Coral reefs play a critical role in biodiversity, provide food and income from fishing and tourism, and offer shoreline protection. They're under threat.
ChatGPT & DALL-E generated panoramic image of a Caribbean underwater view with a coral reef being printed by a large 3d printer, a US materials scientist who is leading a global research project on coral reef restoration on my podcast Redefining Energy – Tech. In the theme of providing transcripts of presentations I’m giving in various places for people who prefer the written word, this is the lightly edited discussion.. I’m your host, Michael Barnard.
We started the project, and I was able to connect with this group at Carmabi Lab in Curacao, led by Kristen Marhaver, who’s a very well known coral scientist and was one of the pioneers in collecting the larvae and being able to keep them alive for projects like this. We wrote this white paper together along with a few other people. Like I said, it was funded. That allowed us to get started.So this kind of gives a snapshot of how you got here with the coral stuff. But let’s step backwards.
A politician there, you know, one of the climate change-denying politicians on a press junket. She dove on the Great Barrier Reef, broke off a chunk illegally and brought it to the surface to say it was fine. It was mind boggling. Previous conversations I’ve had about corals, people have said they grow, they’ll just adapt, they’ll move. And I say to them, not at this pace of change. I keep having to repeat this to people. The rate of change of climate change is so extreme compared to most natural cycles. We’re in a position where potentially we could see five degrees Celsius of warming. The last time we saw five degrees Celsius of warming, it took from about 25,000 BCE to about 20,000 BCE, and all the glaciers melted.
That can create a weak skeleton, and then it’s more likely to be damaged. I’m certainly not a chemist, so I can’t speak to all the details of the chemistry of that process, but I can sort of speak to how that affects the material of the coral, which is the skeleton.I’ll provide a little bit of nerd context in terms of the pathway, some of the chemical pathway problems.
As I said before, we kind of took a step back and wanted to look at how materials could improve larval settlement and growth, that those polyps can become mature and reproduce like their parents did. We’re looking at calcium carbonate based materials, and we’re looking at those because, of course, the skeleton is made of that, and they’re also relatively easy to make. You can use like things like lime mortar, right? Those are kind of the class of materials.
This algae is known to release chemicals and also have chemicals in its tissue that affect the coral, the surrounding coral. People who culture larvae go into the ocean where the coral are spawning, they collect the gametes, they come to the lab. The gametes are a little embryo, and that becomes a larva. These larvae are attracted by this CCA and different components of the CCA.
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