 This is ThinkTek Hawaii, Community Matters here. Good afternoon and welcome to ThinkTek Hawaii. I'm your host Ethan Allen here on ThinkTek Hawaii and with me today in the studio is Dr. Sonia Roly. Welcome again Sonia. Hello. Nice to be back. Hello. Thank you. Thank you. It's great to be here. We're going to be talking about Sonia's research today and Sonia works on corals. I mean it's very likable for all the science, right? We all like our coral here and our coral in the Pacific is certainly facing some interesting challenges these days and Sonia's work picks a very interesting slant on that because you look at fairly deep coral or corals at least deeper than we used to think coral thrived, right? Right. Yes, I primarily work on a group of something called Gorgonian corals, octocorals. And they are octo meaning eight and why they're different to say like the corals that you would get on the reefs, they're kind of hexachoralina so they are from a group that has multiples of six tentacles or more where octocorals have eight tentacles or more. Very simple. Right. And the thing is with Gorgonians is that they are predominantly shaped like a sea fan so they're often just called sea fan and they go all the way down to the abyssal plains. You'll get them to the shallow waters down to the abyss. A lot of my research is conducted using closed circuit rebreather technology down to 500 feet. I also use the subs from Herl as well as part of my research. So yeah, so there's all sorts of different types of coral per se and they're extremely fascinating and they really help us see how we are affecting the environment. Right, because the ocean temperatures are rising in general and the ocean is meanwhile becoming more acidic all the time, probably at much more rapid rates than are typical of the norm. So this has potentially some very bad effects on coral, right? So I mean, different coral species and different coral groups do respond in different ways and there's lots of really seminal research going on, especially at HIMB with regard to these different responses. And the group that I work on with the Gorgonians, they are extremely old in the paleontological record. And so their recent common ancestors are about 400 million years old and you will find a lot of certain species in what we call oxygen minimum zone around the different oceans of our planet. They are extremely biologically successful and the majority of these species are azuzanthellate and what I mean by that is they don't have the symbiotic algae than what you have in the corals that you see out in the reefs here in Hawaii. Now you do have species that do have azuzanthellate, but a lot of them do not and those are the ones that you have at depth because of course you are going past the euphotic zone, past the level of fate of this. No point in keeping algae with you if there is no light, right? Well, yeah, this is true. Excellent. And you have been doing some work around the island of Ponipae, I gather, and why don't we jump into it to start talking about sort of what you went there to find and then what you began to see. Yes, absolutely. So Ponipae, just to say people can know where Ponipae is, it is very much in the Pacific. Right. It's in Micronesia, and Micronesia covers 3 million square miles in between Hawaii and the Philippines. So there's some very, very interesting distributions of animals within themselves within Micronesia because essentially you've only got like 430 square miles actually of land or the rest is ocean. So it's like, well, you've got to look at a whole bunch of different things, how are they so biologically successful? How do they get from one to the next? Island and atoll, lots of questions, very, very exciting people. You can find endemism where species will only live on a particular location or a particular region. There's a lot of that here in Hawaii. So Ponipae is very, very interesting for that. And the islands I particularly work on, which should be, we can see shortly, are the It's Ponipae Island and it's sister atolls and Pakeen, and that should be in a figure very soon, and this is part of the Caroline Islands. And so the thing is with Micronesia is you've got islands and they're grouped into next islands. There's a hierarchy in essence. So you've got the Caroline Islands and then the Ponipae, which is an island and it's two sister atolls, Pakeen and Ant, are the Senyavin Islands, which are named after Russian. And so this is the research that I wanted to come and talk to you about today. Because I've been there for a few years now and conducting some very interesting research, mainly on my interest of the Gaugonians and collaborating with other researchers in different regions. And well, first, I think it would be really good to sort of start describing the depth differentiation of what one would see, particularly on an oceanic island and atoll. Because it's very, very sheer. So we should have a figure showing us that shortly. And shallow waters, they're typically defined by scuba. And when I mean that, it's how deep people tend to go on scuba. What are their limits before they start to feel the detrimental physical effect? So usually between about 30 to 40 meters, around 100 or so feet. And most of the research in terms of marine biology of shallow water reefs is conducted here. Then if you wanted to go off and then venture down to much deeper depths, people tend to use submarines, ROVs and things like that. And they can be about $40,000 a day. So if you're going to spend all that money, you want to go deep. Really deep, 1,000 