 Hey, back with Community Matters. It feels very scientific today at four o'clock on a given Tuesday with Eva Mayarova, who is a researcher in coral here in Hawaii. She's from the Czech Republic and we want to trace her footsteps and find out what she's learned over the years and what motivates her. Welcome to the show Eva. Nice to see you. Hello Jay. Thank you for having me. So your laboratory is the Coral Research Laboratory. Can you describe one and where your laboratory is, how it's staffed, what it's done, what it's doing now? Yes. So we are located at Coconut Island within the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, which is a department under University of Hawaii at Manoa. And our lab is located there and it was founded by Dr. Ruth Gates. Many years ago, unfortunately, Ruth left us three years ago and we decided to go on and continue in her footsteps and continue doing what she was so passionate about. And this was trying to find way how to save corals, how to protect and save corals in the changing world. So this is what we are doing now under the name of Coral Resilience Lab. And we are a group of Ruth descendants. Let's say we are a group of young early career scientists, a lot of students, a lot of volunteers, some technicians. So we are really a very diverse group of people passionate about corals. Yes, that's the magic word passionate because you know you can't do the kind of drill down biochemical science you're talking about without being passionate. You probably wake up three o'clock in the morning and see little visions of molecules, I bet. Yes, yes, it does happen to me. Yes, I already had some dreams that led me to some discoveries. So let's talk about how you got from the Czech Republic to here and how you learned to care about molecular science and research in ocean research like this. From a country that was landlocked and mostly landlocked back in Europe. And now we're talking about, you know, we're talking about ocean science. Yeah, yes, so that's why I'm not marine biologist but I'm molecular biologist and geneticist because we have no sea. So it would be kind of ridiculous to study marine biology in my country. But despite the fact we have no sea, we have a lot of divers and dive clubs and there is a big community of people who like to dive. So I started diving as part of university course with other students. So it was really cool and nice and during the year we were diving in fresh water in my country. But then during summer we were going to the closest localities. So Mediterranean Sea, Montenegro, Croatia or to Egypt. So Egypt was actually the first underwater world I've seen in my life. And yet it's still the best so far, I must say. So that's where I fell in love, like literally fell in love at first sight with marine life and underwater world. But yeah, so I was still a molecular biologist and geneticist. So there was like very long way to move to marine biologists. So I have never actually changed to being marine biologists. I'm still a molecular biologist and geneticist. I just don't study humans anymore. I study corals. There's no coral in the Mediterranean, is it? Well there are some corals, but it's not the same as here. It's definitely not tropical coral reefs. Let's take them just a moment to digress and tell people what coral is. It's not just jewelry, right? Yes, oh, I hope not. So coral, many people will think it's just a stone, maybe some animals living in it. But actually coral is very interesting organism because it is basically an animal that secretes stone-like structure as its backbone. And then it hosts little unicellular algae, so plants in its tissue, so that it gets energy from them. So it's everything you can imagine. It's a stone, it's an animal, it's a plant. All these together forms a colony called coral. So they're living beings and they are in a community, a colony, and I guess they're interdependent. How long do they live? What's it like and what's the sex life of a coral? So they live, they are very long-lived animals. You would say that in certain form they are immortal. So it means that they, a lot of scientists think that they can't die of age. Many of these rebuilding big corals, we know that they lived here for even thousands of years. If I remember well, the longest living coral has been described living more than 10,000 years. Maybe the record has been broken now, but that's why there is a lot of assumptions that corals can't die of age. But obviously they can die of all other ways, but not with age. And yeah, their sexual life, it's coral, it's stationary, it can't really move. So you can imagine it's probably not the most exciting thing about corals, even though it can be really beautiful. So my experience, for example, here from Kaneohebe is that during summer, during summer month, if you go around New Moon and you will go into Kaneohebe at around 8.45 in the evening, you'll suddenly see a lot of little white pearls floating everywhere around you. And these pearls are called bundles. And these bundles are actually egg and sperm together, because there is one coral species, Montepora capetata, and this species is releasing these bundles