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Speaker 2: Oh hey, it's your karate teacher who smells like your
Speaker 2: college sweetheart, and so you're weird around them. Ali Ward
Speaker 2: back with another episode of Ologies. So this episode was
Speaker 2: recorded in beautiful Hawaii. Her ever heard of it a
Speaker 2: few weeks ago. You're about to just get an ear
Speaker 2: full of coral. But before I recorded it, honestly, I
Speaker 2: knew neither jack nor shit about coral. Now all I
Speaker 2: want to do is stare at videos of coral. Honestly,
Speaker 2: I used to just consider them to be like the
Speaker 2: really plucky, kind of quirky setting of a snorkeling jount,
Speaker 2: kind of like a like a splashy backdrop in a
Speaker 2: community theater play. Like, oh, that's nice, but you know
Speaker 2: what's happening in front of them? What kind of fish
Speaker 2: do we have? O contrare? After this episode you'll be like,
Speaker 2: move out of the way, fish, I'm staring at a
Speaker 2: pollop and yeah, it's totally fun. If you don't know
Speaker 2: what a pollop is, we will get to that. But first,
Speaker 2: thank you to all the folks that support the show.
Speaker 2: At patreon dot com slash ologies, for as little as
Speaker 2: a dollar a month, you can submit questions. Also thanks
Speaker 2: to everyone who buys and wears shirts and hats and
Speaker 2: such from ologiesmerch dot com. We have some new denim
Speaker 2: Dad hats if you need a new lid. This says
Speaker 2: I like weird facts, good intentions, and bad puns. It
Speaker 2: doesn't literally say that. I'm just saying that. It's like
Speaker 2: people will go, oh, that must be what you're into,
Speaker 2: although that's not a bad idea for a hat. Stay tuned. Also,
Speaker 2: thank you to everyone who tells friends and co workers
Speaker 2: about the show, and who rates and subscribes and lose reviews,
Speaker 2: which you know I read because I deliver a fresh
Speaker 2: one each week. This week was a fun one for
Speaker 2: your old pal Alley. I brought attention to the fact
Speaker 2: that a department store was carrying some pretty out of
Speaker 2: touch and scientifically unsound body shaming dinnerware, and it made,
Speaker 2: for some reason, international news, and it was picked up
Speaker 2: by some news sites that somehow made this a political issue.
Speaker 2: So I pointed people toward the Coolology episode with doctor
Speaker 2: Renee Engeln to educate people on why body shame doesn't
Speaker 2: actually promote healthy eating. So this led to a rare
Speaker 2: one star review from a new curious listener who must
Speaker 2: have heard about me on Breitbart. Golf Guy sixty nine
Speaker 2: sixty nine sixty nine sixty nine sixty nine nine six
Speaker 2: nine six says, yuck, this podcast claims to be science comedy.
Speaker 2: I didn't hear either, just a bunch of self congratulation
Speaker 2: about not trying to look good. Sad real? Is this
Speaker 2: what we want to promote in our society? A bunch
Speaker 2: of slobs? Thank you so much, golf Guy sixty nine
Speaker 2: sixty nine sixty nine sixty nine sixty nine nine six nine.
Speaker 2: I appreciate your feedback. This podcast has taught me so
Speaker 2: much about different perspectives and experiences, and I appreciate every
Speaker 2: single one of you. Most of you so thank you
Speaker 2: for sharing your perspectives. I learned so much and it's
Speaker 2: very much a pleasure to pass that information on and
Speaker 2: hopefully make the world a little bit more compassionate. Anyway, Okay,
Speaker 2: Nidariology totally a word. It's a well documented, legit term.
Speaker 2: It's a study of animals that are over ten thousand
Speaker 2: species who have nitosites, which are these specialized cells for
Speaker 2: catching prey. And where does this lovely, silent, consonant, weird
Speaker 2: word come from. It looks like when your mom tries
Speaker 2: to weasel a fake term into a Words with Friends
Speaker 2: play and you're like, no way, Nancy, that's not enough. Bowels.
Speaker 2: But it comes from the old Latin need da, which
Speaker 2: means a nettle, and it might also have ties to
Speaker 2: old Latvian and Lithuanian words meaning to itch and to tickle.
Speaker 2: Are Nigerians. They're underwater animals that poses these kind of
Speaker 2: beautiful plant looking things from Mars, and they want to
Speaker 2: just tickle you to death. I'm already sold. I already
Speaker 2: love them, but let's hear more so. I was introduced
Speaker 2: to this ologist by your favorite tuthologist, squid expert, Sarah
Speaker 2: Macnaughty Sarah mcattack on Twitter follow her, love her, and
Speaker 2: she invited me to tag along on a squidding trip
Speaker 2: to Hawaii, a research trip she was doing. A company
Speaker 2: called Atlas Obscura was facilitating it. They were awesome. They
Speaker 2: do wonderful science and history trips. It was a joy
Speaker 2: Rachel she led it. I love her anyway. One day
Speaker 2: the group got to take a little boat to Coconut Island,
Speaker 2: and the very island featured in the opening credits of
Speaker 2: Gilligan's Island. And this was once a weird getaway for
Speaker 2: Hollywood types, but now it's a research station where grad
Speaker 2: students tend to marine life. We spent the day looking
Speaker 2: at these gurgling outdoor tanks and watching a bay of
Speaker 2: hammerhead sharks, strolling some beachy trails to stations with urchins
Speaker 2: and c Q humbers and kayrories nails. They're all being
Speaker 2: monitored by these wonderful marine biologists there. This ologist got
Speaker 2: his bachelor's at UC Santa Cruz, double majoring in environmental
Speaker 2: studies and feminist studies, got his Masters in biology and
Speaker 2: ecology evolution and conservation biology in San Francisco, and is
Speaker 2: working toward his PhD right now at this famed Gates
Speaker 2: Lab at the University of Hawaii, Manoa and the Hawaiian
Speaker 2: Institute of Marine Biology. The Gates Lab is a coral lab.
Speaker 2: This dude has his hands full the coraal. We're in
Speaker 2: the middle of a spawning event that very weak, but
Speaker 2: he is amazing and took an hour out of his
Speaker 2: day to come to my hotel and chat about corals.
