According to Dr. Nicole Fogarty, an associate professor in UNCW’s Department of Biology and Marine Biology, corals are simple invertebrates.
“Most people don’t realize they’re animals, they’re like smooth rocks, right?”
Fogarty said that his lab has five tropical species of corals, four of which are ‘broadcast spawning’ corals, and one species is a ‘brooding’ coral. The difference between the two is that broadcast corals conduct fertilization externally and brooding corals do so internally.
According to Fogarty, the rays release gamete bundles full of eggs and sperm into the water in a synchronized event once a year in late summer after the full moon; meanwhile, the brooders release the sperm, and the nearby colonies take the semen, which they release the larvae looking for a place to live and metamorphose.
“It’s like a caterpillar that turns into a butterfly, and hopefully they continue the life cycle,” Fogarty said.
With the broadcasts, they are a little more vulnerable, said Fogarty, “because those dividing embryos float for several days in the water column, then they form planula larvae and they settle and go through their metamorphosis. ”
laying
Fogarty’s lab was one of the first in the world to produce two specific types of broadcast corals.
“There were four or five of us [labs] producing Caribbean corals in captivity today,” said Fogarty.
while Fogarty’s lab grow anywhere from 75,000 to 125,000 coral babies, he and his team heralded a major reef rehabilitation off the coast of Florida.
For example, they work hard on Aquarium of Florida and the Mote Marine Lab and Aquarium.
“Our goal here is not to raise hundreds of thousands of children to plant on the reef. Our goal is to focus on research that can be used by restoration practitioners. So we are again trying to optimize the light, temperature, water quality, and nutrition of these young corals for use in larger facilities so they can use these parameters for their growth,” said Fogarty.
In his lab, his research team investigates things like how probiotics influence the growth of young corals and the very important relationship between corals and their micro-algae, the zooxanthellae, which provides them with about 90% of their nutrition. They get some from things like that zooplankton.
“Now, this symbiosis between zooxanthellae and their coral hosts is very intense. When the coral starts to get stressed, like when there are really warm temperatures for a long time, that symbiosis starts to break down, and so they expel the zooxanthellae,” said Fogarty.
That’s when coral bleaching begins – which means lower reproduction and growth, which can lead to die-off events.
Louis-Pierre Rich is the lab’s coral husbandry research technician. He is responsible for growing and maintaining the corals. He said in the past two years, there has been a push towards the gene bank coral species, especially the stony coral, whose population is currently threatened. by stone coral tissue loss disease.
“Anthropogenic stress, hurricanes, temperature, climate change, disease, they might have, you know, one or two of these stressors at a time for a short period of time, but once you start adding all of these things together are like a death. by 1,000 cuts, really,” said Rich.
But Rich said the public should not lose hope.
Last job
“There are all kinds of labs doing all kinds of different interventions between crossbreeding, probiotics, different techniques for micro-fragmentation, even looking at the genetic modification of coral using technologies such as. CRISPR down the line, but we just don’t have time to figure out which approach is best,” Rich said.
UNCW Assistant Professor Dr. Jake Warner is the man who did this genetic modification work. Last summer, he successfully transformed young corals, and said perfecting this method took several years.
“This is the first time this has been done in the world. We entered the sequence, the DNA for a gene called green fluorescent protein. And sure enough, one day later, we saw little green glowing babies in coral, so that’s really exciting,” Warner said.
Warner said that scientists are taking their time to understand the effects of putting genetically modified corals into the ocean to make them more resistant to climate change and other environmental threats they face.
“So there’s a big concern that if we’re going to do this in the end, do it right, and do it in a really controlled way, that we don’t accidentally create an invasive species,” Warner said.
But he said the threats to coral remain real and widespread.
“And what I’m describing is that we’re taking the first steps years into the process. That’s why understanding our human impacts on the environment is so important to mitigating coral loss because when you have these stress, and rising temperatures that cause many coral bleaching events, these are real threats that are happening now. That’s why we’re trying to come up with solutions, creative, molecular solutions to address the problems, but we still have a long way to go,” Warner said.
Find out more on the Fogarty Lab here.
