A few years ago I set up an outdoor clawfoot tub/fish tank. My youngest son stocks it with fish in the spring. Our favorites are creek chubs because they have a white dot on their head that makes it possible to find them in the tank. They live like Royalty all summer and then are released back into the creek in the fall. That first fall we talked about setting up an aquarium, I did some research that lead to a youtube and that lead to another and down the rabbit hole I went. I wound up watching videos about reef tanks and coral propagation. That's where I first heard of Ruth Gates.
A marine biologist who studied at UC Los Angeles and later became director of the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, where she performed groundbreaking work on coral survival and reproduction. She was a leader in her field and a teacher. In this video she gives a brief description of her career path, and the Institute. 5:38
Carbon pollution is warming our oceans and bleaching coral around the world. The great barrier reef has lost over half of its coral in just the last few years. Under the old systems coral had a chance at recovery from bleaching events. Now with sustained warming, other types of algae are proliferating in the skeletal structure after bleaching events, causing them to disintegrate rapidly. The slow starvation of coral can become a rapid collapse of entire reef frameworks.
My YouTube adventure was not my first experience with coral reefs. I started diving in 1987 after taking a after school job in a bike and dive shop, as a bike mechanic. The owner needed someone to help on trips to train people to dive. The first offshore dives I took were in the Florida gulf. I was told we would be diving reefs, the ‘’reefs’’ we dove on were nothing more than black trawler strafed lumps. After receiving my certification I went on some dives off the keys and discovered what a coral reef really looks like. At the time I thought nothing of the loss of reefs or even why they were gone, we just moved on to a different place. Looking back, the loss is painful. These locations were just a few spots that my boss knew about that she liked to dive and spear fish on. This process by the commercial fishermen of locating a reef, fishing it out and destroying it at the same time is repeated over and over. This is only one of the many pressures put on reefs, the largest living organisms on the planet.
Ruth Gates died last year, but her team and many others are finding ways to adapt coral to the changing seas. 25 percent of salt water fish and half a billion people depend directly on coral reefs. Here she is again to describe in more detail what they are doing in the lab and a closer look at what coral is. 3:41
I hope this work succeeds. It carries a price tag that runs into the trillions. Much work is being done to save coral reefs. The super corals are being propagated, and new discoveries are helping save our beautiful and vital reefs worldwide. As conditions on our planet worsen they need all the help they can get.
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