to reproduce. So there's a lot of these bundles that will float to the surface, and then they will break. Sperm and egg are released, and then there is fertilization that occurs everywhere in the ocean, and little embryos first appear, then they transform into swimming glaries. And then these swimming larvae, they will swim and try to find a little hiding place somewhere on the reef. They settle down, and that's how new coral is born. And then you have to wait years and years until you are able to see it. They are shy, aren't they? Yes, they are shy. Can you go down in the ocean there and grab those little little things and take them back to the laboratory and examine them? Yes, so that's exactly what we are doing. So we have, so we either collect them in the field, meaning in the water of Kaneohebe, and either we put, it's sort of, it's not a fishing net, but it's a kind of net with a tupperware on the top of it. So when the coral releases all these bundles, they will go into the tupperware, and then all this is over, they'll just close the tupperware, turn it around, and that's how we collect the bundles of individual corals, individual colonies. So yeah, this is what we do. This is how we spend our summer nights here in Kaneohebe. And you can watch them grow. You can create, I don't want to say artificial, but say laboratory colonies of coral that way. Yes, yes, that's exactly what we do. I have a colleague who is really crazy about rearing little corals. So every year he will rear literally tens of thousands of larvae into adults. But the problem is, it's not a problem, that's evolution, that's how it goes, that corals, they will release millions of larvae during one night, but then the mortality is almost 100%. So almost all of them will die because something will eat them. Obviously, that's like a really, really good source of fat, of like all nutrition, nutrients, sorry. Or they will settle at the wrong place, that like a stone that will flip over, so they will die buried in the sun, or they just died buried in the sun because there is a wave coming, et cetera, et cetera. So mortality is really high. In our lab, we are able to get tens of corals of like visible sized corals every year for our experiments. So that's, and we consider this very successful. Have any idea in the wild, how many of the larvae survive and how many die? It must be relatively, there's a lot of them, but it must be relatively small percent actually survive in the colony. Yes, it's definitely less than 0.1%. So it's way less than this. So it's way less than one in a thousand larvae that survives. I don't know the exact number. I don't know if anyone knows the exact number, but it's at least at maximum, sorry, it's at maximum one in a thousand larvae that will survive. So theoretically, in a laboratory, you could generate larvae. You could make them grow them. You could grow them in small numbers and in big numbers. And then you can take them back into the wild and you can create a coral reef that way if you treat them properly. Am I right? Yes. So in theory, this is exactly one of the theories of how to say coral reefs, how to make them more resilient is to out plan more resilient corals on the reef. But the most problematic part is that corals, they grow so slow that some corals won't even grow one inch per year. So this growth rate is limiting almost everything we do when we work with juveniles with freshly born corals. It will take them three, four years to be the size that can be transplanted like put out in the field. But then it doesn't mean that they will survive because they will still be very, very small. So that's the biggest limitation. So if you have 50 years, then yes, definitely you can create a reef like this, but we don't have 50 years. We don't have that. And the other thing is people think of coral as the structure, the structure in the water. They don't necessarily think of coral as separate animals, but I suppose I could go in the water and I could take one off, just one. And it'd be a distinct, defined coral animal. And how big would it be? And how would I take it off? And what would it be like? Would it hurt me in any way? So it definitely depends on the type of coral. But when we talk about what you call one animal, I would probably say one poly. So corals, they have polyps. And if you go, if you take your mask and your snorkel and you'll dive at the reef, and you'll stay very stale by a coral and you wait. Eventually these polyps will go out of the skeleton and you will be able to see tentacles with like little balls at the end of the tentacles. These are stinging cells. So that answers a little bit your question, your question. Yes, they can definitely hurt you. Some corals are stinging corals. Some people can be allergic to corals. They belong to the very same group as jellyfish. So it's the same like jellyfish. Some jellyfish will hurt you, some won't. But in general, the rule of thumb is never touch any coral. And it's not only because of the corals, but you don't know what's living inside of them. There is like a lot of hiding places. There can be fish. There can be aggressive fish. There can be cone snails