When you look at organisms, and you look at
a coral reef, clearly we're more corals than
we would hope.
And that means the rates of change in the
environment have essentially outpaced the
capacity of the corals themselves to adapt.
And let's face it, if conditions change fast,
you have a couple of options.
You move, you adapt, or you die.
And they're not adapting fast enough.
Right, so we're taking these 3 approaches
to accelerate natural selection.
They're all fairly natural approaches.
They're things that could happen in nature,
we're just making sure that they do.
How would we do that?
Well, what we know is that some corals survive
conditions that others don't.
So, I call these the corals that are like
our athletes.
They're the ones that are able to really run
for longer than the others.
We all get that in human populations.
Well I'm looking for the very best performer
on the coral reef.
And the context for performance isn't a sport,
but the context is their ability to withstand
warm temperatures that kill other coral.
So I've got my really good performers and
now we're asking, "can we breed them with
one another?"
If we've got a really good performer over
here and over here, let's not leave it to
chance that their eggs and sperm would meet.
Let's bring them together and make sure they
do.
To make sure we breed the best moving forward.
Or, we have these great pieces of information
coming out that tells us that if a coral survives
one stressful set of conditions, somehow,
when it sees those stressful conditions again,
it doesn't really see them as stressful.
And, you know, for me that's very intrinsically
obvious.
Like, I gave my first talk, and frankly, I
thought I was gonna faint on stage, right?
It was awful.
My heart was racing, my mouth was dry, but
I pushed through.
I gave the talk.
People said it went really well.
The next time I got on stage to give a talk,
it didn't seem quite so difficult.
Right, so, it was within my experience envelope
now.
I'd done it before, so I could do it again.
Well, with corals, we're doing the same thing.
We're giving them an experience that will
be stressful for them up front, but will fix
a memory so that when they see that or experience
that thing again, it doesn't feel so stressful.
Right, that's along the lines of "what doesn't
kill you makes you stronger".
And the last thing that we're doing, which
is, you know, really fascinating and it's
really about the interaction of large animals
with much smaller living things.
Corals are the masters of using the biology
of microorganisms to their advantage.
Inside their tissues, they are packed with
millions of small plant cells that are able
to do what all plants do.
Convert the carbon dioxide that we breathe
out, combine that with water, using sunlight
energy to produce a food molecule and oxygen
through the process we all know as photosynthesis.
We know that some of these plants are better
at feeding their animal than others.
And so, what we're trying to do is to optimize
the relationship and give them the species
of plant that will feed them for the longest
period of time when the water gets hot.
Very simple.
But there are also other players like loads
of bacteria all over the surfaces and inside
the tissues of the animals, of the corals
themselves.
And we now know that like with all large organisms,
that which bacteria you associate with can
have a fundamental impact on how healthy you
are.
Now, so say the answer to all those questions
is, yes, we can breed a strong coral, we can
condition or exercise a coral to be as good
as it can be, or give it probiotics that help
it withstand warmer and more acidic waters..
what do we do with them?
Well, we have to propagate them very very
quickly.
Not only here in Hawaii, but we have to do
these same experiments with corals in many
different places.
The ultimate solution to this problem is the
reduction of greenhouse gasses, is human stopping
fossil fuel burning, but we need to have corals
when we've stopped the greenhouse gas emissions.
And unfortunately, there's a discrepancy in
how quickly we'll be able to moderate the
global temperature and the survivability of
coral.
And so, the rates of adaptation have to accelerate
moving forward.