Speaker 2: I was waiting so excitedly in the lobby, and I
Speaker 2: thought like he was maybe five or ten minutes late,
Speaker 2: which is fine, But it turns out we were in
Speaker 2: the same lobby exactly on time, but just perfectly obscured
Speaker 2: by a pillar. So once we figured that out, it
Speaker 2: was all smooth. Salein we talked about what coral even is,
Speaker 2: why they're important, how he feels about diving, what a
Speaker 2: dead reef looks like, the state of some reefs around
Speaker 2: the world, if it's reef or reefs, perhaps the importance
Speaker 2: of balancing work with being your true self. Some advice
Speaker 2: for aspiring marine biologists. How screwed our coral what movies
Speaker 2: get it right? What's up with sunscreens, what is bleaching?
Speaker 2: And what else can we do to help our hard,
Speaker 2: squishy pals. Beneath the sea, So anchor down. Get ready
Speaker 2: for a wave of coral info with the amazing nadariologist
Speaker 2: Shale Matsuda nine fifty nine shales do here at ten,
Speaker 2: I'm sitting by the pool. They have so little time.
Speaker 2: I'm just essentially gonna throw this microphone in his face
Speaker 2: and like start rolling before we even hit the elevators.
Speaker 2: The column. How long have you been here?
Speaker 3: Like five ten minutes?
Speaker 2: I got into.
Speaker 3: But I came to the other side.
Speaker 2: Was literally like take me away, reading about microplastics and
Speaker 2: coral and wanting to cry.
Speaker 3: But yeah, it's awful.
Speaker 2: Here's my nasis. Kay, and you are a nidariologist. Did
Speaker 2: you say it right?
Speaker 3: Sure? I was thinking about that. Are coralologists maybe?
Speaker 2: I mean? Is are corals nidaria?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 3: The narians the file they're part of. And what unites
Speaker 3: all of those animals is their stinging cells. They're ninocytes.
Speaker 2: Oh that's the common threadated.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so like anemonees or jellyfish and corals, I'll produce
Speaker 3: these little stinging cells of the use in defense or
Speaker 3: prey capture.
Speaker 2: I've already learned so much about corals. I didn't know
Speaker 2: that they got little stinkies. And so what exactly is a.
Speaker 3: Coral That's a great question that we think about all
Speaker 3: the time. Actually, So corals are animals first and foremost,
Speaker 3: but the corals, when you think of a coral reef, corals,
Speaker 3: they're much more than like the sum of their parts.
Speaker 3: So the coral animal looks white. They have clear tissues,
Speaker 3: and they secrete a white calcium carbonate skeleton. But the
Speaker 3: reason that when you're snorkling around a coral reef, they
Speaker 3: don't appear white to us is because they have a
Speaker 3: symbiotic algae which live inside their tissues that provide up
Speaker 3: to like ninety five percent of their daily nutritional needs.
Speaker 3: And the algas color themselves are what we're looking at
Speaker 3: when we see corals. Oh my god, And just like
Speaker 3: you and me, corals also have a microbiome. They have
Speaker 3: bacteria that live inside of their tissues that also play
Speaker 3: a lot of really important roles.
Speaker 2: Okay, so to recap corals are animals, and they often
Speaker 2: have a calcium carbonate white skeletal structure and a squishy
Speaker 2: skin bag that can be filled with colorful algae and
Speaker 2: bacteria pals that live under their skin and provide their
Speaker 2: nutrition so if you pitched that creature in a sci
Speaker 2: fi series, people would be like, no, that's too weird.
Speaker 2: What about just like a short, skinnier human with bigger
Speaker 2: eyes and everyone be like, yeah, yeah, that's more plausible. Now,
Speaker 2: what is with them being a skin bag?
Speaker 3: This is like the hardest question I know. It's like, oh, man, Like,
Speaker 3: we have a term for this. It's called the coral hollobiont,
Speaker 3: and that is like the coral animal itself. It's symbiotic algae,
Speaker 3: it's bacteria, they're fungi, they're a kia. There are a
Speaker 3: lot of different obligate symbionts that these corals have that
Speaker 3: are critical for their life and function.
Speaker 2: So it's kind of like a skeleton, a soupy mix
Speaker 2: of goodness and then like a little transparent skin over it.
Speaker 3: And then trans parent skin is the animal itself. So
Speaker 3: if just like trees that grow in the forest, if
Speaker 3: you count their rings, you get idea of how old
Speaker 3: they are. Corals actually work the same way, where they
Speaker 3: are constantly secreting this calcium carbonate skeleton and growing, and
Speaker 3: researchers will actually take a core of that skeleton and
Speaker 3: you can actually count the different layers and get an
Speaker 3: idea of the age of the corals and also what
Speaker 3: was going on on the planet at the time.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, is it similar to trees in that
Speaker 2: there's a ring for every year of growth because of
Speaker 2: seasons or is that different?
Speaker 3: It's kind of like seasons in the ocean. Different corals
Speaker 3: will grow at different rates, so kind of like different
Speaker 3: plants as well. In a nutshell, like as a coral
Speaker 3: begins to grow and keeps putting down these layers of
Speaker 3: calcium carbonate, we can use things like carbon dating to
Speaker 3: get an idea of like what was happening in the
Speaker 3: atmosphere and in the oceans at those times, and so
Speaker 3: it kind of gives it gives us a geologic history
Speaker 3: of what was happening in these environments.
Speaker 2: So when you see let's say a coral out of
Speaker 2: the ocean and it's like a piece on a well, yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, number one, it's not a happy coral. But
Speaker 2: when do you see like a decorative coral? Are you
Speaker 2: seeing essentially just its skeleton?
Speaker 3: But when we say coral reef corals, there are a
Speaker 3: particular type a group of corals that live in the
Speaker 3: shallow waters that you know have these albosymbionts that rely
Speaker 3: on photosynthesis to get their food. But corals are really
Speaker 3: large group of organisms, and they we have deep sea
Speaker 3: corals that don't have these symbioses, that just feed heterotrophically
Speaker 3: by eating you know, plank dinner things in the water.
Speaker 3: And a lot of corals, like can have pigments and
Speaker 3: their skeletons do have pigments of their own, and so
Speaker 3: like black corals, you know, red corals, those things that
Speaker 3: you see see in the stores, like that's still the skeleton,
Speaker 3: but those are the organisms themselves which you shouldn't pull out.
Speaker 2: Of the ocean, which we should leave in the ocean.
Speaker 3: Leave in the ocean.
Speaker 2: Now, are those getting harvested just for decorative purposes?
Speaker 3: Yeah, very often. There's a lot of protections in different
Speaker 3: places abound corals, but it's you know, not not everywhere.
