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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."
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.
I'm no expert; but they are definitely animals. They can reproduce sexually(since they don't move around much once mature, the do a coordinated mass gamete release and let the water do the mixing). Some can also reproduce by budding or if divided.
Because they are sedentary, colony-living, and gradually form massive calcified structures, there are certain respects in which their role and macrostructure resembles that of plants(the two are enormously different biologically; but both are the major structural organism of their respective environments)...
The news clip broadcasted last evening on ABC.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
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...
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.
I can see three views here:
Coral given ideal (artificial) growth conditions such as those in Marine Aquarists' tanks can actually grow fairly rapidly.
In the Marine Aquarist Community both Soft (LPS) and Hard (SPS) coral is usually traded as "frags" (fragments or cuttings off a mother colony,) and they can
more than quadruple in size over the course of a year given ideal flow, nutrient, light and water chemistry conditions.
I've wondered this too. The seas tend to change by a foot or more every 200 years, with evidence of massive water level drops happening several times in the past. Either Coral is more resilient than we give it credit for, or this wide variety of coral appeared in just a few hundred years since the last major temperature/water level swing. Either way, there's definitely a major clue missing here. Huge chunks of Florida (Miami in particular) sit on top of ancient coral reefs. I mean, check out Coral Gables' Venetian Pool - where did all this coral come from? What happened to those species? That part of Florida no longer has reefs, nor has it had them for hundreds if not thousands of years. I think the Biologists and the Geologists need to get together and decide what's actually going on.
moox. for a new generation.
I'm no expert; but they are definitely animals. They can reproduce sexually(since they don't move around much once mature, the do a coordinated mass gamete release and let the water do the mixing). Some can also reproduce by budding or if divided.
I'm not so sure that reproducing sexually is the reason they're classified as animals. Yeast, for example, also reproduces sexually (and by budding or division). Possibly it has more to do with having mouths and eating food.
What happened to natural selection? The planet constantly changes, and species die all the time, if ocean temperatures are going to kill them off how do they expect them to survive in a warmer ocean!!
Natural selection is still there. But natural selection is a process, not a goal or a reason or a definition of what ought to happen. Yes, species die all the time, but that's not a good reason not to try to preserve them, even if they can never be re-established in the wild.
I didn't think it was ocean temperatures which were the problem for coral (if so, there must be cooler oceans somewhere), I thought it was ocean chemistry and pH? From what I remember of a lecture on that given by someone studying it, higher CO2 acidifies oceans but this also increases erosion rates on-land, washing more calcium-laden water in to the oceans.....and the past CO2 rises were slow enough to keep ocean chemistry much more balanced, whereas the current one is not.
Maybe I am getting ahead of myself with what there overall plan really is. I am sure there is a detailed plan, even another press article out there.
I wouldn't personally trust a journalist an inch to get across a balanced view of the motivation of even a single scientist, never mind the reasons for doing something. In any case, I can't see why there should be a specific plan. An obvious reason for wanting to preserve and grow these things in captivity is for future research, which could have unknown benefits or at the very least merely be interesting. And if a reason arises, isn't it better to have some stored coral available, providing it's at reasonable cost? Of course, if you want a 'plan' then how about genetically engineering or selecting and breeding coral to be more tolerant of different conditions?
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
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.
Obligatory Matrix Reference:
I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I've realized that you are not actually mammals. (Smiles) Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment. But you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. (Leans forward) There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague. And we are... the cure.
- That is the sound of inevitability.
The reason is the rate of change in certain parameters surpasses what we think species can adapt through. Yes, evolution and natural selection adapts to change, but the rate at which it absorbs change is limited, as evidenced by past mass extinction events. If ocean acidification were happening on a much slower timescale, then there would be much less reason for concern. As it is, we are setting the stage for a trophic cascade.
Someone had to do it.
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.