meters plus. So there's this kind of in-between zone, which we call like the twilight zone, which is now officially called the mesophotic coral ecosystems. And this is the zone that I do quite a bit of work in. And that I use my rebreather in order to go and research the animals that are there. And they're mainly Gorgonian corals, like fields of them. So the rebreather allows you to go to that depth, stay down long enough to make it worthwhile basically. Yes, yes. And of course they're very quiet as well, which is very good. And it's to put it simply for those that aren't familiar with rebreaters because they are becoming to be more accessible to divers. It's like they have the gases a tailor made for the depths that we go to and keep us coming up safely. And that enables us to be able to stay down longer and conduct the work that we need to conduct. But of course, if you're going to go and dive deep, there's going to be an obligation to what we call decompression up into the shallows. And I can spend like a few hours in the shallows decompressing. And there is a good opportunity to do additional research and characterize the reefs across a bathymetric range. So before we continue, I've got some footage and I wanted to show you this footage to give you an idea of what the mesophotic or twilight reefs actually look like on the oceanic atolls and islands around Ponopay State. Yes. Yes. So here, those are the indigenous people of Pakine who are very generous. And there's the atoll. It's a stunning, stunning place. They had never seen a drone before. They called it a little helicopter. And to see their faces having a whole new perspective of where they live was quite priceless. That's right. They would never have seen this stuff. Quite. Quite. Exactly. Yeah, it was wonderful. And there's Manta Reza, a good friend of mine, Julie Hartup, who's the president and director of the Micronesian Conservation Coalition and doing some work with her in the app. And she studies these animals. And, yeah, magnificent, wonderful thing. So here are the Gorgonians that I was referring to earlier. And as you can see, they're like trees in many ways. And we're just descending down. This is ant atoll, which has only got about eight people, I think, living on it. This is about 140 meters. And watch for the shark. There we go. I was planning to go in that cave. Oh, I chose my mind. Yeah, absolutely. And in the background there is Brian Green and Dr. Richard Pyle, and they're catching new species of fish to science. And here's some more of the Gorgonians down. We're 148 going down to 150 meters now. And so you get some very unique coral, very different. And it's a very different environment. This is a very popular aquarium fish that people like very, very much. And you can find them in crevices. And you actually find, like, a few scores of them further down, further deeper on packing. Here you can see the fields and the diversity of the Gorgonians. There's a lot of different shapes and sizes. But it just goes on and on and on. And so this is my primary area of research. What you were saying, they're actually very successful, although people don't see them. Out of sight, out of mind. Right, exactly, exactly. Excellent. And so these corals thrive, you say, without their little, eligible partners basically in general. And so that's sort of an interesting twist. We always think of corals as being a symbiotic partnership. But obviously it's not a requirement then. Well, no, actually the vast majority of coral taxa, coral species, are actually azuzam phthalate and found below 50 meters depth. So 64% of the coral species are actually from the octocoralea. And only 14% of corals are actually scaratinians, which are the hard corals that form reefs. That doesn't make them any less important. It just means that there's a huge proportion of biodiversity that is much deeper. And it's very telling. It's like the big animals and the shallow and in-your-face animals everybody wants to know all about, of course. But it's very similar with microbiology, which is fascinating and lends further to some of my research that I'm doing with the Gorgonians. People know less deeper and less smaller the animal is. Right, right. Less people know about it. Less people tend to care about it. Yeah, but they're often like the impact of the microbial communities within an animal or on an animal is integral and fundamental to its existence. Right, right. We have what ten times as many cells aren't our own within us and on us as we have of our own. I know. People don't like to hear that. They don't like to think about that. They're against us, but most of them are our friends. Right, indeed, indeed, right. So during this work, as you were both looking at your own Gorgonians and also sort of characterizing the different assemblages at different depths, you also did this over several years, right? Yeah. One of those years was right during a big El Nino event, right? Yes, it was. So I've been putting down temperature loggers every 10 meters from 10 meters of a depth, 30 feet, down to 140 meters. So here you can see from just August 2015 to August 2016, you can do the slides over there, there was quite a temperature anomaly. As you can see, not all the depths are there because they often get consumed, my loggers. But you can see this data was absolutely fascinating when I took one look at that. And in some parts, the diurnal temperature or the daily temperature variance can be, at its extreme, 20 degrees centigrade within a day. Usually averaging within a day around 10 degrees