Speaker 2: Okay, So side notes, Some figures have estimated boards of
Speaker 2: two hundred million dollars annually worth of coral is poached
Speaker 2: from the oceans for things like jewelry and decre and
Speaker 2: in some places just taking a coral skeleton bit from
Speaker 2: the beach is illegal. So if you're gonna get arrested
Speaker 2: on a beach. Do something else, have a better story,
Speaker 2: you know, So maybe don't have coral decorations.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, you know, but what you can have is
Speaker 3: that where you know, with technology increases, where we're doing
Speaker 3: a lot of work with like three D imaging, you
Speaker 3: can like go home or you know, go to a
Speaker 3: museum or you know, tech place and get a coral
Speaker 3: printed and put that in your house.
Speaker 2: Yes, you can admire them in a way that's a replica.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, that makes sense.
Speaker 2: This is beautiful, right, you can, I'm sure you can
Speaker 2: even cast cast them. And the more little plaster of
Speaker 2: Paris in there exactly we fixed it pss. I did
Speaker 2: look it up, and there are hollow coral shaped molds
Speaker 2: you can pour plaster a Paris in them, and it
Speaker 2: just it seems more convenient than get yourself to an
Speaker 2: ocean and then out of jail. And now, how long
Speaker 2: have you been studying corals.
Speaker 3: I've been studying corals formally for four years during this degree,
Speaker 3: but I've been interested in corals for for much longer,
Speaker 3: and I studied corals as a volunteer researcher at the
Speaker 3: California Academy of sciences on expeditions and volunteer expeditions actually
Speaker 3: kind of like subscure as a younger person.
Speaker 2: And were you always maybe drawn to the sea, Were
Speaker 2: you always like an aquatic person.
Speaker 3: That's a good question too. So I grew up just
Speaker 3: outside of Chicago, where even though I felt like I
Speaker 3: was growing up on a body of water like Michigan,
Speaker 3: you know, it's not a marine environment, it's freshwater environment.
Speaker 3: So it looks like I wasn't growing up swimming on
Speaker 3: coral reefs. But for me, you know, looking back, my
Speaker 3: first taste of you know, the ocean was growing up
Speaker 3: and going to the Shed Aquarium and seeing all the
Speaker 3: exhibits there. And I think it's a really common thread
Speaker 3: that you hear for a lot of us who you know,
Speaker 3: pursued degrees in marine biology, that most of us in
Speaker 3: the United States aren't lucky enough to grow up on
Speaker 3: a coral reef. And so a lot of our first
Speaker 3: exposures to this, you know, especially those of us before
Speaker 3: like the YouTube era and whatnot, was going to our
Speaker 3: local aquariums and really seeing these organisms that you know,
Speaker 3: you don't even read about the ocean.
Speaker 2: If you're wondering where are corals. I asked corals dot
Speaker 2: org and it said essentially around the equator plus where
Speaker 2: currents flow out of the tropics, like in Florida and
Speaker 2: southern Japan, it's a little bit warmer. They make up
Speaker 2: zero point two percent of the ocean floor, but they're
Speaker 2: home to this blow my mind, twenty five percent of
Speaker 2: marine life. What So, if sea animals were like the
Speaker 2: cool kids, the coral reefs would be like the mall
Speaker 2: if this were a movie from the eighties and so
Speaker 2: was there was there a moment like at the aquarium,
Speaker 2: where you thought I would love to do that in life.
Speaker 3: It's an interesting I'm gonna give you my journey story
Speaker 3: and you can like hack this up.
Speaker 2: I love a journey store.
Speaker 3: It's a journey story.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's get to no shales science background sateline.
Speaker 3: So I had one of those moments where, like I
Speaker 3: I was always drawn to nature, being outside and playing outside.
Speaker 3: I was a very like I was not a video
Speaker 3: game kid. I was a wanted to get muddy kid.
Speaker 3: But when I got to college, I kind of went
Speaker 3: a different science route. I studied, you know, water policy
Speaker 3: and sustainable organic farming, and that was something that I
Speaker 3: was like really into and really excited about. And I
Speaker 3: never I just like marine biology wasn't like something that
Speaker 3: I thought I could really do, and I ended up
Speaker 3: actually pursuing a different path. I had a dual degree
Speaker 3: in environmental science and women's studies, and I kind of
Speaker 3: went the second route and just kind of worked with
Speaker 3: youth in nature and underserved communities, and I kind of
Speaker 3: got to this point, you know, my little bit later twenties,
Speaker 3: I decided to, you know, quit my job and move
Speaker 3: out of my house. I was selling all my stuff
Speaker 3: and travel and figure that out. And something that happened
Speaker 3: for me on that trip as I finally decided to
Speaker 3: learn to scuba dive. I'm a really claustrophobic person, so
Speaker 3: I kind of put that off for a while. And
Speaker 3: I really explicitly remember, you know, that first time I
Speaker 3: descended into the water, and this was in Thailand, and
Speaker 3: I remember like being so overwhelmed with how beautiful all
Speaker 3: the corals were and how this environment like different than
Speaker 3: just snorkeling, just like opened up in a really three dimensional,
Speaker 3: dynamic way. And then I also remember seeing a lot
Speaker 3: of garbage on the reef too, and so I was
Speaker 3: having a lot of I was having these like you know,
Speaker 3: push pull moments of being like so overwhelmed with the
Speaker 3: beauty around me and so curious about, you know what
Speaker 3: these animals were. What, you know, what is this environment
Speaker 3: that I'm in? And I want to like looking at everything,
Speaker 3: but also being really struck by how how polluted it
Speaker 3: was as well. Yeah, from there basically went I want
Speaker 3: to make sure that was right choice, and so I
Speaker 3: applied to sitting these little internet cafes, like applying to
Speaker 3: these like coral ref monitoring like volunteer ships, just to
Speaker 3: like learn a little bit more, make sure this is
Speaker 3: the like big life switch I was ready to make.
Speaker 3: And I joined one that was in the Yuka ten
Speaker 3: in Mexico, where I went out and lived for three
Speaker 3: months and learned to identify all the species of coral
Speaker 3: out there, and we participated in monitoring transects that were
Speaker 3: then used by local NGOs to compare the protected sites
Speaker 3: that they had gotten protection for versus the sites that weren't.
Speaker 3: And so in that experience really kind of solidified that,
Speaker 3: you know, I moved back to San Francisco. I went
Speaker 3: to City College to make up on some coursework that
Speaker 3: I hadn't done the first time. I was volunteering as
Speaker 3: a divert aquarium to get more hands on experience, started
Speaker 3: volunteering in a research lab at the California Academy of Sciences,
Speaker 3: and then I was bartending to you know, pay the bills.
