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Scientists Cryo-Freeze Coral Reef
An anonymous reader writes "Due to rising ocean temperatures, scientists from the United States and Australia are attempting to freeze coral eggs and sperm in cryogenic suspension so that the endangered species can be preserved. Once frozen, the species may later be grown in a lab and implanted in reefs. This could be the only way to ensure the survival of certain endangered species at The Great Barrier Reef."
Huh. I always thought coral was more like plants than animals. Anyone here a coral expert or should I check out them wikipedias?
I live near the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. It's bleached. Dead. Its one of the saddest things I have ever seen. Lots of tourists coming over asking where the "colorful" reef is, like in the brochure. I reply "oh, like in the 80's? Your 30 years too late". If you want proof of global warming / ocean acidification, look no further.
Well maybe not too late, but just in time.
The news clip broadcasted last evening on ABC.
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It would certainly be an impressive feat(and, if capable of being used on scene, sure would be handy for all those "He needs to be prepped and being worked on by the trauma surgeon 10 minutes ago or he'll die" ambulance calls...); but it would be of only modest use for the mortality problem...
While frozen, the organism is metabolically inactive(by design). Dead, albeit reversibly so. Simply being cryoed would be more or less identical to dying, save that they can wake you up at some future time. And, if they wake you up, you still have whatever issues you had when you went under. If you have sufficiently accommodating family and/or some clever flavor of legally immortal trust supervising your affairs, it might be a decent way of halting fatal diseases until other suckers have finished the clinical R&D and come up with something effective; but even in that best case it would actually be pretty weird:
Just imagine a situation where a serious accident, or the wrong diagnosis would mean going on ice for 20 years, before being revived and repaired. It wouldn't have quite the permanence of death; but it'd be weird if you, or people around you, could just 'get iced', starting a near-death process of absence and loss; and then pop back up in a decade or three with no time having passed for them. Somebody better than me could probably wring a neat sci-fi story out of it, a world where the risk of the separation and loss that accompanies death is still very real; but most 'deaths'(excluding things like explosions or intense fires and the like) are really just freeze periods of unknown duration.
How much would it fuck with your head to have your spouse or child 'die', and then show up again exactly as they were when they died, but with everybody else that much older, and having lived without them? It'd be weird...
By 'In this same way' do you perhaps mean something like how they cryo store human sperm and eggs for assisted pregnancy millions of times around the world, every day?
Or do you perhaps mean 'in some completely different way, entirely unrelated to the story'?
Ocean acidification, although a daunting problem, isn't irreversible. The idea of saving just coral sperm and eggs doesn't sound like a well thought out solution, though. A coral reef is more than just bare coral. It is a matrix upon which an entire ecosystem is based. Does't the rest of habitat need saving as well? Imagine saving a place on land from soil erosion, but the hill or valley is completely barren with no plant or animal diversity.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
This could be the only way to ensure the survival of certain endangered species...
Or, you know, we could clean up our act and treat the earth better. I'm pretty sure that one of the species that is going to be endangered is us if we don't.
And just like that we've got a wonderful outline for a sequel to Finding Nemo, as they try to recover coral eggs that the humans have stolen. :)
Not exactly the same (it uses time dilation for the age differences) but quite a similar concept is explored in Joe Haldeman's "The Forever War"
"Of modest use". You could buy CENTURIES to work on the mortality problem if this technique worked. With enough centuries to work on the bio sciences, eventually we would learn how to strip down and overhaul the whole damn human body, replacing every last broken cell if we had to.
Not to mention if you ever (within 50-1000 years) developed molecular nanotechnology, you could just deconstruct the frozen human body to a molecular mapping in a computer, repair all the damage in software, and print out a new body with all the problems fixed. While doing this, make a backup copy so if the original were to be killed you can still bring them back.
I guess in the loooooooonnnngggg run mortality would win. The universe will run out of fuel, etc. But a lifespan of potentially millions or billions of years is so close to immortality by our standards we might as well call it that.
sounds yummy... like the astronaut food they sell at the Smithsonian.
This is what we need: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_monkeys
In "Coral Reef" flavor.
If we can convince a private company to produce coral versions of these we're all set. The company can profit from the sales as novelty items for kids with short attention spans. And scientists can just empty a packet into a fish bowl of water whenever needed.
Win-Win all around.
We might need to do a bit of work on the lifespan issue, though.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Where the hell are we going to 'plant' these things after ruin the reefs that exist...
Save some now so we can destroy the reef and then fix it and THEN replant... Instead of um... idk.. just not fucking up the reef in the first place?
I think i see a wasted step here...
And then you come up against another problem, that of the future peoples not wanting your ancient presence messing up their society. When there are millions of 'dead' people in storage and the world is overcrowded there will be no incentive to get them out. Nor if the world is sparsely populated.
Any effective longevity treatment will be for the 1%, make no mistake about that..
Don't forget "The First Immortal", sequel to "The Truth Machine".
The CB App. What's your 20?
So, they are actually killing them to help "prevent extinction"?
That the coral was frozen while trying to deliver a pizza to I. C. Weiner .
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Aren't corals one of the oldest lifeforms on the planet? As far as I recall, they've survived at least a couple of the 'great extinctions' - so as a widespread species they're at least 200 million years old. I know they're found abundantly in fossils at least 100 million years old.
And within that last 200 million years, the earth has been (both) substantially warmer and colder for long periods of time, as well as strikingly quick changes of several degrees in both directions (fast enough to appear as 'instant' in a climatological scale - otherwise comparable to the current shift). So clearly they can survive both large and quick changes.
