A moonshot for coral breeding | Hacker News Reader

A moonshot for coral breeding

hakaimagazine.com

220 pointsPetiver39 comments

A similar programme for tank breeding and reseeding has been working in Queensland too. Getting tank corals to spawn is hard I believe. They're aiming to breed up higher temperature tolerant initial colony types to use for rebuilding bleached coral.

Small instances are "seeded" onto a bad spot with a stable base matrix like a scaffold, to develop and grow. The matrix either decays over time or is stable and not a problem left in place. My understanding is that beneficial fish and related species are needed for the full biome to "work" and the seeded early coloniser types help these animals come in from surrounding areas. Without this work, a more rapid colonisation by less beneficial types can happen.

Almost any remediation gets my upvote for trying, but at scale avoidance of the man made causes of coral death is much more important.

A lot of what hobbyists might not realize at first is the fact that coral are colonies of many many tiny organisms each performing their role, like zooxanthellae. These structures are enabled by entire ecosystems of ancillary bacteria on adjacent rock and the water column that maintains the equilibrium. A lot of the acute die off we see is not just warming waters or pollutants harming the coral itself, but primarily the damage to the unseen symbiotes, food sources, and bacterial colonies that are part of the coral's life cycle.

With few exceptions if you have a piece of coral in your tank and it dies, it's your fault. They're immortal otherwise when left undisturbed. Some common pet store coral like pulsing xenia, green star polyps or zooanthids will grow in spite of the worst conditions to the point where they become invasive. All you need is a single polyp and most coral specimens we're familiar with will eventually grow and spread as far as the ecosystem will allow.

Deep deep layered sand beds, areas of stagnant water and high flow water, macroalgae, various gas exchange areas, copepods, amphipods, all of it is part of a holistic picture that is needed for these bacteria to be happy. This process can take years of what I call 'strategic neglect' by not messing with the deeper darker anoxic layers of sand and algae. If those bacteria are happy the coral has no choice but to thrive.

I hope this new effort to get the coral to spawn without subdivision succeeds so that future generations can see the same things we once saw, and the life it creates below.

I'm sure you know this but for others; the "tanks" here are university lab near industrial scale plastic 10,000l tanks, not glass walled home aquarium tanks. Same same, but they know what their doing and what complex symbiotic organisms coral are. UQ's Heron Island has table rigs under lighting but on the mainland at JCU and I believe the CSIRO it's pretty massive.

Australian uni Tank farmed corals have spawned in the same lunar phase as reefs for a while I believe, it's getting them to do it more frequently and doing the "IVF" like stuff, and implanting on scaffolding which is hard.

Not a coral scientist. I welcome corrections

Another place doing some important research is KAUST above Jeddah on the Red Sea. They are working with one of the Barrier Reef photogrammetry capture programs to monitor coral and doing replacement testing etc due to higher average water temps so a coral evolved to withstand Red Sea summer might be a fit for the more recently hotter QLD water. I hope something like this works one of the most amazing things I have ever seen was a spawning event years ago. Coral is the canary in the coal mine of Climate Change and if we can't help them adapt then I am afraid we might not be able to either.

You can do it at home with a lunar light, temperature controller, and a curtain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9jsNTyeGNk

AIMS are the main org I know of that are doing lab-based synchronised spawning in Australia, and more interestingly IMO spawning/survivorship under future conditions. SeaSim is fairly well known here and tends to get national media attention around the annual mass coral spawning event (expected early next month).

https://www.aims.gov.au/about/facilities/national-sea-simula...

> the "tanks" here are university lab near industrial scale plastic 10,000l tanks

Likely polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA), usually called acrylic, and possibly but less likely polyethylene terephthalate (PETE). Both are technically plastic, but plastic often correlates to cheap, and I doubt those tanks are cheap. Also possible but even less likely to be aluminium oxynitride (ALON), which is ceramic not platic, aka transparent aluminum, but I suspect it would be cost-prohibitive.

> ...they know what their doing... I welcome corrections

--> they're ;-)

> ...they know what their doing... I welcome corrections

--> they're ;-)

HEADSHOT

>> which is ceramic not platic

missed opportunity on my >< typo

No one is perfext. :P

Strategic neglect is really the heart of conservation. More than anything, ecosystems need to be left alone, as free as possible of human influences.

That’s not true in North America.

In the northeast, the forests we see are actually cultivated, and much that is deciduous would become pine forest with impassable underbrush without human intervention.

Prevention of wildfires requires human intervention and brush clearing. I believe this is a factor right now in California.

The Great Plains is largely cultivated, and without proper maintenance is shrinking.

Some people theorize that much of the lush vegetation European settlers saw in New England was actually human cultivation, that was left untended due to mass smallpox deaths.

Strategic neglect is a strategy, but when applied naively you may not end up with the ecosystem you wanted.

> Prevention of wildfires requires human intervention and brush clearing. I believe this is a factor right now in California

Prevention of all wildfires requires intervention, but the natural state is lots of small fires and that actually results in fewer huge fires, so “neglect” is a valid strategy. Unfortunately it’s hard to do proscribed burns to “catch up” to the natural state as they are unpopular.

