 Welcome to another episode of Likeable Science here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host Ethan Allen. Likeable science is all about why you should care about science, why you should relate to science, why you should embrace science. Science should not be isolated until things are kept off distant laboratories done by strained scientists. Science is something we should all be involved with every day. Here to help me talk about that today is Dr. Mary Haganorn. Welcome, Mary. Thank you. Welcome back. After about four years ago, I think you're on one of my very early shows, so it's very nice to see you. Oh, sure. Mary has been working on coral reproduction for something like 14, 15 years now. It's made tremendous rides, runs now some of the world's largest cryopreservation facilities for coral eggs, coral sperm, and coral embryos, if I'm not mistaken. Right. Yeah, so that's good stuff. So a lot of people are going to say, corals, just under the water, why should we care about them? So coral reefs do a lot for us, and I think the major take-home message is, without coral, life on earth would not be sustained. So they're really important for us to survive as a species, as a population, as a group on earth. So coral and humans should like coral, because they help them survive. So make that link, if you would. Yeah, yeah. So some of the things that coral help us with is they're one of the oldest ecosystems on the planet, and one quarter of all life that lives in the ocean at some point lives on a coral reef. So a vast nursery ground, and they also help us think of the tsunamis we have had over the last five or so years. They protect cities and coastlines because they take the impacts of the waves before our city or our home. And certainly, I've been grateful for those coral reefs on the Kanioa side who have taken those impacts of the tsunamis that have come to Hawaii. They also provide us with novel sources of pharmaceuticals, and some of that is still very much in research. But when you think about the resistant antibacterial strains, corals may provide us with new types of pharmaceuticals that will help with those kinds of things. And moreover, they provide livelihood for lots of people on Earth. Almost one billion people on Earth depend on coral reefs and the fish that they house for their major source of protein, like in the Pacific here. And then finally, and I'm not sure if I said this, I might have already, but excuse me if I'm repeating myself, about 350, they add about 350 million, sorry, billion dollars to the economy every year. So it's quite substantial in terms of tourism and snorkeling and just, you know, they really help us. Yeah, the impacts on many, many different ways, that's fascinating to see. And of course, now corals face a lot of threats these days, right? I mean, the ocean temperature is getting warmer, which is bad for corals, the ocean is getting more acidic, which is bad for corals, the ocean is getting more polluted, which is bad for corals, right? So is this sort of what helped get you involved in this whole business of looking at coral reproduction? Yes. So back when I started, I understood that we were overusing fossil fuels. And by overusing fossil fuels, we're putting CO2 in the atmosphere and warming our atmosphere. 14 years ago, it wasn't quite as much in the public mind as it is today, but it was in the scientific literature. There was no question that we were warming our ocean and causing more acidity to our ocean. Now, this dual action of warming our ocean and overusing fossil fuels is causing stress for coral. So any time you cause stress for any living organism, think of humans and, you know, when you get too busy at work or wherever at school and you just are not eating right or not exercising right, you get stressed and you can easily catch a cold or any other kind of sort of disease that's floating around, it's often easy to get sick. And it's the same for coral as well, because they are animals, they are not rocks, and they are not plants. I know. I'm a misconception, right? Well, they have those qualities, you know. So just like we have skeleton in our body, like in my hand, which is very hard and rock-like, they produce their own skeleton. And they also have algae that live inside their cells, which are plants. So it's easy to see where people could get confused that they might be a plant or they might be a rock, but they're really living organisms, they're animals, and they reproduce. Right. And that's really what you've made the focus of your work over the last few years. Because they reproduce the way animals typically do. Some produce spurns, some produce eggs, these meet up, happy, happy, they form a little embryo and that grows and at some point drifts around or swims around, settles somewhere and new coral appears. Exactly. But this was not well studied, certainly 15 years ago, right? This whole process was not well studied. You're right in some respect that the first time people even understood that coral did these mass sponnings was in 1985. So it's relatively, oh, then it quotes, relatively recent that we understand that coral reproduce and how they reproduce, but I think what's come more recently, say in the last