So how is it that they're so desperately endangered? Is it that "corals" are at risk (as the news stories say) or is it that THESE corals are at risk but there are other places that were formerly unfavorable to corals that are now optimal?
I am not a coral scientist, so if someone could explain, that would be great.
-Styopa
If the oceans degenerate to the point where no coral is left we are going to have bigger problems than "think of the coral". Valiant effort, yes, however I wish Science/People would focus on addressing the bigger problem; the reason the ocean is warming in the first place.
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It should be noted that at one point, it was commonplace to throw your personal waste into the street. I'm sure that there were plenty who thought that the taxes levied for building sewers were an injustice too.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
From coral to rhinos, ensure you can grow it outside its original environment.
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So this really makes you Fascist Eco Nazi's
It is SO adorable the way Republicans use big words they've heard adults say, even though they have no idea what they mean.
We've destabilized the climate and destroyed a lot of the coral habitats owing in great part to their temperature sensitivity. Seeing as they're a key species for providing habitat to whole ecosystems, I have this really odd idea. What if we selectively breed or modify coral species for greater resilience to these hostile conditions, and reintroduce them to hold onto reefs that are otherwise lost?
These are methods usually associated with liquidation of environmental capital. They should totally give you pause while you reflect on the number of things done wrong with that kind of meddling. I think that it's worth considering, though.
All of that coral on the planet Earth (yes, all of it) is less than 10,000 years old. All of the coral that was alive 20,000 years ago died when the last ice age ended and the ocean levels changed by > 400ft. All of the Earth's previous coral died as it was too deep to survive the new depths. In the past 1,000,000 years such events have wiped all tropical coral from existence at lest 20 times.
Coral has adapted by loading the ocean up with the eggs and sperm so it can form wherever conditions are correct. This falls into the publicity stunt range of science. They got funding for something they know isn't a problem, but they get money for it anyway.
No, If you look it wasn't taxes. It was people getting hit with it that used their personal weapons. Its was royalty and police scaring the hell out of people when they got hit and generally the foul stench that let to its stoppage.
"NASA and the U.S. Solar Observatory has said to expect moderate global cooling for the next three decades due to a quiet period on the sun, and a consequent cooling of the Pacific Ocean’s huge heat mass." http://junkscience.com/2011/11/22/earths-embarrassing-lack-of-warming-since-1998/
During the last ice age, the ocean levels dropped ~40 meters and has since risen to its current level. If the coral reefs can withstand that change, it can withstand the changes whatever small changes we got in the past decades.
So much tech, so many minds involved in trying to save the World when all we really need to do is admit we circumvented Mothers checks and balances with our medicine and technology and agree that we need World wide population reduction immediately, now, not tomorrow.
Just grow up and admit we are the plague of locust, we are the problem, the 7 billion ignorant, greedy animals sucking the planet dry.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Therapeutic Hypothermia is the closest we have just now.
Remember there was a short length sci-fi story based on this theme back in the 80's. It was in a hard-cover Nova/Nebula/Supernova awards book, with an orangy-red cover.
Anyway the story involved a patient going into cryogenic storage until a cure for terminal cancer was found. Unfortunately, for him, and other patients sharing the safe cryo-store, that took around 1000 years, by which time the declining human population had been replaced by androids and robotic machinery programmed to serve humans.
He was the last human on Earth and proceeded to search for any other survivors initially across the continent, the planet, the solar system and ultimately the entire. galaxy. In each case, the search progressively long eras of time, until he was spending billions of year in cryostasis.
In the end, the Sun has become a red-giant and is about to roast Earth, the androids have evolved to beyond physical form, and have guided the terraforming of another planet until human life there has exceeded Earth technology, and a space-yacht is sent to collect him from Earth at the very moment that the oceans have boiled away, outside temperature is 350C and all the cooling systems are starting to fail.
Dr. Who also had that theme with Abslom Daak, D.K., whose girlfriend was placed in cryogenic storage until he could find a resurrection centre.
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And then you come up against another problem, that of the future peoples not wanting your ancient presence messing up their society. When there are millions of 'dead' people in storage and the world is overcrowded there will be no incentive to get them out. Nor if the world is sparsely populated.
Or you could find that you can't stand their society, even if they were willing to let you integrate...
Pohl's "The Age of the Pussyfoot" is an interesting take on that exact scenario.
So your argument is they should just let the hill wash away, aka let it all die.
Good to see you thinking things through like that. Perhaps they already thought of such things, and of course: you have to start somewhere.
Which part of "Does't the rest of habitat need saving as well?" do you not understand?
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
Obviously the exact same technique won't work because scale does matter to the laws of physics. However, the fact that sperm/eggs/entire human embryos can be frozen and reused shows that freezing entire human beings is possible in theory.
As a matter of fact, there are techniques that might work for entire human beings. Google for the Japanese "Cell alive" system.
"Of modest use". You could buy CENTURIES to work on the mortality problem if this technique worked.
Heh, amazing how much thought we put into physical immortality, when we could be devoting resources much more effectively into logical immortality AKA knowledge transfer AKA education ;-)
I'd think that if we had unlimited lifetimes, we wouldn't be in any rush to learn or accomplish anything, because, you know, you could just do it later. And when you die your body of knowledge still goes with you, assuming you haven't forgotten it.
On the other hand, if we concentrated on transferring our body of knowledge faster and more efficiently to the younger generation, we might actually get somewhere.
Coral species, on the other hand, are worth preserving. You know, for SCIENCE.