Speaker 3: And then from there I realized that, you know, being
Speaker 3: being at a museum was such an exciting place because
Speaker 3: you've got researcher studying everything, right, You've got that, You've
Speaker 3: got tourists and like community folks from the neighborho are
Speaker 3: like right upstairs that you can just go upstairs and
Speaker 3: talk to you about like all the really cool things
Speaker 3: that we're working on. And then moving on, you know,
Speaker 3: from there to to my PhD where I am now
Speaker 3: was you know I was at that point I was
Speaker 3: like pretty much sold.
Speaker 2: So I have never been yet snorkeling in and alive.
Speaker 3: Reef, Oh you got to do that out you're here?
Speaker 2: What is that like? I mean, you do that for
Speaker 2: your job and also as a passion, Like what is
Speaker 2: it like to be underwater like that?
Speaker 3: It's so beautiful? Yeah, it's so beautiful. Corals come in
Speaker 3: like all shapes and sizes and just like you know,
Speaker 3: you have your favorite city or your favorite you know
Speaker 3: nature trail you like to walk on. Every reef is
Speaker 3: going to be a little bit different. They have huge structures,
Speaker 3: and these corals will have these you know, these big
Speaker 3: branching corals. You look a little closer and you see
Speaker 3: their their homes to all these different kinds of animals.
Speaker 3: Like the more you know, the more structure you have
Speaker 3: in your in the ecosystem, the more different types of
Speaker 3: organisms that you're gonna see when you're down there, and
Speaker 3: it's it's just it's it's so exciting, like there's so
Speaker 3: much to see, and you like, you know, you'll see
Speaker 3: your turtle and your shark every once in a while,
Speaker 3: which is really exciting. But for me, it's like kind
Speaker 3: of just like swimming up to one kind of coral
Speaker 3: and just like staring at it for a while and
Speaker 3: then things will start to come out. You'll see like
Speaker 3: crabs that live inside the coral. You'll see you know,
Speaker 3: snapping shrimp someone you'll see eels or octopus and just
Speaker 3: like you just it is like it's like a you
Speaker 3: can think of it almost like a you know, a
Speaker 3: metropolis in the ocean and full of a diverse cast
Speaker 3: of players.
Speaker 2: When you're doing research, is it ever difficult for you
Speaker 2: to say, Okay, all right, chill, we're done, We're get
Speaker 2: out of the water. Are you like one word?
Speaker 3: Oh? Yeah, absolutely, you know, and sometimes you forget, like
Speaker 3: there have been times when I, you know, since I
Speaker 3: work on corals and I'm working on an experiment right
Speaker 3: now where I'm focusing on individual coral colonies, i can
Speaker 3: be like upside down in the reef for like an
Speaker 3: hour at a time, just staring at this one coral.
Speaker 3: And then we'll come to the surfa and people be like, oh,
Speaker 3: did you see that shark that went by before? And
Speaker 3: I'll what are you talking about? You know, So it's
Speaker 3: always still really nice to go out when you're not
Speaker 3: working and just really appreciate, you know, how lucky we
Speaker 3: are to be able to see these environments. You know,
Speaker 3: I've worked with researchers who you know, I'll go to
Speaker 3: a coral reef and I'll say, this is beautiful, look
Speaker 3: at all the diversity here, and they'll be like, you
Speaker 3: should have seen it twenty years ago, because they're seeing
Speaker 3: these changes at such a rapid pace that we're witnessing
Speaker 3: them in our lifetimes and that's that's new.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so what does shale working on in terms of
Speaker 2: protecting these bony, soupy, squishy, mysterious, gorgeous critters.
Speaker 3: What we're working on, like our lab group is working on,
Speaker 3: is you know, really a whole wide range of questions.
Speaker 3: But we're really curious about, you know, what's going to
Speaker 3: happen to corals under these future climate conditions and what
Speaker 3: can we do to intervene to give them a better
Speaker 3: chance of surviving. I'm trying to say, if I wanted
Speaker 3: to go like broad or like my stuff, Okay.
Speaker 2: Let's go broad a little bit, just because people don't
Speaker 2: know shit about corals.
Speaker 3: That's true, but they're the coolest animal. Yeah, So corals
Speaker 3: are all coral species are all really really different. That's
Speaker 3: something that makes them super exciting and interesting. But it
Speaker 3: makes it also a lot harder to come up with
Speaker 3: like strategies to help them survive because they reproduce differently.
Speaker 3: You know, some will brood like releasing coral larvae into
Speaker 3: the water. Some will spawn, releasing coral gammeyts, eggs and
Speaker 3: sperm into the water. Some are large and they grow
Speaker 3: in these really big shapes. Some are very small, even
Speaker 3: single polyped corals, and so they and they have very
Speaker 3: different life strategies. They're just they're so different they associate
Speaker 3: with different types of these symbionts. And so what we're
Speaker 3: really interested in is doing is seeing if you know,
Speaker 3: are there types of interventions that we can kind of
Speaker 3: scale up that managers and conservationists all around the world
Speaker 3: who work with these different corals and these different coral
Speaker 3: reef environments and all widely different can can use or
Speaker 3: like can use as signals for what might happen in
Speaker 3: the future, or to use to kind of help glose
Speaker 3: corals that are that are out there survive. Some of
Speaker 3: the stuff that we're working on in the lab is
Speaker 3: looking at like can we expose corals to non lethal
Speaker 3: stressors to condition them to them be put out in
Speaker 3: the reef, and if they experience these higher temperatures downstream,
Speaker 3: will that initial exposure help them survive?
Speaker 2: What is coral bleaching? You're asking, I get it. We're
Speaker 2: going to explain that in a second. Don't worry, got you.
Speaker 3: And with coral bleaching, what's really hard about that is
Speaker 3: it's this whole balance of how hot and for how long.
Speaker 3: So if there's like a really short high temperature spike,
Speaker 3: how does that affect these organisms versus if this is
Speaker 3: more of a prolonged only a degree or two above
Speaker 3: that thermal maximum that they have, How does that affect
Speaker 3: if they're going to bleach, the severity of that bleaching,
Speaker 3: and then also their ability to recover afterwards. So we
Speaker 3: haven't really talked about like what coral bleaching is. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I know expression So I was like, okay, Like that
Speaker 3: doesn't make any sense yet. So corals, you know, how
Speaker 3: these these symbiotic algae that are obligate, that means they're
Speaker 3: required for the corals to live. They provide up to
Speaker 3: ninety five percent of their daily nutritional needs and everything.