five to seven years, is the effect of these changes to the ocean and how it's affecting, dramatically affecting reproduction, because as the oceans are warming, we get these things called bleaching events. And it's a stressful event which causes the algae that lives inside the coral. Now these algae are critical for sustaining the coral's life because the algae takes sunlight and it produces sugars and it passes those sugars to the coral. So they basically feed the coral. And the coral, in turn, protects the algae. Exactly. Exactly. So it's a mutualistic. Exactly. And we call that symbiosis. And the, so when the coral gets stressed, what happens is that the symbiodinium start going through, it's called oxidator stress, and they are often, they go through a series of physiological events that damages their photosynthesis and they leave or get expelled by the coral. And so then the coral looks bleached. And I'll just use this example here, and this is a 3D printed coral, but it looks very white and it's really just showing what a coral model might look like. And so when coral bleached, they have this very white look to them because we're looking through their tissue, kind of like the invisible man that's that model you put together when you're a kid. You look through their skin and you can see their skeleton. And so in 2014 and 15, we had major bleaching events here in Hawaii. And many people would stop me and go, what is wrong with the coral? Because they could see from their cars, as they drove over H3 or in Kailua or wherever it might be, they could see that the corals were white. It was very clear that they were white. And people were very disturbed by this change in the coral. So these bleaching events are becoming much more common around the world. And they're driven by the overuse of fossil fuels and the CO2 in our atmosphere. And as we get more and more bleaching events, it's stressing the coral and it's impacting the reproduction. So they're not reproducing as they did, say, 20 or even 30 years ago. And they reproduce very sort of synchronously, right? They all, some very odd combination of tides, moon, time of day, they all know that this is the perfect time. And they all release sperm and release eggs in one mass, which, of course, sort of have to do. It's a big ocean, right? If you just dribble them out, they never find each other, right? No, that's very right. And I think the thing that's very fascinating about the coral invertebrates in particular is they obviously, they can't move. So many animals synchronized by moving together, they can go to one spot or something like that, migrate, but coral can't do that. And they have, there's only about 10 cells within a coral body, but they have proteins that are very similar to the proteins that are in our eye. And so they can take moonlight and sunlight and process the change in the sun and the moon. And so in addition to warming waters, which happens in the summer, the sun and the moon becomes very important to their circadian rhythm. And that means we have a clock, it's called a circadian clock. All animals have a circadian clock, it's in their DNA. And so they synchronize their spawning based on this sun and the moon temperature and their circadian clock. Yeah, that's critical. And of course, yeah, as you say, they're warming the oceans, they're being more stressed, a number of things could desynchronize that would make it harder for them to sink and sink. So then when did you get this sort of this idea that the way to conserve them and maybe to preserve the species was to sort of gather the sperm, gather the embryos? So what I do, just the most simply, simple way to think about it is I use human fertility techniques, exactly the same things like if you were, your family member would go to, you know, a clinic, that's the sorts of questions, the sorts of cells, the sorts of approaches that you would experience there are exactly the same thing that we do with coral. So the coral, we know when the coral are going to spawn, so our next spawn here in Hawaii is going to be the night of June 14th at 9 p.m. You're welcome to come. And so here in Hawaii, the corals are very synchronized. And so we can predict when they're going to spawn and prepare for that. And there are many ways we do that, we can either go out and collect a small sample and bring it into our flow through our sea water system, or we can put nets over the coral and collect the material that way. Now, many corals produce these things called egg sperm bundles. And I'll use my hands here a little bit. So think of it as a small ball of fat with many different eggs, like somewhere between 10 and 20, depending on the species. And in the center of that ball of eggs is a sperm packet. And so corals are hermaphrodites, meaning they can produce either sperm or eggs, so they have ovaries and testes. And they package that egg sperm bundle up about two days or a day before they're about to spawn. And then at the time of spawning, they release these and they gently flow rise in the water column to the surface. We often collect them in kayaks and we scoop them off the surface, or as I said, we can go ahead of time and get small fragments and bring them into our water tables. Wow, I