By Kimber Price
newsroom@montereyherald.com
Monterey >> Two local marine biologists have been named to an international committee formed by the National Academy of Sciences to conduct an emergency investigation on how to make coral more resilient.
Having two of the top dozen coral experts come from an area that harbors no coral reefs itself is not so unusual, according to Stephen Palumbi, director of Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, who was chosen to chair the new committee. “There are hundreds of marine biologists working in Monterey Bay and many, many, many of them have worldwide reputations like Cheryl,” he said.
Cheryl Logan, an associate professor in the School of Natural Sciences at CSU Monterey Bay, was also selected by the National Academy of Sciences to work on the committee.
The committee was assembled at the request of the study’s sponsor, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, which monitors coral reef health around the world through a program called Reef Watch. They are reacting to the increased incidents of “coral bleaching” which is destroying reefs on a global level.
When ocean water is too warm, corals expel the algae living inside them and turn completely white. Coral need these internal symbiotes in order to survive and feed and grow, Palumbi said. There were massive, worldwide events of coral bleaching that occurred in 2015 and 2017 and coral biologists are becoming more and more alarmed about this.
“You can kind of think of it as the single biggest ecosystem effect of climate change on the planet right now,” Palumbi said. “This is the thing that you can look at and say, here is an effect of climate change that is an enormous effect on an important ecosystem.”
What’s the committee tasked with?
Scientists agree that the best way to reduce coral bleaching is to lower levels of carbon dioxide in the air. But that’s a long-term goal. NOAA has tasked the committee to investigate what may be feasible to do in the nearer future, and expects them to wrap it up in about a year.
“Our first goal is to review and evaluate all of the potential human interventions that could increase the resilience of coral reefs,” said Logan. “But we also have to assess the risks and unintended consequences of each kind of intervention.” She said that they would develop a risk assessment framework to function as a sort of decision tree for managers to use based on their goals. Ultimately, they will make recommendations to NOAA for the best strategies to use in the next five to 20 years.
Many of the human interventions include what Logan referred to as “assisted evolution.” The committee is considering interventions that can be done now, as well as things that are in development that may be used in the future.
Palumbi said potential interventions include creating coral nurseries with heat-resistant corals, finding corals that are already heat resistant, selectively breeding corals so that they become more heat resistant, modifying the symbiotic algae to make them more heat resistant or genetically modifying the corals themselves.
Why is saving the coral important?
“They’re like this living, self-repairing, growing seawall out there across tens of thousands of miles. Why wouldn’t you want to have that? The value of them is huge. The threat they’re under is very, very palpable,” said Palumbi.
Coral reefs can provide storm surge protection for human lives and structures by absorbing up to 97 percent of wave energy that crashes into them. “We’ve already lost 30 to 50 percent of them and these are areas that people depend on for growing fish populations and food for hundreds of millions of people.”
NOAA models predict that if nothing is done to reduce the impact of climate change and coral doesn’t adapt, coral reefs may be completely gone by 2030 or 2050, Logan said. Palumbi is concerned with whether we can turn around the constant threats to corals so that there’s still some left by 2050 or at the end of the century.
Committee contributions
While Logan has worked in coral reefs in American Samoa, her primary expertise is in predictive modeling, looking at the effects of climate change on reefs in the future. Adding in human interventions complicates things further. “I’ve been thinking about it more theoretically and this is really a feet-on-the-ground situation, asking whether this is possible, is it worthwhile, what are the risks, etc.,” she said. “It was sort of hard for me to gauge what my contribution would be compared to other people, but [the Academy of Sciences] did a really nice job of balancing the different expertise of people on the committee.”
As a marine population ecologist and geneticist, Palumbi sequences coral genomes to look for genes that allow them to be more heat resistant naturally. “We go around the world looking for places where the water temperature is a little warmer than other places, but they’re still full of corals,” he said. He also manipulates coral conditions in laboratories, but not here. “Corals generally really hate Monterey Bay seawater, which is what we’ve got, so we’d have to grow them in artificial seawater, which just seems so silly,” said Palumbi. Instead, he sets up experiments in places like the Palau International Coral Reef Center, which is set up for running seawater systems and has the wet labs he needs.
Doing a Julia Platt
Palumbi said that after reversing the emissions problem, marine scientists must preserve as much of the ocean as possible for the next 80 years so that when things actually begin to get better, there will be enough ocean life left to grow back from.
He noted that his lab at the Hopkins Marine Station was the home of the west coast’s longest running marine protected area and recalled a story from his book, “The Death and Life of Monterey Bay: A Story of Revival.”
In the early 1930s, the mayor of Pacific Grove was a woman named Julia Platt. She was a marine biologist and wanted to preserve an area of Monterey Bay to protect it from cannery pollution. At that time, the fisheries were unhealthy. The whales and seals and otters were gone. So was the kelp. Platt wanted to protect a small part of the shoreline where plants and animals could thrive, so that their larvae and propagules could re-populate the Bay once conditions improved.
“Basically 80 years later we’re doing a Platt, we’re doing a Julia. We’re trying to set things up so all around the world’s oceans — corals, in this particular case — we work out ways to protect as much as possible now so that it can regrow later,” Palumbi said.