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."

Comments

Too late :(

[ihaveamo]

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.

Re:Too late :(

[gregrah]

Another possible explanation for why the reef isn't as colorful as in the brochures: cheating on the part of the photographers.

The longer wavelengths of sunlight (such as red or orange) are absorbed quickly by the surrounding water, so even to the naked eye everything appears blue-green in color. The loss of color not only increases vertically through the water column, but also horizontally, so subjects further away from the camera will also appear colorless and indistinct. This effect is true even in apparently clear water, such as that found around tropical coral reefs.

Underwater photographers solve this problem by combining two techniques. The first is to get the camera as close to the photographic subject as possible, minimizing the horizontal loss of color. Wide-angle lenses allow very close focus, or macro lenses, where the subject is often only inches away from the camera. Many serious underwater photographers consider any more than about 3 ft/1 m of water between camera and subject to be unacceptable. The second technique is the use of flash to restore any color lost vertically through the water column. Fill flash, used effectively, will "paint" in any missing colors by providing full-spectrum visible light to the overall exposure.

Re:Too late :(

[ckhorne]

As both an underwater photographer and a reef keeping hobbyist, I'd have to refute your claim. When you dive, your brain fills in the missing reds, yellows, etc - you don't notice the lack of color underwater near as much as you think you would. You definitely notice bleaching however - the coral is stark white at first, and then then becomes brown or green with algae.

It's certainly true that underwater strobes provide fill light to corals in exactly the same way that a studio photographer will use strobes to light his model. However, if the colors aren't there to begin with, they're not going to be magically created by the strobes.

In the end, the grandparent poster was correct- either the picture was from years ago or the photo may have been taken from a different part of the world.

Re:Too late :(

[robow]

Here is a cool trick, in the Summer take a hand full of M&M's, dive to the bottom of a pool and take a look. If you have more than about 4 feet of water over you you will not be able to tell the red from the blue. Red wavelengths of light are generally filtered out after a meter or so of water. The deeper you go the more color gets lost.

Re:Coral sperm?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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)...

Re:whatever

[tloh]

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.

A better idea

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Coral sperm?

[Nursie]

I can see three views here:

• Optimistic view - once we've sorted ourselves out, stopped acidifying and warming the sea, we can reintroduce them
• Pessimistic/interfering view - we can re-seed currently cooler waters later
• Klepto-biologist view - let's just keep hold of everything in case we need it later

Re:Coral sperm?

[blackicye]

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.

Re:Coral sperm?

[Hadlock]

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!!

 
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.

Re:Coral sperm?

[xelah]

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?

IANACS, so could someone explain?

[argStyopa]

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.

Re:IANACS, so could someone explain?

[Anonymous Coward]

No. In a number of ways. Firstly, corals and the group to which they belong (Phylum Cnidaria) are indeed very ancient animals, and are found as fossils all the way back to the latest Precambrian, probably about 600 million years ago or so. There are older fossils, but they are single-celled creatures. Those go back at least 3 billion years or more. So, oldest animals, maybe. Oldest lifeforms, not by a long shot.

Modern day corals are a bit of an oddity because they are very young. They date from the middle Triassic Period and younger (~230 million years ago). There were many types of reef-building corals in the earlier Paleozoic era (545-250 million years ago), but they *all* became extinct during the biggest mass extinction at the boundary between the Permian and Triassic periods. For ~20 million years there were no coral reefs in the world at all until the modern scleractinian corals evolved. It is thought that these originated from mostly soft-bodied sea-anemone-like cnidarians after the original Paleozoic corals were wiped out, and there are a few fossils known of similar creatures from the Paleozoic, but they were a minor group until the others became extinct.

So, you are right about the implication that corals can survive some pretty tough stuff. On the other hand they have been entirely wiped out by major changes and it took evolution of an entirely new group before coral reefs became reestablished after about 20 million years or so. It's more like they "started over" from non-reef-building forms than survived that event.

The modern-day corals are mainly endangered because of changes in ocean chemistry related to increasing CO2 content in the atmosphere and the effect this has on their ability to grow skeletons. This is quite bad for them. Extinction kind of bad. Probably not enough to cause all of them to become extinct everywhere, but pretty likely to decimate them if it keeps going.

Re:Holy fuck.

[rednip]

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.