For most of us, the colorful, otherworldly marinescapes of coral reefs are as remote as the alien landscapes of the moon. We rarely, if ever, experience these underwater wonderlands for ourselves — we are, after all, air-breathing, terrestrial creatures mostly cocooned in cities.
It is easy not to notice the perilous state they are in: We have lost 50 percent of coral reefs in the past 20 years and more than 90 percent are expected to die by 2050, a presentation at the Ocean Sciences Meeting in San Diego, California, earlier this year showed.
As the oceans heat further and turn more acidic, owing to rising carbon emissions, coral reefs are tipped to become the world’s first ecosystems to become extinct because of us.
Illustration: Mountain People
Just because we do not see them does not mean that we will not miss them. For, as we are belatedly discovering, the nice, dry human world that we have made for ourselves is dependent on the planet’s natural systems and coral reefs are no exception.
They protect our coastlands from erosion, they are the nurseries for the fish we eat and they harbor the plankton that produce the oxygen we breathe.
Globally, coral reefs support a quarter of all marine life and the livelihoods of 1 billion people.
Coral reefs are ancient and highly adaptable — they first emerged nearly 500 million years ago. Those coral went extinct, and the coral that we have now first appeared 240 million years ago.
The difference now is the extreme pace of change. Coral is slow-growing and a reef takes about 10 years to fully recover after a single bleaching event.
By 2049, we are expecting annual bleaching events in the tropics, pushing reefs beyond recovery. It is a grim prospect and one of the reasons that in 2015, the world’s nations pledged to limit global warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, a temperature that would enable coral reefs to survive. It remains far from clear whether we will meet this goal.
However, while we still have reefs, we still have hope. Some will likely do better than others — some already are — and scientists are trying to work out the reason in a bid to build resilience elsewhere.
As with climate change, human activity is implicated. For instance, studies show that reefs are more likely to recover from a heating event if they are protected from other stresses, such as overfishing, pollution from agriculture and boat damage.
With the future of the world’s ecological and human systems now so deeply interconnected, a new movement in reef conservation is putting social systems at its heart, and explicitly building resilience into human and ecological systems in tandem.
In other words, protecting nature means protecting people. The Coral Reef Alliance, for instance, is working with reef-dependent fishing communities in Honduras.
Overfishing hits reefs in a number of ways, including by removing herbivores, such as parrotfish, whose grazing constrains coral-damaging algae.
The non-governmental organization helps with boat purchases for reef patrols, providing salaried key positions on the ground and helping diversify income streams so people are less reliant on exploiting vulnerable ecosystems.
“They’re not alternative livelihoods, because nobody’s going to fully give up fishing. But can we provide them with alternatives for when there’s a fisheries closure to protect the reef, so they can still provide food and an income for their families,” Coral Reef Alliance director Madhavi Colton said. “We’re building resilience in the human community and that translates to resilience in the coral reef community as well.”
The organization uses economic indicators as well as data collected by scientists in the community, which is then presented back to the community.
“So they’ve been able to see that the fish stocks are increasing because of their actions,” Colton said.
A key test was when their lagoons off the island of Roatan were in March and April protected with a one-month closure.
“This year, with COVID-19, we weren’t sure if the community was going to want to do that. But because they’ve seen such dramatic increases in biomass after closures in past years, they decided to,” Colton said. “We’re building community support for regulations by showing how they benefit the community.”
The organization is also reforesting inland to reduce sediment flows and has built a wastewater treatment facility.
“We estimate we’ve prevented around 28.5 million gallons [96.5 million liters] of sewage from being directly discharged onto the reef. And as a result of that facility, the public beach in West End was given a flag for safe swimming by US standards,” Colton said.
BUILDING RESILIENCY
The hope is that by building resilience, coral reefs and the communities that depend on them will be able to adapt and survive if the climate stabilizes. If the worst happens, it should help people adjust to living with an extinct reef.
UNESCO is piloting a similar community-focused initiative called Resilient Reefs, after finding that 21 of its 29 World Heritage-listed coral reef sites were already degraded.
Meanwhile, in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, which has lost half of its coral in the past five years, an innovative project is putting the tourism industry, which is 90 percent reliant on the reef, at the heart not just of reef protection, but of actively healing the reef.
“We’re trying to build a more sustainable and resilient reef economy, by equipping workers with the skills and tools to propagate corals from the good parts of the reef to help rebuild the poor parts of the reef, so that the ecosystem they rely on for their livelihoods is retained,” said David Suggett, a marine biologist and associate professor at the University of Technology Sydney.
Suggett’s coral nurture program, which has been running for four years, relies on coral gardening, which was first developed in the Caribbean after disease nearly wiped out the only three species of native acropora (hard, branching) coral there.
That laborious process involved gluing fragments of living coral from healthy parts of the reef on to dead coral skeletons or artificial reef structures. The idea is to hasten a natural process whereby coral fragments or polyps are carried on currents and fix themselves on a reef, repopulating it. The expense and time-consuming nature of such projects means that they have been largely dismissed, but the method has proved worth the efforts in the Caribbean: This year, acropora saved from the brink of extinction began spawning naturally.