hadn't realized that. So are they primarily self-fertilizing then, or do they break apart then? Yeah, that's a really good question. Some species do, not many do, but those are the pioneering species. So species that go into new environments, some of those can self-fertilize, but most do not. And so they have to break apart, the eggs have to hydrate or get expand and get ready for fertilization. And the sperm has to swim away and find a near neighbor. OK, wow, that's it. It's very complicated. It is complicated, no. And of course, this is not just a Hawaiian problem. This is in the Caribbean, this is around Australia. It's basically all tropical islands basically have. All over the world. It is a global issue. And it's pretty bad everywhere, right? Some places are better than others. If you think about some of the troubles that the Great Barrier Reef has recently experienced in the 2016 bleaching event, one third of the northern Great Barrier Reef died. Just died. They didn't bleach. They died. They bleached and then died. Just because you bleach doesn't mean you die. You can recover if you get your algae back again. But the southern Great Barrier Reef is still in good shape. And there's areas there that still have a lot of diversity. And hopefully the northern Great Barrier Reef will recover. But I think that was a huge wake-up call for many biologists, coral biologists in particular in Australia, to think that so much of the Great Barrier Reef could just die in just short order. Right. I think there's some reefs around parts of Palau that are still doing quite well, even though the water has warmed. So there's obviously a lot of unknowns here still. Exactly. And I think that's the thing that gives me hope, is that we can go ahead and start cry preserving and archiving some of this material. But we also want to save it for the near future, so that, say, we do have something like the Great Barrier Reef has a problem, we could then use our frozen sperm and help bring those populations back again. And in the near future, we hope to do this thing called assisted gene migration, where we take, say, sperm from Palau and perhaps, and this is, we're not doing this right now, but it's something that we could do. We could take our frozen sperm from the corals in Palau that are doing quite well and perhaps bring them to another area and cross-fertilize them. Wow. So we have the ability to move around the really robust genes from the corals who are doing well. We have the capacity to do, to move it around the world. The question is, do people want to do that? Is there permitting to do that? And is it allowed? So we have the capacity. We just don't, we're just not doing that right now. And when we come back, we're going to dig in much more deeply into this, what can we do? What are we doing to bring corals back? Right now, we're going to take a little break. I'm Ethan Allen. Mary Hagedorn is with me here in the ThinkTech studios. We're talking about reef reproduction and restoration. And we'll be back in one minute. Aloha, I'm Keeley Ikeena, and I'm here every other week on Mondays at 2 o'clock PM on ThinkTech Hawaii's Hawaii Together. In Hawaii Together, we talk with some of the most fascinating people in the islands about working together, working together for a better economy, government, and society. So I invite you into our conversation every other Monday at 2 PM on ThinkTech Hawaii Broadcast Network. Join us for Hawaii Together. I'm Keeley Ikeena. Aloha. Aloha. I'm Dave Stevens, host of the Cyber Underground. This is where we discuss everything that relates to computers that's going to scare you out of your mind. So come join us every week here on ThinkTechHawaii.com 1 PM on Friday afternoons. And then you can go see all our episodes on YouTube. Just look up the Cyber Underground on YouTube. All our shows will show up. And please follow us. We're always giving you current, relevant information to protect you, keeping you safe. Aloha. And we're back here on Likeable Science on ThinkTech Hawaii. Dr. Mary Haginorn has joined me, your host, Ethan Allen of Likeable Science here in ThinkTech Studios. And we're talking about coral reefs and coral reproduction and coral reef regeneration, basically. We were talking the first half of the show about how coral reefs aren't being trouble worldwide. They've been hit by sort of the triple whammy of rising temperatures, increasing acidity, and some pollution, all of which stress the corals and inhibit their reproduction. Mary has gathered up sperm and eggs and embryos from many types of coral in many places and stuffed them in super cold freezers, basically, where she can actually pull them back out and make voila coral again, right? But you do more stuff than that, right, really, now, right? So let me just briefly summarize what you just said. We have over 20 species of coral now that many of them from the Great Barrier Reef that we've frozen the sperm for. And we have, actually, many, many samples from those. Those live in Taronga Zoo in Australia. And then we have sperm from the Caribbean and from Hawaii that are stored at USDA in Fort Collins. The, in addition, now, we're starting to cryopreserve a variety of different types of material. We're