back looking for
colonies that showed signs of bleaching
and we’re driving numbered stakes
alongside them and then we’ll take
little clippings of tissue and analyze
those he purposely took bleach pieces
yeah we did some laboratory experiments
where we tried to induce bleaching and
corals where we increased the
temperature of the water up to 30 31
degrees and we held those conditions for
two months which is like the maximum
duration in nature and would have
normally resulted in high death of
corals but it didn’t
when they get stressed out we’re finding
that corals can actually feed on
plankton from the water column and
they’re using that food to store energy
or fat reserves we’re finding they
completely can make up for what they’ve
lost at least temporarily so good
analogy is a backup generator that they
can turn on when they’ve lost their
primary source the important part of the
field right now is understanding are
there species that are going to be able
to bounce back from that stress so the
future of reefs it’s really an open
question right now they’ve been around
for 200 million years and they’ve
survived at least eight glacial
interglacial cycles and some other huge
extinction events what’s unique is that
the climate change event that
precipitated those happened as much as
ten or a hundred times more slowly than
we think is going on now people ask me a
lot why am I doing this and I just I
feel like we can buy a lot of time by
intervening now but if we don’t do
something now when we have the
opportunity then we won’t have the
opportunity in 20 or 30 years we won’t
be able to start doing a lot of this
because we will have lost too much
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