Suggett’s team has designed a coral clip that is safer than glue — and much faster to apply.
“Tour operators can clip several hundred coral fragments on to the reef in each dive — each takes seconds — and within one to two months, the coral naturally glues itself on to the reef and starts growing. The clip just degrades over time,” Suggett said.
The scale of the operation has meant that the team has had to create nurseries to supply a stock of coral, by propagating parent lines.
The team also uses coral in vitro fertilization, collecting eggs and sperm and fertilizing them away from predators until they grow into baby coral that can be injected back on to the reef in a controlled manner.
“So you bypass that really early stage where everything’s really susceptible to getting eaten,” Suggett said, adding that the project gives tour operators resilience, enabling them to be much more adaptive in the face of change.
“This year, during COVID-19, when tourism shut down overnight, the tour operators who were equipped with the new tools and workflows for coral gardening were able to repurpose their businesses and ride out the downturn, while others closed,” he said.
Just as diversification builds resilience for livelihoods, so it is essential for reef ecosystems, and reef networks connected by ocean currents, to allow migrating larvae move and adapt.
Malin Pinsky, an associate professor at Rutgers University, who led one recent study, said: “We found that a diversity of reef types provides the variety that evolution depends on. We need to conserve hot sites, which are important sources of heat-tolerant corals, as well as colder sites that can become important future habitats.”
Coral are already migrating in the directions of the poles, showing up in Japan, in places that used to be covered in kelp, and in southern Australia, “which is another sign of hope,” he added.
In the face of profound global change, it is not enough to simply protect reefs from stress: Active intervention and adaptation is required, from coral gardening to physically removing coral predators, such as crown-of-thorns starfish.
Others want to intervene further by selectively implanting heat-tolerant varieties, including lab-grown polyps, or even using clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, a rapid gene-editing technology, to produce genetically engineered versions. Researchers last year described 23 different ways to improve the resilience and persistence of coral reefs.
“It took several years for us to get a permit to experimentally move heat-tolerant corals from hot mangrove lagoons out to the reefs, a journey that polyps could make naturally,” Suggett said. “So it will take some time before coral are allowed to be introduced from elsewhere.”
HEAT ADAPTATION
Those experiments showed that heat-adapted coral can thrive in new environments and could be an important source of reef regeneration.
One place to look would be the Gulf of Aqaba in the northern Red Sea. Due to a quirk of geology, the coral there have adapted to harsh hot conditions, with the result that they are not simply heat-tolerant, they thrive better as the water heats, growing faster.
“Most corals struggle to survive temperatures just 1°C above the summer maximum, but Aqaba corals are super-thermally resilient, even in acidic waters, and cope with temperatures 6°C — even 7°C — hotter,” said Karine Kleinhaus, an associate professor at Stony Brook University in New York.
She believes that these coral represent a precious and unique population — they could be the last coral reefs standing at the end of the century. However, they are currently poorly protected, threatened by pollution and rampant coastal development, which compromises their resilience.
What coral reefs are experiencing right now amounts to a massive evolutionary selection pressure, something that Michael Webster, a research scientist at New York University who, unusually, is confident that they will get through.
“Take the northern Great Barrier Reef, with three years of back-to-back bleaching. In some places, 70 percent of the coral was lost. What that means is 30 percent of the coral survived, perhaps because it is more tolerant. Those are the coral that produce the next generation, which inherits some of those traits,” he said.
Indeed, one study showed that coral that in 2016 survived bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef had twice the average heat tolerance the following year. Separate lab research reveals that coral can pass on their adaptive strategies to their offspring .
Timing is everything, though. When coral dies or is destroyed, the reef shrinks, a problem exacerbated by the current sea level rise, making it harder for new coral to grow because their habitat is depth-specific.
When you lose a coral reef, you are losing the entire ecosystem, not simply a few species of coral. It means we need to ask hard questions about what we value in our reefs and what we are trying to protect in terms of functionality.
Implanting thermal extremophiles, such as coral from Aqaba, could speed up the evolutionary process of heat adaptation, but means dramatically changing the ecosystem — the opposite of traditional conservation — and comes with risks.
Artificial — even 3D printed — reefs can provide structure and researchers are even experimenting with artificial reef noise. Using underwater loudspeakers to play the sounds of a healthy reef in degraded areas has been shown to attract fish populations back to the area, helping to kick-start recovery of the ecosystem.
“For evolution to occur quickly usually requires a lot of death: That is the natural selection signal. Right now, we’re in the ugly beginning of that process,” Webster said. “I believe a lot of coral are going to get through this bottleneck. They’re not going to go extinct, they’re going to figure out a way to pace with climate change, so long as we give them some room.”
In other words, it would depend on good reef management and whether humanity can get a handle on climate change. Given the scale of bleaching globally, it is a brave prediction — let us hope that he is right.
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