working on larvae. Eggs are still difficult, but we're gonna try them this summer. And we have some very high-tech ways of freezing them and thawing them. We actually use lasers to thaw them super fast, like, at millions of degrees per minute, because one of the things that can really damage large tissue, like an embryo is large. A human embryo is, say, less than a grain of sand. But a coral embryo is more like a tapioca bead. So they're largely different in volume and size. So that makes a difference in terms of their physics and how water and the antifreeze that we need to get into them moves in and out. And so we worked on larvae first, because that was easier, and we'll try eggs this summer. But one of the things that can happen when you're freezing something is that an ice crystal can form inside, or many ice crystals. And that can tear the material apart. We do this all the time in our home. If you don't cover your ice cream appropriately, you'll get big ice crystals growing, and it tastes terrible. We call it freezer burn. But it's really those big ice crystals that are growing. And that can happen in cryopreserved material as well. And you don't want that. So by using lasers and warming them up, we warm them up at 4 million degrees per minute. It's very fast. Not very long, actually. Yeah, no, no. Exactly, exactly. We were able to then stop the, there's some ice crystals there, but we stopped them from growing. So they just go into stasis, which is perfect, and then material's perfect. So in addition, and I want to point out this show and tell I brought, there's a small piece of coral on a silver pin outside the glass there. And we call them coral microfragments. They're dead. It's just the skeleton that you're looking at right now. But what we do is we cut them this small, and then we allow them to recover. They heal over. And then we're doing a number of experiments. And our goal over the next six months is to get these live, so they would look green or green brown, coral microfragments, to live through our cryopreservation process and to come back out and be alive. And there's many ways we know that they're alive. They actually, coral have tentacles. If you look at them very carefully, you can see their tentacles waving in the air. And actually we use behavior more than anything else to show that the coral are alive. We look to see if they're waving their tentacles around. So you could actually, in theory, freeze pieces of coral of that size and then bring them back to life. Hopefully, that's the goal. So these are more as adult corals. Yeah. And so then the thing about the difficult things about working on coral reproduction is you only have about two nights a year that you can work on this. And it's only like about four hours each night. So you have eight hours to do all of the work that you want to do. And in Hawaii, it's a little bit longer because we have coral reproduction more extended. The gripper if it's not, it's just one and done basically. But with these microfragments here that we have in front of us, we could potentially work almost throughout the year because we could go, we actually take a tiny little microdremel. It's like dental tools. And we just take a tiny little chip out of the coral. We don't damage it at all. And we put them on those silver pins and we stick them on material that raises them above the ground in our water table. And we let them there for about a week and then we start our work on them. All right. And then with the idea of being eventually you essentially replant that on some substrate and set that back in the ocean and that grows back up into a full-size coral again. Yeah, there's some amazing work that's being done by groups in Florida. One in particular is a moat marine lab and they're the ones who really have pushed forward this idea of microfragments. And they can take microfragments and put them in different combinations like close together and they can grow them so they merge and they grow much faster and they reproduce much more quickly. Interesting. They like being with another. There's a critical mass. Yeah, so it's a way to accelerate the growth of the coral. So if we can freeze these, we think it's gonna be transformative in terms of the way we can conserve reefs around the world. Excellent, because I recall when back in 2011 you were saying you thought the coral reefs were in grave danger some three or four decades out and the estimates only sort of gone down from there, right? So... Yeah, you know, I guess I'm a little more, I don't know, I'm a little more patient now, I'm a little more hopeful. I think there are places in the world like you mentioned Palau where corals are adapting and I'm hoping that people are really, they're waking up about coral and I think they would like to do something about it. And so I'm hopeful. Okay, well, I don't know, that's great. I mean, you gotta have hope to do this kind of work, right? And it's critical stuff because again, another key role with these reefs play in life cycles of fish, marine invertebrates, everything the fish eat. So yeah, coral reefs collapse and the fisheries collapse and people's livelihoods collapse and then people collapse, right? Well, one thing we know for sure