Speaker 3: When the temperatures are good, everything is happy, you know.
Speaker 3: The corals get what they need, the symbionts get what
Speaker 3: they need. But when the water temperature rises, like I said,
Speaker 3: just even slightly above that thermal maximum that the corals
Speaker 3: can handle, the corals are starting to stress out, and
Speaker 3: one of their stress responses is to expel. These algae
Speaker 3: are so kind of how when we get sick, we'll
Speaker 3: get a fever, and that's good, it's helping. It's our
Speaker 3: body's way of helping protect us. But if that fever
Speaker 3: gets too high or goes not for too long, that
Speaker 3: can actually be detrimental to us. And the same thing's
Speaker 3: true with coral bleaching. So as the corals are purging
Speaker 3: out these algal symbionts, it's not just all the time.
Speaker 3: You can watch a coral start to pale, losing its color,
Speaker 3: right because as by on sleeve, that white skeleton showing through.
Speaker 3: And then as that's happening, the longer goes on, the
Speaker 3: corals aren't getting the energy and they can begin to starve.
Speaker 2: Okay, so under temperature stressors, corals toss their internal friends
Speaker 2: and they bleach because they lose that color. So they're
Speaker 2: not dead, but they're certainly weaker and they're in danger.
Speaker 2: It is not cute.
Speaker 3: And what you'll see is if you should go out
Speaker 3: into a coral reef when this is happening, if you
Speaker 3: see these corals that are white, you're seeing that skeleton
Speaker 3: through the tissue. But the tissue is still there. The
Speaker 3: corals are still alive. And if that stressor leaves, the
Speaker 3: corals have a chance to recover. Those symbio communities can
Speaker 3: proliferate again, and the corals they'll repigment and be okay,
Speaker 3: but if that stressor goes on too long, the corals
Speaker 3: can die. And we've seen this happen on massive scales
Speaker 3: on a reef, and once the corals die, you'll start
Speaker 3: to see macroalgae growing on top of them, and that's
Speaker 3: when the structure of the reef environment will then start
Speaker 3: to really break down. And also some corals aren't bleaching
Speaker 3: some individuals, like in kanye A Bay during the twenty
Speaker 3: fourteen to twenty fifteen bleaching events that we had, there'd
Speaker 3: be two corals the exact same species, right next to
Speaker 3: each other, like touching on the reef, and one of
Speaker 3: them would be bleached and one of them would be
Speaker 3: visibly totally normal. And so we're really trying to understand, like,
Speaker 3: you know, what is it about that corals, like genetic
Speaker 3: makeup or simbilian communities that is allowing these corals to
Speaker 3: perform a lot better.
Speaker 2: And so when you're looking at say two different examples
Speaker 2: of coral next to each other, are those different individuals
Speaker 2: genetically or are those different groups of a bunch of individuals.
Speaker 2: When you're looking at a fan of coral, how many
Speaker 2: people are you looking at that are coral.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a good question. So a coral colony is
Speaker 3: a coral. You can think of a coral of itself
Speaker 3: is a coral pollup?
Speaker 2: What is a pollup? Well, it's a squishy little bugger
Speaker 2: with a feathery head and it secretes calcium carbonate and
Speaker 2: it's base to anchor it on a surface kind of
Speaker 2: like a cup holder filled with one of those gas stations.
Speaker 2: Should wind sock dancers only made out of jello salad? Also,
Speaker 2: as long as this train has made a stop into Pollopville.
Speaker 2: It comes from the words poly many and pe mean foot,
Speaker 2: so polyp and in Old Latin it meant cuttlefish. I
Speaker 2: personally tend to associate polyps with bad news about colon's
Speaker 2: and that's because a polyp is a little intestinal dingle
Speaker 2: dangle that can grow and if not checked, it can
Speaker 2: turn into a tumor. So get checked. Okay, let's get
Speaker 2: out of our butts and back into the ocean. Though.
Speaker 2: What is a polyp?
Speaker 3: Ars? So you look a little mouth, kind of like
Speaker 3: if you took it in eminy, that kind of structure
Speaker 3: mouth the middle, tentacles on the outside. And as a
Speaker 3: coral grows it buds off and creates a genetically identical polyp,
Speaker 3: and as those polyps continue to multiply and spread and grow,
Speaker 3: you've had a coral colony that is made up of
Speaker 3: polyps that are all one genetic individual.
Speaker 2: Do you think that that's all the same person or
Speaker 2: do you think it's a person and a bunch of clones. Yes,
Speaker 2: it's a hard quest. I understand that our coral is
Speaker 2: not a person too, but maybe.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely, And that's that's a hard question.
Speaker 3: And actually people in the labar are looking at that too,
Speaker 3: like at what life stage are coral is able to
Speaker 3: fuse together and share resources or not? Do some species
Speaker 3: do this more than others? So there's that's definitely a
Speaker 3: really good question. Okay, good but we don't totally know
Speaker 3: the answer to that. All. You can't just look at
Speaker 3: one and be like that's three or four genetic like
Speaker 3: genetically distinct individuals, like we're literally the same person. Sometimes
Speaker 3: when they do grow up next to each other, you
Speaker 3: can see kind of like a scar between colonies where
Speaker 3: one individual ends and the next one begins. But we're
Speaker 3: also like we're also seeing evidence of fusion.
Speaker 2: And how much do you think research has changed in
Speaker 2: the last five or ten years with DNA sequencing and
Speaker 2: how much cheaper and faster that's gotten so much. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's cool.
Speaker 3: I mean it's a really exciting time to be a
Speaker 3: biologist right now and asking questions that we were you know,
Speaker 3: couldn't afford to ask before another time anology to ask
Speaker 3: before on these really large scales.
Speaker 2: And now what about their their stinkiness, their little stinger stingers,
Speaker 2: how is that helping them survive or thwart predators? Or
Speaker 2: are their predators to coral other than just human.