centigrade is the variance. That's kind of like the lowest variance that you will get, and that's around 90 meters. Typically, I was astonished when I saw that data, but the most thing you'll see from that graph is it shot up in March 2016. It just absolutely shot up. So even at 130 meters of depth, which is, I think, excuse my chance, it's like 426 or something, it actually went up to 30 degrees centigrade, which is the temperature you would find in the shallow reef. Yeah, amazing. And that was right when the whole drought was really hitting badly. Absolutely. Above the surface. Because I was actually out in Palau at that time. Right. And the reservoir was dead dry, basically. Yeah, so much mortality. Yeah. A lot. We're going to continue this conversation just a moment, but I'm told we need to take a brief break. I'm your host, Ethan Allen here on Likeable Science. We'll be right back. My name is Howard Wigg. I am the proud host of Code Green, a program on ThinkTek Hawai'i. We show at 3 o'clock in the afternoon every other Monday. My guests are specialists, both from here and the mainland, on energy efficiency, which means you do more for less electricity and you're generally safer and more comfortable while you're keeping dollars in your pocket. Welcome back here to Likeable Science on ThinkTek Hawai'i. I'm your host, Ethan Allen. With me today in the studio is Dr. Sonya Rolby. She studies Gorgonian corals, or maybe just more probably Gorgonians, I guess. These are pretty good. In the Mesophotok region, you said, right? This twilight region below 100 or 120 feet, going down until it turns sort of pitch dark, right? Oh yes, absolutely. There are, I mean, you can get Gorgonians, actually the Zuzanthellate ones, the phodosynthetic ones, the ones that have phodosynthetic symbiotes. They can dominate the reefs in other regions, in many regions. But the ones that we're talking about here, especially across the Indian-Pacific and the oceanic islands and atolls of Ponape, which we're discussing today, they really come into their own when you get down to deeper depths. And particularly, I was very fascinated with how they are so tolerant to temperature. I mean, to be honest with you, I was fascinated with it anyway. And before the break, we saw that these animals, essentially, are living in an environment which is hugely thermally dynamic. I mean, very, very changeable. So one of the things I want to know is, how are they so biologically successful? But the other thing that I'd noticed from the El Nino event, essentially, when the temperatures shot up, not only at those depths, but also in the shallows, is, like, how did everything survive? Right. And from 2006, the shallow reefs were just stunning and particularly on the atolls. So I've got a picture here from the atoll, Pakeen atoll. And in 2006, you can see that they're still beautiful, thriving reefs, even though other areas of the Indo-Pacific were having strong, strong bleaching. Palau also noticed that bleaching wasn't really affected at this point. However, when we returned the following year, this year, the reefs were just dead. So even though they're a very pretty pink, basically, they were covered with Crustose Coraline algae. And when you just nick off a little bit from the branches, this is Isoporopiliphora and you break that off. It's very thin, but the Crustose Coraline algae, I mean, it grew that fast. It was actually growing over the Halimeda, which is another algae. You know, I mean, it was just, it was remarkable that the whole reefs was like this pink mortuary. I mean, it was, I was quite shocked, actually, because I got some coral researchers coming from Ames and just research on the corals, and I was like, right. Yeah, I mean, fortunately, we did find some new species to science at depth, which was good. It's still, I mean, it's low-hanging fruit at depth. Right. So what's the prognosis for that? I mean, that shallower reef. Well, it's very, very difficult. The good thing is that, you know, larval settlement favours Crustose Coraline algae. But in other reefs, they did not fare so well. And, you know, I wanted to sort of, we have some images that can show basically what happened there, what was happening with the other reefs. Now, this is also what's happening at depth. So 2016, you can see at 30 meters, actually down to 60, you would see this band of filamentous cyanobacteria. And that, I was actually running experiments at the time, which we have time we can talk about afterwards. But I was quite astonished. All my experiments were just completely smothered. But you didn't see a signature of this in the shallows. In 2016, you just saw gorgeous reefs. But then in 2017, that cyanobacteria got completely smothered by algae. This green invasive algae. Microdiction. And the two images at the bottom were below, 65 meters or below. So here, I was just doing some monitoring. And there's two species of coral, seriata pora, seriata pora histricks. Get my tongue around some of these names. And then also siphonogorgia. So we've got a scarotinian and an octacoral right next to each other. And you can see it was just nice. Nothing bad was happening there. And lots and lots of new recruits. But then following year, the same depth, same place you've got this microdiction was just dominating those depths. So the upper twilight zone or the upper mesophotic was basically carpeted by microdiction. The year previous, as you see in 2016, this kind of shallower band, but still in the mesophotic, it was like the mesophotic zone is essentially a signature that things were not