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In a hurricane-proof laboratory, miles away from the Florida Keys, scientists sleep tiny pieces of coral from the moment they are spawned until they're enough hearty to be separated into specimens equipped to survive in the wild.
Then, these dark green fragments are put through misery, immersed in reservoirs mimicking the warmer and more acidic water projected for a day beyond the tropical region. Many coral samples will die, but those who undergo hostile testing will be thoroughly transplanted into the Atlantic.
For generations, marine biologists working around the 360-mile coral reef have ensured that their research does not disturb the fragile kaleidoscope. marine habitat so critical for the local ecosystem and a multi-billion dollar tourism economy.
But as global warming quickly brings the natural wonder to the brink of extermination, scientists are abandoning their non-intervention approach in favor of an unthinkable strategy. : an intervention to manipulate the natural balance of the reef.
The work is pioneering, and some say unsettling. It generates both hope and exasperation. And it is closely watched by contractors and technologists, who see an opportunity in this effort to bring what scientists call "assisted evolution" into the wild
On Summerland Key, an Army Scientists are trying to rebuild thousands of square acres. the reef one centimeter at a time, cutting tens of thousands of coral microfragments, dipping them in the laboratory and replanting them piece by piece in the ocean.
At the Coral Restoration Foundation in Key Largo, coral divers set on rows and rows of "artificial trees" constructed in plastic tubing in an underwater nursery, where they feed up to that they are ready to be replanted.
Both efforts are part of an expensive and expensive international experiment. that the hope of avoiding the total devastation of reef systems worldwide that provide the main source of food to a billion people and home to a quarter of all marine organisms. "We have no choice now," said Michael Crosby, general manager of the Mote Marine Laboratory, which runs the 19,000-square-foot laboratory on Summerland Key. "These corals are not able to come back alone, they are really slipping towards functional extinction."
This is a familiar cliché in the Florida Keys and in the many other coastal regions where coral is alive: Reefs are the canary in the climate change coal mine. There is no projection of what could happen if emissions continue unabated. The chaos is already there.
About 95% of the coral of the Florida Reef Tract is already dead. Although the damage was not caused exclusively by climate change, it is the only threat that the region is unable to mitigate, advancing so constantly and creating tensions on the coral so extreme that scientists play the role of surgeons trying to save a dying patient.
"We are not so naive as to think that we can restore all the lost corals," said Jessica Levy, Key Reef Foundation Reef Restoration Program Leader. "Our goal is to keep this material on the outside, push it and do our best to promote natural recovery."
She compared it to repairing a crack in a big dam. Scientists are trying to keep coral alive long enough for governments to solve the fundamental problem: climate change
"This will not take the place of mitigating climate change," said Christopher Page, Senior biologist to Mote. "But it will help the process as we work to change things on a larger scale."
On a hot day in June, the foundation trained a few hundred volunteer divers who helped create a more resistant coral. The group is prepared to spend many hours under the water with waterproof slates and electronic tablets, recording the state of the reef plates.
The organization will plant about 20,000 pieces of coral this year in eight sites. But before the coral is stuck to the reef, it is fed in the vast underwater nurseries of the group. They discovered that fragments of corals cut into small pieces and hung on artificial trees grow faster at the beginning of their lives than they would in nature. "It has already made a difference," said Mark Eakin, coordinator of Coral Reef Watch. project at the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that monitors and responds to changes in climate and the ocean environment. "There are places where there have been no branch corals for 30 years and now you go out and look at the bottom saying," Wow, it's starting to look like that. "
The effort is exhausting to watch. Coral develops atrociously slowly, often taking 200 years to fully develop. The process has been speeded up considerably by science, but researchers at this stage can not be sure of the amount of corals they will have planted in 100 years, while ocean conditions should be much more difficult than they are in the past. they are not currently. 19659005] The kind of disease exacerbated by climate change is not new to reefs. For decades, scientists have been studying murders, often caused by bleaching when ocean temperature spikes kill many of the reefs and turn vibrant colors into white skeletons. Until recently, such events have occurred rarely enough for the coral to rebuild and regrow. This is no longer the case
The rising temperature of the oceans and the acidification caused by global warming have resulted in a wave of mass bleaching that did not occur. left time for the coral to recover. Large expanses of coral disappear completely. The United Nations warns that 25 of the 29 coral reefs on UNESCO's World Heritage List may be devastated by consecutive bleaching events by 2040. And they warn that the 29 reefs , including the Florida Reef and the Great Barrier Reef in Australia will house more functional ecosystems by the end of the century if climate change is not confronted.
