Impact

DISCOVERING NEW CORAL HOPE

Coral has to figure out a way to survive climate change and ocean pollutants, or else our reefs will die and and the catastrophe will ripple out to affect us all. Some fascinating recent discoveries offer new insight and hope.

Perhaps nature’s most important architects, coral reef structures -- they protect shores, they are a vital part of the ocean ecosystem which provides food for about one billion people, and are a source of many natural medicines. They are also a stunningly beautiful part of our world.

Photo: NOAA’s National Ocean Service. Rapture Reef, Northwestern Hawaiian Islands

Threats come from climate change stressors (disturbances in temperature, ocean chemistry, storm frequency, and severity), and chronic or acute local impacts (coastal development, pollution and overfishing). These have already contributed to significant global deterioration of reefs and their integral ecosystems.

Photo: Courtesy of USFWS. Montipora coral off Jarvis Island in the Pacific.

The Gates Lab, located at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, a research unit embedded within the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, is devoted to finding some new solutions, to save the reefs. Dr. Ruth Gates, who runs the lab, and her team have set up research stations throughout the Pacific Ocean, including in Main and North Western Hawaiian Islands, Moorea (French Polynesia), American Samoa, Taiwan, and St. John (USVI).

Photo: Courtesy of the NOAA. Symbiodinium (symbiotic algae) under microscope.

The lab recently acquired a confocal microscope, with help of a donation from Pam Omidyar, which allows them to study organisms that are still alive, vs standard microscopes which can only view super-thin wafers of dead organisms.

Video: Courtesy of Science Mag.

The confocal microscope enabled the research team, led by lead research PhD candidate Hollie Putnam, to discover that some coral are faring better than others. This could hold an important key to environmental management and reef conservation. Some coral species have a symbiotic relationship with single-celled algae. Gates’ studies showed that coral species hosting fewer types of symbiotes were more resistant to vital threats than those who hosted a larger variety.

Photo: Jared Kelly. Pocillopora Damicornis off of Kona, Hawaii.

Just off Ofu Island, in American Samoa, the Gates team is observing species of coral that have self-selected to live in high temperature environments. They may become the dominant species on our planet. According Gates’ Thermal Stress research studies, rising temperatures will be a bigger cause of coral death than the changing acidity of the ocean.

Photo: Mary Lou Frost. Courtesy of Coral Reef Alliance. Soft coral polyps.

While the future looks bleak for many corals, the fact that some types survive and even thrive in conditions that rapidly kill others gives us possibilities. Gates is focused on defining biological traits that promote survival among corals and reefs.