happy on the reef. And so even though in the shallows, the scarotinians looked fine for all intents and purposes, obviously there was this latent effect because they completely sort of decimated following year. It was just quite interesting to see like a premonition signature at depth. It's fascinating. It really speaks to the interconnectedness of those regions, right? The lower reef is feeding something up in the upper reef. And when it's being impacted, it just takes a while before that. It's interesting the dynamics. There's still much that we absolutely don't know. That's the thing. I've been doing a lot of different environmental monitoring. And you get these huge swaths of chlorophyll that come through at 90 meters depth but you don't get them in the shallows. You know, you get the dissolved oxygen can go really, really, really low the deeper you go, but the oscillations can be really high within a day. It's intriguing. You think of the depth of the ocean as being absolutely sort of stable. At least I have that in my mind. It should be just sort of fixed. And your work is showing it's a very dynamic place. Yeah. When we first started going there and I was like, right, there's this one particular species called anhela. And it means angel in Hawaii. And I really like it. And I've chopped it up and put it up in lots of different places and all sorts of real good model species for me to play with. And I noticed that it seemed I would find its distribution from the shallow waters. The shallow is five meters, like really down 150 meters plus. I mean, it would just be, and I'd be like, wow, that really traverses some serious temperatures. But through looking at these temperature variances, it obviously has a certain degree of temperature intolerance to this thermal dynamic environment. I mean, really, really is. But to find its, to such an extent, was quite astonishing. People were, like you say, with the deeper you go, you think it's benign, but far from it. Far from it. You've got these internal wave structures. So you've got like, essentially, you've got the shallow reef water proper. And then you've got these internal waves. You've got this oceanic physical oceanographic influence that's coming in. Now, this is just intriguing stuff that you're doing. And it's so important to learn about it. It really speaks to what we don't know about there, right? I mean, how it seems like every day you're discovering sort of that there's bigger and bigger worlds out there of the unknowns, which is, that's of course one of the jobs of science, right? Yeah, quite. Is to keep open up those horizons. So before we jump out of this entirely, I want to hit you with a very odd off-the-wall question. So if you were to have a superpower and you could either fly or be invisible, which would you choose and why? Oh. Oh. Oh, God, I want both. Probably, that's really tough. That's super, super tough. I would fly if I could go underwater. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Perspective. Yeah. I'll be invisible. So, yeah, that's cheating. Sorry. I just had to drop that in. I'm reminding you, we have one more photo that you had wanted to share. So we'll do that in the last minute here. Okay. Okay. Please do. Right. So basically, the point I was trying to make here is when you get past 70 meters plus, the assemblages are still the same. You've still got all these gorgeous Gauganians, fields of them. And so my research continues to pursue how they are so biologically successful. And one of my hypotheses that I'm working on at the moment is I believe it's due to their microbiome. Oh, okay. So all the little things in them and on them are really... Yes. Because they have a huge percentage of them that appear to be, I wouldn't say obligate because I haven't got that far yet. But wherever I seem to put them, they seem to have the same friends. And they also, I believe that they're gardening bacteria due to their anatomical limitations and so forth. And so really, because they're really bad at catching large zooplankton. They don't do it very well. Then it will quick to do it. They couldn't really catch a cold. So what are they eating? It must be microbes. Or more to the point, they've got this symbiotic reciprocal pathways. Makes sense, right? Just as they may co-opt algae to make food, they also can co-opt bacteria at depths. Well, we have the same thing in our bowel when they have it in there. Exactly. It's an old game, apparently. Yeah. It's more and more prevalent. I think that's the discovery. That's the exploration right there. Yeah. And finding these... I mean, it's a big push now. Finding these broad rules that really run life. Yes. And one of them appears to be that, yeah, sort of nothing exists by itself. Quite. Quite, yeah. Was it that lovely phrase, only you alone can do it, but you cannot do it alone. Exactly. Exactly. Well, this has been just fascinating stuff. Great to get you back here. And as we spoke of before the show, you were talking about some other work that you're doing that we'll have to get you back here again. Yes. Talk about because you do so much really interesting stuff. Oh, thank you very much. Yeah. So thank you so much for taking the time, because I know you are busy, busy, busy. And it's wonderful to have you back on the show again here. Thank you so much. And we look forward to getting you back yet again. Oh, well, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you. And we hope you'll come back next week and be with us for another episode of Likeable Science here on Think Tech Hawaii. Until then.