Speaker 3: Yeah, our antlesh? Yeah, but yeah, so corals don't have
Speaker 3: a lot of predators. There's a lot of fish that will,
Speaker 3: like you've probably heard of parrot fish that we'll try
Speaker 3: to like eat the macro algae around coral. Sometimes they
Speaker 3: will nibble the coral too, but you know, for the
Speaker 3: most part, there's not a lot of animals coming towards
Speaker 3: them to eat them in that sense. They they use
Speaker 3: their stinking cells a lot to in prey capture. So
Speaker 3: if you see, if you like, stare at a coral
Speaker 3: long enough under the scope, and you know, if your
Speaker 3: piece of plankton, you know, swims up you'll you'll see
Speaker 3: it almost like kind of like a you know, venus
Speaker 3: slide trap. You'll see the plankton get stuck to the
Speaker 3: coral tentacoles and then the coral tentacles will pull it
Speaker 3: into its mouth and suck it in and digest it.
Speaker 3: It's really neat to watch. So but those you know,
Speaker 3: the stinging cells, like if you touch a coral, what
Speaker 3: you shouldn't do. It will try to sting YouTube but
Speaker 3: our skin is too thick. But you know, other animals
Speaker 3: like you know Portuguese Man of war for example, Like,
Speaker 3: there are stinging cells that can affect us too, but
Speaker 3: corals are pretty safe. Don't touch them.
Speaker 2: But Chaille says that one thing that changed in his
Speaker 2: academic lifetime is that gene sequencing technology has improved vastly,
Speaker 2: so they're able to get hundreds thousands of millions of reeds,
Speaker 2: getting a much better idea of what bacterial communities associate
Speaker 2: with corals. Just imagine your haircut six or seven years ago,
Speaker 2: like yikes, right, just imagine what gene sequencing thinks of
Speaker 2: its tbt's so embarrassing.
Speaker 3: And what this will do is I can go out
Speaker 3: there and take a really small tissue sample, extract the
Speaker 3: DNA sequence the DNA get back like you know, ten
Speaker 3: twenty thousand reeds of all these different organisms that we
Speaker 3: were able to amplify, and from that I can see,
Speaker 3: you know, who is there?
Speaker 4: What is it?
Speaker 3: Get an idea of like what the what fudg are
Speaker 3: the functions of these organisms and how important might that
Speaker 3: be to the health and survival of the coral. A
Speaker 3: lot of the bacteria, like you know, baccher of different
Speaker 3: different roles like in us, like your skin bacteria is
Speaker 3: gonna be different than your gut bacteria and you don't
Speaker 3: want those to mix. And like corals have bacteria that
Speaker 3: you know help in defense and nutrient cycling and things
Speaker 3: like that. So we're interested in like what those are
Speaker 3: doing there. We can get a way better idea of
Speaker 3: what's going on now than we could, you know, ten
Speaker 3: fifteen years ago.
Speaker 2: Morning bummer question, bummer question, And what do you think
Speaker 2: is the biggest coral bummer for the coral? Would it
Speaker 2: be a rise in temperature or ocean is sientification? Pollution?
Speaker 2: Like is there what's their big? What's their big? Said trombone.
Speaker 3: So corals are dealing with a lot of threat right now,
Speaker 3: the biggest one being the impacts of climate change, and
Speaker 3: we're seeing this on reefs today in the form of
Speaker 3: sea surface temperature warming and ocean certification as you mentioned.
Speaker 3: And why this is so bad is that we're seeing
Speaker 3: an increase, like even in our lifetimes of these massive
Speaker 3: coral bleaching events worldwide. And a coral bleaching event can
Speaker 3: can wipe out entire reef ecosystems in like one season,
Speaker 3: and we're seeing them not only you know, it's not
Speaker 3: just like a one off anymore. And here in Hawaii
Speaker 3: we've had we had the event in twenty fourteen again
Speaker 3: in twenty fifteen. The Great Barrier reef has also experienced
Speaker 3: these successive events. And so while you know, we're seeing
Speaker 3: corals that are able to survive one round of this
Speaker 3: warming and recover, it's like you keep on hitting them.
Speaker 3: What is that affecting? Like We've got research groups at
Speaker 3: the Hawai Institute of Marine Biology who are looking at
Speaker 3: like how does the reproduction affected by these events? Like
Speaker 3: are we going to see a lot more downstream things
Speaker 3: that are happening? And you add things like the local
Speaker 3: stressors like you know, overfishing or sedimentation and pollution runoff
Speaker 3: from a lot of the local environments that are there.
Speaker 3: Those are the kind of the the added pressures that
Speaker 3: that corals are facing. And it's if it is so good,
Speaker 3: like it is so good and so important to mitigate
Speaker 3: some of these local stressors, right, like you know, diverting
Speaker 3: pollution and sedimentation really important. Like a coral can't live
Speaker 3: if it's covered in sediment.
Speaker 2: Quick aside, what is up with sediments? Well, apparently it's
Speaker 2: been long known that sediments and coral, they are not happy. Roommates.
Speaker 2: Sailors would know that they could enter a freshwater river
Speaker 2: because that's when the reeves would stop because the sediment
Speaker 2: in their outflows would kill the coral. So why can't
Speaker 2: coral deal with a little river dust or erosion or
Speaker 2: storms caused by weather events or say tsunamis So in
Speaker 2: a paper titled Mechanisms of Damage to Corals exposed to sedimentation,
Speaker 2: researchers say that sediment blocks sunlight, which means that their
Speaker 2: photosynthetic inner alergae buddies get blocked, So there goes their
Speaker 2: nutrient and energy source. Now, if there's also organic material
Speaker 2: in the sediment, it tends to hog all the nearby
Speaker 2: oxygen in the water, and then those byproducts lower the
Speaker 2: pH and then other organic compounds in the sediment get digested,
Speaker 2: they release toxic hydrogen sulfide. So the sediment covered coral
Speaker 2: can die in twenty four hours. It can happen really quickly. Okay,
Speaker 2: So even though coral is an animal, just like imagine
Speaker 2: a favorite houseplant and then imagine coating it in a
Speaker 2: heavy spray paint and dipping it in an acid bath
Speaker 2: and then pumping poison in the room. Your plant would
Speaker 2: be like, wow, can you not The.
Speaker 3: Most important thing that we need to address if we
Speaker 3: want corals in the future is climate change?
Speaker 2: And why are coral reefs important? Also? Is it reefs
Speaker 2: or is it reefs? Is it reefs? I want to
Speaker 2: say like thaves, like rooves or like cloves.
Speaker 1: I like that.
Speaker 3: I haven't heard that.