Other diseases that corals have been able to fight in the past have contributed to these murders. own. Scientists are shocked by the rate at which such a disease tears coral in the Keys, pushing them to experiment with medical pastas that divers inject into the reefs in hopes of containing the spread of the disease. Great Barrier Reef, the largest in the world, one-third of coral was killed during an oceanic temperature spike in 2016 that scientists attribute to climate change. They concluded in a study published in the journal Nature that the reef will no longer be alike, although some of it can be saved if nations meet the commitments made in the climate agreement of Paris, whose Trump administration has withdrawn.
The rate at which global warming is ravaging these vital marine ecosystems leaves scientists grappling with the question of the intensity of the intervention. The challenge of scaling up their efforts to the point that they can be effective in restoring areas the size of the Great Barrier Reef is discouraging.
Still, encouraging breakthroughs have been made in recent years. The Microforming effort supervised by Page has allowed Mote to speed up production up to an unimaginable pace until recently. The culture of a piece of reef the size of a basketball, which lasts from 25 to 100 years in the wild, can now be done in three years.
Large volumes of corals are placed in genebanks under water and in laboratories. earth, so that scientists can tap into various genotypes for restoration efforts, even if they extinguish themselves in the wild.
During the summer spawning season, thousands of coral eggs have 1 million chances of being fertilized in the wild. are collected by the Coral Restoration Foundation and sent to the Mote laboratory, which guides them for breeding. It has allowed Mote to develop thousands of new genotypes, promoting the kind of diversity that researchers deem essential to climate resilience.
"We do not have a crystal ball," Levy said. "We do not know what will be the future, so we have to push diversity … When we talk about a changing climate that focuses on the extremes, do you want to put all your eggs in the same basket? And if that does not account for what is happening? "
The large-scale rescue effort is filled with unknowns. Even corals that thrive in laboratory conditions to simulate unbridled global warming in 80 years, for example, could be planted in nature and lose the characteristics that made them resilient in the laboratory. Scientists are already discussing restoration efforts with more extreme interventions that include spraying aerosols in the clouds above them to darken sunlight and blow up bubbles. air in the waters surrounding the reefs to block the sun's rays.
"These are all ideas that can protect these corals as you put so much effort into restoring them," Eakin said. "They could absolutely play a role in this area."
He said that a new technology would also be crucial to getting enough corals planted to have an impact worldwide. Eakin is considering underwater drones doing the tedious job of planting tens of thousands of pieces of coral on the reefs, and robots taking the task of cutting the microfragments that scientists have now seen one by one. There is already a robot that helps to grow a coral farm in Israel.
Entrepreneurs see the opportunity in all this. A start-up called Coral Vita is relying on Mote's work with plans for a network of coral farms catering to customers in the hospitality and fishing industries suffering from reef degradation. The insurance giant Swiss Re AG recently announced coral insurance policies for beachfront hotels in the Riviera Maya in Mexico protected by the Mesoamerican reef. Under them, hotels receive compensation after major storms to repair the reef, which is crucial to protect resorts from even more catastrophic damage in future storms and devastating beach erosion.
Scientists Are Encouraged to Do
"We are looking at a potential complete loss of the ecosystem that, to my knowledge, has not occurred in the history of the I & # 39; humanity, "said Levy. "I do not think anyone wants to be responsible for that."
Learn more:
Immunity could be the key to solving the coral crisis
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