around it. Really a lot of stuff that can hurt you. And also you can cut yourself. Corals can be pretty sharp. So you can have wounds, cuts, and injuries like this. And they can get pretty badly infected. So I would definitely recommend not to bring any corals back home because of all these things. When I first arrived here, you know, this is a long time ago Eva, I went down to Alamo Water Beach Park. And there was a swimming area. And beyond that, there was a coral reef. And so that's beautiful. I can walk on that. And I started walking on it. And I felt a funny sensation of the corals penetrating the bottom of my feet. And when I got back to the shore, I had cuts all over my feet. And ultimately, that got infected. It was quite an issue for me. It was when I arrived, it was like, welcome Aloha. And what was happening there? Was that bacteria? Was that a toxin of some kind? Yeah. So basically, if it gets infected pretty badly, I believe it's bacterial. You know, I won't tell 100% sure, but very probably it's bacterial. Marine world is totally different from what we are used to. Bacteria, viruses living there, all the animals sitting there, they just live differently than we live here on the land. So our body is not used to it. Our immune system is not used to these bacteria. So it can be very bad if you hurt yourself underwater. Yes. So one thing we, well, let's, let's say I want to know what it takes to make a coral animal happy. How can I tell the coral is happy? What do you do in the laboratory and what happens in the wild in the field to make the coral healthy, happy, and live a long time? And on the flip side of that, what does it take to make a coral die and get sick and die? So a happy coral is a coral that has nice bright corals, colors. It will sit somewhere on the reef. It will have a fair amount of sunshine. It will have, of course, saltwater around itself. And it will have this symbiotic algae symbiotic plant in its tissue. So these symbiotic plants, as you might know, plants can photosynthesize. So they can create their own energy from sun as it serves. And they create sugars like this. And that's, that's how plants actually like feed themselves. So this is exactly what the symbiotic plants do in coral. They are like a little cover plants of the coral. So coral provide them shelter and provide them with some nutrients. And these algae will give him back sugar to feed the coral. And a lot of these, what we call a reef building corals, so corals that literally build the reef, these like majestic, big corals, they are totally dependent on this kind of energy income. They are not hunters, even though sometimes they can hunt with the little tentacles, you know, they can hunt a little prey, but it won't definitely feed them for long. So a happy coral has a good share of these symbiotic algae in its tissue. What happens when the coral gets stressed or unhappy is that these algae leave. So there's a lot of theories why they leave. We don't know for sure. This is one of the research that I'm doing with my team is that we are trying to understand this mechanism, what actually happens when the algae leaves. But visually what you can see is that the coral will bleach. It means that it will change its color to white. Sometimes it will even be like bluish to pinkish little fluorescent colors. It can get pretty wild. But the coral definitely looks unhealthy to a trained eye. And this is something you can see during summer months here in Hawaii. We already had multiple mass bleaching events where a majority of corals around the island of Oahu will go white and bleach. So this is definitely a part when coral is not happy because it's starving. It is very prone to be infected by viruses. It can't really defend any harmful algae trying to overgrow it. It's a sick coral basically. Not doing very well. Can you simulate that, create that condition in the laboratory? How do you do it? How do you make a happy coral unhappy? So one of the biggest threats now, biggest stressor that makes these corals unhappy is heat. So it is very closely connected to the global change of climate. And it's mostly that there is more and more of these extreme weather events. It can be tropical storms. It can be hurricanes. It can be just like that the winds shift and suddenly there are less waves. The water sits still. It will get warmer. And sometimes the water can get extremely warmer to temperatures that the corals are not used to. And in this moment, there's one of the theory that says that these little power plants, these little algae living in coral tissue will go crazy. They will overexcite themselves. It's a plant. So it will be like, oh, I have sun. I have warm temperature. So let's just go and create a lot of energy, a lot of sugar. But the problem with this is that every time a plant or this algae creates sugar through the means of photosynthesis, it also releases what we call free radicals or the term we use in the lab is reactive oxygen species. But people probably know this as free radical. And these free radicals are harmful. They are harmful for me, for you, for corals, for plants, for basically everything in this world. It can