The arid plains fringing Australia’s desert center are more suited to camels than blooms of coral, but here, hundreds of kilometers from the coast, a piece of the Great Barrier Reef has been put on ice.
Suspended in a liquid nitrogen chamber at minus-196 ?C, the 70 billion sperm and 22 billion coral embryos are part of an ambitious Australian-first project to preserve and perhaps one day regenerate the world-famous reef.
“We know the Great Barrier Reef is in deep, deep trouble because of a number of different things — global threats including climate change and acidification of waters as well as the warming of waters,” said Rebecca Spindler, the project’s director.
“We will never have as much genetic diversity again as we do right now on the reef, this is our last opportunity to save as much as we possibly can,” she said
Spindler’s team is working with Hawaii-based Mary Hagedorn from the Smithsonian Institute to collect and freeze samples from the World Heritage-listed reef, a sprawling and vivid natural wonder visible from space.
In order to maximize the amount of reproductive cells — gametes — collected the team cut away sections of the reef and took them back to land-based tanks to spawn, an event that only occurs for three days a year.
Experts from the Australian Institute of Marine Science, a major partner in the research, then tagged the reef sections and returned them to Orpheus Island, literally gluing them back to their original sites.
They plan to build up a catalogue of coral species as insurance against increasing bleaching linked to ocean warming and acidification and threats including chemical run-off, dredging and damage from cyclones and floods.
Eventually Spindler hopes to grow in-vitro reefs that can be used to reseed wild populations — something she is “confident” will be possible in a few years time. Experts at Dubbo’s Western Plains Zoo, Australia’s top wildlife reproductive lab, keep the frozen reef ticking over with regular liquid nitrogen top-ups while they explore optimal conditions for reviving and mating the coral.
Some 400km inland from the coast and far closer to desert than ocean, Dubbo seems an unlikely location for marine research. Giraffes, rhinos and elephants roam the 300-hectare zoo and the lab, which backs onto a mating enclosure for the endangered Tasmanian devil, is a hive of hormonal experiments using animal droppings and urine.
Spermologist Nana Satake did her doctorate in pig reproduction and usually works with African and native animals, but she sees the Reef Recovery Project as an exciting challenge.
“The Great Barrier Reef is really a bit of an enigma — there’s very little [research been] done on coral reef production from [its] coral species,” Satake said, describing it as the “rainforest of the ocean.”
“Coral is one of the most unique species of the world, really of any organism, because they actually have all types of reproduction — they can reproduce asexually and sexually,” she said.
Once more had been learned from this initial round of samples, taken from two foundational types of coral, Satake said work could be done on more endangered species.
Spindler said Australia’s corals had so far dodged the kind of damage from climate change, disease and human impacts seen in the world’s other reefs but described the next few years as critical, with some species already feared lost.
“We’ve had a little bit [of damage], but really just a taste, and I think the next five years are going to be incredibly important in terms of maintaining the health of the reef and capturing as much of that genetic diversity as we possibly can,” she said.
RARE EVENT: While some cultures have a negative view of eclipses, others see them as a chance to show how people can work together, a scientist said Stargazers across a swathe of the world marveled at a dramatic red “Blood Moon” during a rare total lunar eclipse in the early hours of yesterday morning. The celestial spectacle was visible in the Americas and Pacific and Atlantic oceans, as well as in the westernmost parts of Europe and Africa. The phenomenon happens when the sun, Earth and moon line up, causing our planet to cast a giant shadow across its satellite. But as the Earth’s shadow crept across the moon, it did not entirely blot out its white glow — instead the moon glowed a reddish color. This is because the
DEBT BREAK: Friedrich Merz has vowed to do ‘whatever it takes’ to free up more money for defense and infrastructure at a time of growing geopolitical uncertainty Germany’s likely next leader Friedrich Merz was set yesterday to defend his unprecedented plans to massively ramp up defense and infrastructure spending in the Bundestag as lawmakers begin debating the proposals. Merz unveiled the plans last week, vowing his center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU)/Christian Social Union (CSU) bloc and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) — in talks to form a coalition after last month’s elections — would quickly push them through before the end of the current legislature. Fraying Europe-US ties under US President Donald Trump have fueled calls for Germany, long dependent on the US security umbrella, to quickly
Romania’s electoral commission on Saturday excluded a second far-right hopeful, Diana Sosoaca, from May’s presidential election, amid rising tension in the run-up to the May rerun of the poll. Earlier this month, Romania’s Central Electoral Bureau barred Calin Georgescu, an independent who was polling at about 40 percent ahead of the rerun election. Georgescu, a fierce EU and NATO critic, shot to prominence in November last year when he unexpectedly topped a first round of presidential voting. However, Romania’s constitutional court annulled the election after claims of Russian interference and a “massive” social media promotion in his favor. On Saturday, an electoral commission statement
Chinese authorities increased pressure on CK Hutchison Holdings Ltd over its plan to sell its Panama ports stake by sharing a second newspaper commentary attacking the deal. The Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office on Saturday reposted a commentary originally published in Ta Kung Pao, saying the planned sale of the ports by the Hong Kong company had triggered deep concerns among Chinese people and questioned whether the deal was harming China and aiding evil. “Why were so many important ports transferred to ill-intentioned US forces so easily? What kind of political calculations are hidden in the so-called commercial behavior on the
RSS