Speaker 2: Actually, I just want to say reeves. And I know
Speaker 2: that's not reefs, okay, Like you know, like like multiples, Okay,
Speaker 2: you know foots or feet, but reeves. Okay, I've asked
Speaker 2: an expert, and it's not reeves. Listen, if elves had
Speaker 2: hooves the second halves of their lives, would they be
Speaker 2: tall enough to reach the shelves where they kept their
Speaker 2: knives to cut up lobes of bread, or would their
Speaker 2: wives have to put down the scarves they're knitting to
Speaker 2: get them themselves. I believe it's so why are reefs important?
Speaker 2: Why do we why do we want to save the
Speaker 2: reefs other than their fucking gorgeous and awesome and fish
Speaker 2: live there. But clearly they are important.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're yes, Yeah, they're really important, and they're really
Speaker 3: important for a lot of different reasons. They're really personal
Speaker 3: to too many people, but also then on a community
Speaker 3: and you know national, international scale as well, So you know,
Speaker 3: having a coral reef environment is they're one of the
Speaker 3: most biodiverse ecosystems in the world. They're a bank for biodiversity.
Speaker 3: And within that, you know, the coral reefs themselves are
Speaker 3: the breeding grounds and homes for tons of marine life.
Speaker 3: You've got animals that will come in from like the
Speaker 3: deeper oceans to breed. Fish is a really important, you know,
Speaker 3: food resource for a lot of coastal communities. It's their
Speaker 3: main source of protein, main source of burden for many
Speaker 3: people in the world. And the reef environment is where
Speaker 3: a lot of those larger game fish reproduce and come
Speaker 3: back to coral reefs, and a lot of our coastal
Speaker 3: ecosystems are really important for meditating, mitigating coastal damage. So
Speaker 3: you've got they absorb a lot of that you know,
Speaker 3: wave action, that wave power that's coming in. We've all
Speaker 3: seen really awful things that have been happening a lot
Speaker 3: of our coastal communities around the world because of you know,
Speaker 3: flooding and coastline erosion and things like that.
Speaker 2: Shale stresses that he doesn't like to focus too much
Speaker 2: on the potential pharmaceutical benefits of nature because there are
Speaker 2: other intrinsic reasons for conservation.
Speaker 3: But you know, a big something that we were learning
Speaker 3: more and more about the ocean in general is that
Speaker 3: there's a lot of these chemicals out there that can
Speaker 3: be used to help humans. And so for me, like
Speaker 3: one of the most exciting moments that I had actually
Speaker 3: during my master's degree, I studied sea slugs and need
Speaker 3: ranks during that time was I was like in my
Speaker 3: advisor's office looking through some old papers, and I found
Speaker 3: this paper where one of the so the slugs that
Speaker 3: I study really cool animals. They will eat things like
Speaker 3: sponges or different organisms that produce these toxic chemical compounds,
Speaker 3: and they will slightly alter them when they eat them,
Speaker 3: and they'll put them in their own tissues and use
Speaker 3: them to fend off their own predators. Really cool.
Speaker 2: I did a little digging and for more information on this,
Speaker 2: you might want to dip into just a light beach.
Speaker 2: Read entitled quote selective toxicity of a Persian Gulf sea
Speaker 2: cucumber Holorithia parva on human chronic lymphocytic leukemia by B
Speaker 2: lymphocites by direct mitochondrial targeting. Okay, spoiler alert, I'm gonna
Speaker 2: let shay I'll tell you the plot of the paper.
Speaker 3: But these toxins that are like antimicrobial antiviral also can
Speaker 3: be used in medical biomedical research that it benefits humans.
Speaker 3: Oh So, I'm like looking through this box of papers
Speaker 3: and found this paper and I'm like, oh my gosh,
Speaker 3: I like call my mom right and I'm like on
Speaker 3: the phone with my mom and I'm like, mom, like
Speaker 3: guess what. Like there's this mutobrank that they're studying that
Speaker 3: they're using to see if they can treat the adult
Speaker 3: form of cancer that I had as a kid, which
Speaker 3: is like mind blowing to me. Wait, what like this
Speaker 3: organism that I didn't think I was gonna study And
Speaker 3: I don't study pharmaceutical things or anything like that, but
Speaker 3: just that like this kind of a group of animals
Speaker 3: that I didn't know much about before could actually have
Speaker 3: such like a personal impact on me. And there's like
Speaker 3: tons of things out there that we haven't discovered yet.
Speaker 2: Oh my god. What kind of cancer was that?
Speaker 3: Uh? Childhood leukemia? Oh my gosh, it's wild. Right, So
Speaker 3: it's like I was like, it's all came full circle.
Speaker 3: But it's those kind of moments where they're you know,
Speaker 3: the reasons to protect coral reefs. We might not even
Speaker 3: know all the reasons yet. Yeah, right, And are we
Speaker 3: going to lose these opportunities because of like you know,
Speaker 3: it's not because we don't know better, but it's because
Speaker 3: it's like we're not ready, politicians aren't ready. It's not
Speaker 3: for a lack of science. I should say that that
Speaker 3: we're not making these big changes, but I'm hopeful that
Speaker 3: we're getting there. We're getting in the right direction.
Speaker 2: Do you think having had that experience with cancer as
Speaker 2: a kid changed the way you approached what you wanted
Speaker 2: to do in life and at all are.
Speaker 3: Yeah, not in the way you'd expect, Like everyone thought
Speaker 3: I was gonna grow up and want to be a doctor, Right,
Speaker 3: that's like a really typical narrative that people abscribe to
Speaker 3: childhood cancer survivors. For me, what heart or I think
Speaker 3: the main the way that it affected me the most,
Speaker 3: like in my personality is that I from a very
Speaker 3: early age didn't have this idea of like all the
Speaker 3: time in the world. I was like, if I want
Speaker 3: to do something, I have to do it now. And
Speaker 3: so I was from a very early age I was
Speaker 3: very you know, for better or for worse, like everything
Speaker 3: that I want to happen has to have now. So
Speaker 3: it resulted in me being a very driven human being.
Speaker 3: But then at the same time, it also you know,
Speaker 3: causes a lot of anxiety and pressure. And I think
Speaker 3: that it got me really curious about science, about answering questions,
Speaker 3: and about the fact that you know, like, oh man,
Speaker 3: this story too. So leukemia is a really interesting thing
Speaker 3: because for like you know, centuries or whatnot of studying
Speaker 3: this thing, we didn't know what caused it. And there's
Speaker 3: been a lot of hypotheses out there that have talked
Speaker 3: about you know, it's could be like an environmental thing whatnot.