damage DNA. It can damage proteins. It damages the membranes. It is, you know, it's like an arrow just going somewhere and destroying everything it goes through. So this is the problem. This is what happens. And then somehow the symbiosis is broken. Somehow the symbion, the symbiotic algae will leave the coral and leave it energy-less. Well, yeah, you know, it's so interesting that what you've done with the antioxidant approach and the article in the paper talked about something called manitrol, which is some kind of compound that's an antioxidant that would help people, would help people whose systems are breaking down, who have, you know, their immunities are breaking down and so forth. And so you give them antioxidants and they do better. But what's struck, and of course, as we discussed before the show began, antioxidants are good for all living things, including humans and coral and all of us. And, you know, that's really important as a, that'll be on the final exam, you know. Yeah, you're right, you're right. So it's, so we have like every organism have multiple layers of defense of stuff that can come from the outside. And antioxidant system is one of the basic ones, one of the systems that have evolved very long time ago and has kept, has been kept by every organism that we know that I know right now. And it's what I was talking about, like when you have these free radicals that are just like hanging around, you need to get rid of them, you need to scavenge them. And this is what antioxidant system is for. So we know that in humans, they can prevent some form of cancer. They can even be helpful during some cancer treatments, you know, when doctors give you, use some kind of treatment in your body, they can also ask you to get more antioxidants to like prevent your body from other type of damages, etc. So I also had this idea, what if it can help the coral, you know, maybe since we know that free radicals can be problem during heat stress. So what if we give the coral more antioxidants and it will prevent them from losing the symbiotic algae. And yeah, that's exactly what happened. And it's not only this, but we also figured out that if you, if you teach coral how to cope with higher temperatures, meaning that you take this perfectly happy coral, and you raise the temperature just a little bit, you know, just that the coral still seems fine. But it has the time to learn. It's like when I came first to Hawaiian islands, you know, I could not just go to Alamoana Beach at noon and just lay down, you know, and some bath because I would get totally burnt. So I had to go, you know, on the sun in the afternoon, and just like get my skin to acclimatize to it. So we did exactly the same with coral, except that we used heat stress. And so when we made the coral learn a little bit of how to cope with heat stress, then we figured out that antioxidant system or antioxidant defense was definitely one of the mechanisms that the corals improved in order to be more resilient. So it's not just me adding antioxidants to the corals to make them more resilient, but it's also corals themselves who figured out that if they increase the number of antioxidants that they make in their body, it will make them more resilient. So that was fascinating, guys. It was a great result. That's a revelation. That's really important. But let me give you a line of thought and see what you think about this. So if you take a number of different species of coral, and you expose them to unhappy vectors, some species will do better than others. Some will survive, even, you know, in the face of adversity, others will not. And likewise, if you take antioxidants and you give them to a number of species of coral, they will help more for some species than other species. And furthermore, that if you do that, you are building resilience for some species of coral. And the next time they are stressed by some negative vector, you know, they will do better because they have developed a kind of immunity based on the antioxidant as people. Same thing, have a better immune system. Okay, but I'm reminded of a movie we made not too long ago, where Dr. Mora, who is a part of the university also, was talking about climate change. And he said, well, you know, you can go to the root cause of it. That is, you know, you know, in the case of climate change, it's carbon. It's the change of the planetary environment. Or you can do what he called adaptation. Adaptation means you simply adapt to the destructive decline of the planet. And his point was that adaptation is sort of a short-term thing while the planet is degrading. And so I put to you this question. If you are giving them the antioxidants and helping their resistance and resilience while the planet itself is degrading and the conditions in the ocean are degrading, that's adaptation rather than getting to the root cause. Am I right? Yes, yes, you are perfectly right. So we are dealing with two problems. And first is to you talk about adaptation. Adaptation usually when researchers talk about adaptation, it's something that lasts through generations. What I was doing here was just acclimatization. So the same like when I