Wildfires are the natural earth's own clearing process, returning carbon harvested by the trees to the soil. It's only a negative thing because it effects us.

Tangential: It’s amazing to realize that corals are in fact animals.

Though coral may look like a colorful plant growing from roots in the seafloor, it is actually an animal.

Source: https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/coral

Or colonies of millions of tiny animals. They are indeed fascinating and beautiful. I just went diving this morning and I’m in my way to a second dive right now. The effects of bleaching are visible, and it pains me to think that in my lifetime they could disappear.

You're checking HN while you are on the way to your second dive this morning?

Wow.

It’s pretty bad…

I feel you...

And now put down that damn phone and enjoy the dive! :D

Colonies of millions of tiny animals that incorporate plants into their tissues in order to generate energy from the sun.

Also many shallow water coral actually get their color from photosynthesizing single-celled organisms they live in symbiosis with. Coral bleaching happens when the animal kicks out this cell, the animal isn't necessarily dead.

I can't remember the last time I read an article that made me feel more like quitting my career and starting a new one.

What made you feel this way? Because you feel like your time could be "better" spent?

Hakai has a way of doing this. Their research in British Columbia is literally awe inspiring at times, and they’re experts at writing and presenting it.

If you feel that way you seriously should consider it. I have often had people tell me that they want to change, but then gone on to explain all the reasons why they can’t. There are many very interesting opportunities out there.

I've been wondering something. So corals evolved 535 million years ago. During this time the earth went through large fluctuations in temperature (ocean temperatures of 35 degrees, Antarctica being tropical), and CO2 concentrations over twice as high as we have now. But supposedly they can't handle the current conditions? That makes no sense to me.

Are the causes of coral bleaching actually understood? Wikipedia lists a dozen potential factors. It seems more likely to me that it's something other than CO2/temperature considering the species' history.

On the other hand it could well be that during the times when the temperature was changing rapidly, most of the corals died off, leaving behind only the most resistant ones.

Excepting mass extinction events (impacts, supervolcanoes), have the conditions ever changed as quickly as are now?

Evolution doesn’t have a great memory, we used to live in the ocean and now drowning is a real threat. Plenty of land mammals have gone back to aquatic living but they don’t regain gills so they still go back to the surface. The transition from feet to fins also took a very long time.

So yea massive changes over 50 years means mass die offs and even extinctions. Assuming we eventually stop introducing massive changes and in 5 million years aquatic ecosystems will be fine, but we care about the short term.

> Plenty of land mammals have gone back to aquatic living but they don’t regain gills so they still go back to the surface.

Breathing air is probably a superior system anyway, since mammalian fish utterly dominate gilled fish in nearly every respect. What gilled fish can dive like a sperm whale, acquire the bulk of a blue whale, or the agility of a dolphin?

What’s the point of diving like a sperm whale if you can just stay at the bottom of the ocean? As to overall performance the fastest swimmer is the Indo-Pacific Sailfish clocked at 68 mph.

The blue whale is more bulky and faster than a whale shark, but young whale sharks can simply dive too low to be at significant threat from Okra. So breathing has real disadvantages.

What's the point of having gills to stay at the bottom of the ocean if you're going to get dominated by sperm whales anyway? I don't know if sperm whales eat young whale sharks, but they certainly could if they wanted to. They can dive deeper than any whale shark.

We don’t have any evidence that sperm whales attack them.

Okra packs have been observed attacking juvenile baleen whales on the other hand.

Are you the superior system if you’re at the top of the food chain but your species’ continued existence is more tenuous than the lower prey animals?

I think the greatest threat to marine mammals is the decline of all the other fish they eat.

Marine species like coral and starfish are supported by a symbiotic holobiont of bacteria and dinoflagellates that provide it with protection and nutrition. Raising ocean temperatures contribute to the disruption of this biome, but there is something else at play IMO. The bacteria consisting of the holobiont, especially the Rhodobacterales, can quickly transfer genes and plasmids, to devastating effect [0]. There’s evidence that the ultimate genetic source of these destabilizing bacteria is in wastewater treatment plants - I don’t have the sources on hand ATM but there are cases both in Miami and China.

0. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35254236/

Just because there have been changes in the past does not mean that this is like all of the others. This is happening at an accelerated rate that is much higher speed than the evolution rate of plants and animals. The result will be a mass extinction of species. That has happened in the past and overall life does recover but many species are gone and things are very different afterward. No one wants to be alive during a mass extinction but they all would hope to survive. There is no guarantee that humans would survive this extinction.

Even if the climate changes do not directly kill us off, it will stress our societies to a possible breaking point, with the risk of famine, war, and general societal breakdown.

You can breed acroporas (elkhorn is a type of acropora) in your home and the list of species where spawning triggers are being documented is increasing.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=jamie+craggs+co...

Light pollution is (yet another) a big deal problem for the reef.

"The New Ronco Spawn-o-Matic! Just point it at your aquarium, pull the trigger, and shazam! Gametes everywhere!"

How about corals fixating CO2 from the atmosphere?

Nice

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