is that hunger will increase. If reefs start to fail, hunger will increase around the world and that's not a good scenario at all. I don't know. I mean, already the major fisheries around the globe, most of them are already being unsustainably fished and overfished and in decline. Yes, yes. And it's only projected to get worse, as I understand it. Absolutely. So all the more reason that we need to give the coral every bit of a helping hand we can. Yes, absolutely. So I mean, do you have a set goal here? Are you gonna, you know, re-colonize the great barrier reef or? I do have a goal and so if this, these microfragments and other types of material that we are working on are successful, we know the sperm is successful, we know the larvae is successful, but it's being successful in the lab and then being able to make that applicable for restoration. So it's a very big difference between that. So there's some spin-up that you have to do to go from sort of a small scale to large scale. So we have to be engaged with that, but I would very much like to have teams that went around the world in every ocean that could engage in some kind of conservation and cryopreservation for coral and be banking them in every ocean. So there's not, the unfortunate thing is we don't have repositories in every ocean that material can go to and the permitting in some countries is very difficult now. They don't want people taking genetic material out of the country, which is completely understandable because of biopiracy. But I'm hoping that in the future that they'll make exceptions for science because we aren't making any money off of it and we're there to help them and maintain their genetic resources. Right, and since the oceans a few decades now are likely to be a different place, you actually probably need a different mix of types of corals to have some new hybrid species that has the desired characteristics of being acid tolerant, heat tolerant, plastic tolerant. Exactly, and some of that's happening already. We're starting to see a lot of hybridizations in the oceans. I mean, I was recently... Natural hybridizations? Yeah, yeah, I mean, there's one, there's a very famous one in the Caribbean, it's called Acropora prolifera. It started hybridizing in the 50s. So the Caribbean has been ahead of the game here for good or for bad. But also I was in Morena recently and there was just so many different, I just had to call them Acropora complex. And Acropora is the major species or genus, sorry, that are reef building. And you couldn't tell one species from the other because they just were so mixed. And I'm maybe a good systematist who really did this for their life, could tell, but they just looked so similar. Interesting, interesting. Well, it's great to know that the mother nature herself is actually doing some of this work for you, right? Yeah, she's taking a hand way ahead of us. But it's also most excellent valuable that you're doing this and sort of wrapping it around back to our starting comments. This is, I mean, really, there's, in some sense, no more important work to be done, right? For me, there's many importance that work to be done, but as a marine biologist, for me, there's... Right, yeah, if the coral reefs do fall apart, yes, and the oceans are in big trouble, basically, as we know them. And since what one out of every two breaths we hate come from the algae in the oceans. Yeah, and we don't really know how the coral reefs interact with algae so that our oxygen could be threatened. We don't know the answer, you know? We're messing with a very big, complex system and if you pull enough parts of it out, does everything else crash? Yeah, I kind of liken it to the 2008 financial crash in the United States. It just rippled across the globe, you know? Yeah, and this could conceivably do a very similar thing. Wow. We hope it doesn't. Yeah, we hope it doesn't, and due to good people like yourself, it's looking like maybe there's hope. I hope so. All right. I want now, before we wrap up here, I'm going to take a side step here and ask you a completely off the wall question, nothing to do with coral at all. But if you could have the superpower of either flying or being invisible, which would you choose and why? Oh, yeah, that's a good one. I think I would choose being invisible because I think that that allows you to go places and understand things that you wouldn't necessarily be able. I can fly on a plane, right? But I can't be invisible. So I think I would choose being invisible just to increase the amount of understanding that I had both politically, politically, mostly. Because many things are set in confidence, and I would obviously be eavesdropping, but I think we understand complex things when we are engaged in conversations and being invisible would be a good one. Excellent, excellent. Well, thank you very much, Mary. Mary Haggarorn from the Smithsonian is here, has been telling us all about coral and how much she's doing the amazing work on coral reproduction and restoration of coral reefs. Thank you so much. I look forward to talking to you in a few more years and we'll see what things are going on. Thank you so much, Ethan. I hope you will come back and join us next week on Likeable Science.