was talking about myself, I'm getting burned on the sun. So now I'm used to Hawaiian weather. But when I go back to see my family in Central Europe, I stay there three, four weeks, I come back, I will get burned. Because my body won't remember it for this long. So this is also what we see that happens with corals. So we can make them learn from previous experience, but they won't remember this for too long. But we are doing these experiments because we want to understand all the mechanisms that have the potential to make corals more resilient. We study what they do by themselves. We make them more resilient and then we look inside of them and we try to see like, oh, what have you done to become this more resilient coral? We also have corals that have already adapted to increase temperatures. But this is just to gain the knowledge. And then we'll try to see whether we can help them a little bit. That's what we call assisted evolution. Help them become more resilient in the future. But at the same time, we keep saying, this is not the final solution. This is just buying us time because with the predictions, the predictions are really better. Some predictions say that by 2050, we might lose the vast majority of corals worldwide. And we don't want this. We want the corals to survive a little longer. But at the same time, we must do something with the pace of climate change. We can't just say, oh, let's adapt. It will be okay. It won't be okay. We can't adapt the whole planet. It's impossible. So there's like no way to not do anything with the atmosphere and with releasing emissions and all these things. While being like, oh, our scientists, they will figure out something. They will make all the stuff we need adapt. No, we won't. We can't do this. We are not gods. We can only try to help the system a little bit to buy us a little bit more time. But the final solution is definitely to find the basics of the climate change, like the basic reasons of the climate change, which is greenhouse emissions at the first place. That was his point too. But let me ask you this. So I'm John Q. Everyman and I'm walking down Bishop Street and you stop me and you say, you know, what do you think of coral? We think about the fact that we might lose a good percentage of the coral in the world's oceans and on the world's beaches in the next few years. And he says, I don't care. I don't surf. I don't shop there. This is not my concern. And so what? What do you say to that, man? So corals are extremely important. There is like one third of everything that lives in the ocean, lives at coral reef or very near the coral reef. Almost 70% of which is which is three fourths almost of all the organisms or everything that lives in the sea is somehow related to coral reefs, at least some part of their life. So if we lose corals, we lose fisheries, we lose and people who fish, they will lose their jobs, they will lose their, their lifehoods. A lot of people in the world will lose the source of their food. We also corals protect the, protect the coast. So in Maldives, for example, when during some developments, they destroy the coral reef, then they figured out that they have to build artificial wall to protect the coast. And they paid $10 million per kilometer of this wall to be as, and it's still not as protective as the corals in the United States. There is an estimate that all the coral reefs in the whole United States protects around $850 billion of infrastructure. So this is something very important. Reefs are the first barrier when there are, when there is high surf, when there is hurricanes coming to Oahu, people in Kenya or Hubei can be quite relaxed because there is, there are so many coral reefs that they will just break the wave energy and, and there won't be any big tsunamis or big waves, you know, coming to the shore during, during hurricanes. So there is, there is a lot of stuff that corals are definitely good for. And if we lose corals, we will basically lose all the seas, we will lose the coasts, we will lose the coastal environments like mangroves. There are no mangroves in Hawaii, but, or there should not, not be any mangroves in Hawaii, but in other countries there are mangroves and mangroves will also die off. And then it's, you know, it's like if you build a house of cards and then, and then you just like cut the base of it, everything will collapse. So this will happen, but if hopefully not corals, coral will die. But we don't want to give the impression, Dewey, that coral is the only thing in the ocean environment that is being affected by global warming. And I'm thinking of Dave Carl, National Academy of Science at the Seymour, the Center for Microcomial Oceanography Research, where every gram of seawater is a universe of microbiology and it is changing dramatically over time. And so there, you know, there is, am I right? There's a million zillion things happening in the ocean that also have, ultimately will have an effect on our lives. Carl is one of them, it happens to be very important, but there are many others, right? Yes, yes, it's like definitely, it's like, it's like the land ecosystems. Corals are like trees in the forest, then forest is not only trees, it's everything around, it's animals living there, it's animals living in the ground, birds flying around. So coral reefs are really like the housing unit, I would say for a lot of other life. Yeah, it's definitely not the only thing, but it's the most visible thing, and still not yet visible to enough people to care. There is, in the documentary Chasing Coral, I believe it was there, there is this quote that sometimes during some mass bleaching events, there was up to 70% of corals in some regions around Australia that bleached. So imagine that there is 70% of trees in a forest that suddenly lose leaves, people would panic, people, there would be immediately so many organizations and people and politicians and like all the media would just look at that forest and ask the question, why? But when this happens underwater, nothing really happens because people don't see it. And as you said, there's a lot of people who will be like, I don't surf, you know, I don't dive, I don't care if the reef is there or not, but they don't realize that the ocean without corals is the same like a land without forests. It's sad, it's desert. It's all interdependent. David Attenborough, it's all interdependent. So I want to take a trip with you Eva, just for a moment, into the microbiology of a coral and ask you what you see there and how, say, the antioxidant affects that in terms of the microbiology. Can you talk about it? Give us a little voyage. A little voyage into into molecular and cellular biology of corals. So what I was saying, for example, what we could see is that if if you heat stress or coral, there is a lot of signalization that suddenly appears, you know, like every single cell in our body signalizes and communicates with other cells. It's, they're like pretty, pretty serious mechanisms going on. Every action has its reaction. And this is what we are studying. So we are studying this signalization pathways and then execution of of what coral thinks that should happen. So when coral is heat stress, one of these pathways that we see activated is so-called program cell death pathway. So it's something that is very important in the development. And it's a pathway that actually tells one particular cell, like you are no longer needed because you're harmful or we don't need you anymore or you are here like one too many. Please pack your stuff and die in a very neat form. You know, it's a it's a sometimes we call it cellular suicide. And it's not harmful for the organism. It's it's, for example, how your fingers are made, you know, it's like when you are when you are embryo, you have it's like a disk here. And then at some moment of your development, the cells in between the fingers will die off. And like through this program cell death, you know, they are like no longer needed. So they will die off and they will release the fingers. And that's genetic. And yes, yes, that's genetic. That's perfectly that's that's program. That's a that's a very neat pathway. So we can see that that some cells in the coral will act exactly the same. So they they get this signalization and they are like, oh, something is happening. We believe it's because they become harmful. And they become become probably harmful because they harbor our adult cells, the symbiotic cells that go overexcited with the heat stress. And they start releasing all these free radicals. So then the the coral organism will be like, oh, we have some cells that used to be friendly cells, but now they are not they are harmful. So let's get rid of them. So they send these signals. So now I'm just I'm talking in terms of it's hypothesis, you know, it's it's it's nothing that if you ask another coral biologist, they will have probably different explanation of what's going on. But this is this is my explanation based on what we are seeing in our results. We also saw that there is this pathway called autophagy. So it's a pathway that actually tells the cell to engulf something and digest it. So it's a it's a pathway that will be like, please, you eat this, digest it, and then use the material to rebuild it for something new. This is, for example, one of the pathway that works in your fat, fat tissue, you know, it's like all this energy dependent, you know, how to how to like store energy and then release energy. It's it's it's through this pathway. So this is what we are seeing. And we also see that under heat stress, if we do not teach corals how to cope with it, if we suddenly heat stress them, their their DNA is damaged, and their DNA is damaged in an oxidative way. So we can even say like, what is the source of the damage. And we know that it's oxidative damage. So it's still in the it's aligned with the theory that symbionts release a lot of free radicals, and they just bombard the cells around them. They break their DNA. So again, if the DNA in the cell is damaged, then the cell itself will be like, there is a problem with my DNA. So now I think I should kill myself because I could potentially harm the organism. And this brings me back to cancer research what I was doing, because this is exactly what cancer cells block. So in order to become immortal, this is one of the pathways that cancer cell must block in itself. They cancer cell, that's that's this philosophical question, I was having how to kill something that will not want to kill itself, you know, because that's that's the that's the basis of the of the normal cells is that when you tell them to die, they will die, but cancer cell won't. Oh, that was my next question. I anticipated my next question. And so when you, you know, dig deep and drill down into the cellular structure, you know, microbiology of the coral, and see how it reacts and see how the, you know, the genetics compete, you know, with the development of the cells, you're learning things. And I know, you know, you wake up at three o'clock in the morning, and you say, Gee, why don't we try this? And why don't we try that? And what else can we learn about this? What, what could it must be very exciting? And what, you know, what new conclusions can we draw in in your mind? Am I right? In your mind, Eva, you're looking for a larger truth. And the larger truth would apply to all living beings, especially all human living beings. And those lessons, those discoveries could could help us, you know, help help human beings deal with cancer. Yeah. Yeah. So definitely, definitely, corals and marine life and the study of corals and marine life is very helpful in cancer research, mostly in drug discoveries. That's not something I do. But yeah, that's also one of the questions, one of the, the things when you said what are corals good for, we can get a lot of cancer treatment drugs from corals and underwater life. But that's, that's just like a side thing. But what you were saying is partly true, partially not. So of course, I'm trying to figure out a bigger, bigger image of how molecular things live. But right now, our understanding of coral molecular mechanisms are so limited that I usually, most of my time, I go to see cancer literature, and I read stuff that has been discovered in cancer, and I try to apply this knowledge to corals. Anyway, there are things that corals can be used to understand better humans. And for example, one of the things is what I was talking about that corals probably cannot die by age. And we know that, that longevity and an aging and all these things are also connected to several molecular, molecular traits. One of them are so-called telomeres, for example, I don't know if you've heard about them, it's the the ends of chromosomes, and they shorten the telomeres, yes, yes, yes, telomeres, they get shorter and shorter. So that's, that's what I used to work in cancer fields, I used to work in telomeric fields, I was doing research on telomeres. So that's, now we believe that studying corals and coral telomeres and how they cope with aging without actually getting their telomeres shorter and live almost forever. That could be pretty interesting for human fields to understand because there are conditions, people can be born with conditions when they age prematurely, because something is wrong with how they maintain their telomeres. So we believe that maybe if we get the lesson from corals, if we understand how corals take care of their telomeres, how they maintain them, that could be very helpful in the field of human aging. Yeah, right. Thank you, Luc, for 10,000 years. So can we? It's the fountain of you too. Yes, yes. One last question, Eva, and that is, you know, how do I get your job? What do I need to do to study this? How can I get into your field? Where do I go? What do I do? And how do I spend my time and my intellectual energy? So I studied molecular biology and genetics at college. But basically, when I look at my colleagues, everyone has studied something different. So what I would say is that you need to study something biology related, and then you just find your place on earth. The most important thing about research is to get passionate. If you are not passionate, that's why I left the cancer field. I loved it, but I was not really passionate. I was not waking up at three in the morning to read something about like new drug discoveries in cancer. But I do almost wake up at three in the morning, just dreaming about corals and what we are going to do next. So I think that as soon as you are passionate, people around you will see it and they'll want you to be in their team and help them. This is something that Professor Ruth Gates, she was awesome in this. She saw potential in every individual person and she always tried to give them exactly what they are passionate about, exactly what they are good at. And she was combining people from very different areas of study, very different fields, because she believed that if we all know something different and then we sit in one room, we can get some pretty good ideas and some crazy ideas. But that's also part of science to try crazy ideas. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. Eva Mayarova in the Coral Resilience Lab at UH, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate your discussion here today and your good nature. And we understand what it takes. Thank you so much Eva. Thank you for having me here. It was a pleasure, okay. Thank you. Aloha.