Speaker 3: And it was only it was very recently that a
Speaker 3: paper came out with like this new hypothesis that it
Speaker 3: was it's kind of like a combination of things. It's
Speaker 3: like a genetic thing, like a genetic predisposition. And then
Speaker 3: also the hypothesis is that babies who were not exposed
Speaker 3: to like the right bacteria in their like first year
Speaker 3: of life were more prone to this. And you know,
Speaker 3: so that that was like super interesting because like a
Speaker 3: lot of you know, bacteria is like another really big
Speaker 3: thing in my research today, Like there's a lot of
Speaker 3: working with like choral probiotics, Like can we you know,
Speaker 3: I'm studying like what bacteria is there other groups are
Speaker 3: working on like can we take the bacteria that we
Speaker 3: know is helping chral survive and like inoculate them with
Speaker 3: that at an early age and then will that help
Speaker 3: them downline? So like this whole idea that you know,
Speaker 3: maybe we could prevent childhood leukeinia by creating a probatic
Speaker 3: cocktail for babies, and then all of a sudden, like
Speaker 3: can we solve you know, or help mitigate you know,
Speaker 3: choral diseases by also creating like a probiotic Like there's
Speaker 3: the amount of knowledge regaining about bacteria just in general
Speaker 3: right now. It's just been like a huge, uh, a
Speaker 3: huge driver.
Speaker 2: Right for knowledge, right and the notion that it's not
Speaker 2: just one necessarily species you're studying, but it's interaction with
Speaker 2: several species that almost makes it able to survive and adapt.
Speaker 2: Shale says that some corals even need both bacteria and
Speaker 2: certain viruses present to survive these thermal events, so the
Speaker 2: symbiotic connections go deep, they get complicated, kind of like
Speaker 2: a group of adults who've been friends since college, just
Speaker 2: like a girl's weekend without stuff thinks that a coral
Speaker 2: party just aren't the same without both bacteria and viruses.
Speaker 3: The ocean is full of different things, and you know,
Speaker 3: we're looking at like a lot of these interactions, like
Speaker 3: how many partners need to be in play to get
Speaker 3: this result or to prevent something from happening. It's just
Speaker 3: a really exciting time to be studying, like all of
Speaker 3: this stuff.
Speaker 2: So home to twenty five percent of the world's marine species,
Speaker 2: potentially home to a cure for cancer. Weird interesting alien
Speaker 2: like live sculptures full of other beings and also also
Speaker 2: our new friend coral is just playing really pretty and
Speaker 2: nice to look at. So there's that factor Shale explains.
Speaker 3: And they're also you know, really important for tourism in
Speaker 3: the economy, and that's also a really great way to
Speaker 3: kind of switch our way that we think about like
Speaker 3: our economy is, you know, instead of you know, extracting
Speaker 3: from the reef and damaging the reef, we can actually
Speaker 3: like do you know, eco friendly tourism bring people, educate people,
Speaker 3: see to see the reef, and you know, it's hard
Speaker 3: to find an appreciation for something that you have never
Speaker 3: seen before. You know, we can all kind of relate
Speaker 3: to that, and we all of those moments where like,
Speaker 3: you know, you saw something for the first time, even
Speaker 3: you know, any any place in nature, Like we can
Speaker 3: have those kind of moments. But I think that's really
Speaker 3: important also, and especially like here in Hawaii, the coral
Speaker 3: reef ecosystems are incredibly important culturally and there's a lot
Speaker 3: of history. There's a lot of stories, a lot of
Speaker 3: history wrapped up in these ecosystems, and it's you know,
Speaker 3: there's a lot of reasons to protect them.
Speaker 2: And with eighty five percent of the US coral reefs
Speaker 2: surrounding Hawaii. There's also a really big cultural necessity of
Speaker 2: protecting and preserving those ecosystems. And there's a piece called
Speaker 2: Puka Mai Heykoa the significance of corals in Hawaiian culture,
Speaker 2: and it's featured in the book Ethnobiology of Corals and
Speaker 2: Coral Reefs with an f reefs Fine, and the lead
Speaker 2: author of it, Tony mcconnie Gregg, writes, quote, Hawaiian people
Speaker 2: consider coral to be an akua, something that provides birth
Speaker 2: and death to both the people and the islands, and
Speaker 2: possesses much manna, which is the essence of spirituality. Corals
Speaker 2: are considered the beginning of life and are thus the
Speaker 2: most ancient ancestors of all living things in Hawaii. And
Speaker 2: that's something that Shale seems to approach with a lot
Speaker 2: of reverence. He seems to have a lot of empathy,
Speaker 2: which may be from feeling conscious of pingponging between a
Speaker 2: few science subjects before he landed on reefs. But also
Speaker 2: he plays through grad school with challenges that most of
Speaker 2: us don't face.
Speaker 3: Not only did I not have a you know, a
Speaker 3: direct like go to undergrad, go to your master's or
Speaker 3: groserrate to your PhD kind of experience. But I'd experienced
Speaker 3: also a lot of the obstacles and challenges that you know,
Speaker 3: folks who don't typically see themselves in science face as well.
Speaker 3: And that's not something that you would necessarily get from
Speaker 3: looking at me today. And for me, I experienced a
Speaker 3: lot of sexism when I was younger, So I didn't
Speaker 3: transition until I was just until as in my master's program,
Speaker 3: and so I had the experience of being a woman
Speaker 3: in science for my entire coming into science. And you know,
Speaker 3: in high school, I was put on like the not
Speaker 3: the honor science track, and took me a while to
Speaker 3: realize that this is something that happened. Those experiences in particular,
Speaker 3: like really came to head for me when I showed
Speaker 3: up at my PhD program, like well into my medical
Speaker 3: transition and all of a sudden had access to like
Speaker 3: conversations in space where people really kind of let you
Speaker 3: know what they really think in ways that I didn't
Speaker 3: before really and those you know, it's it has been
Speaker 3: a very interesting experience to see on the other side,
Speaker 3: you know, really a lot of the things that I
Speaker 3: thought were happening, you know, the old ways of thinking
Speaker 3: and kind of the gatekeepers for a lot of opportunities
Speaker 3: in stem from from this point of view. And so
Speaker 3: I think that, like the taking a longer time in
Speaker 3: your journey is something that's very typical for folks, you know,
Speaker 3: from many underrepresented backgrounds in the sciences, especially after decades
Speaker 3: centuries of you know, being excluded not only from science careers,
Speaker 3: but also like you know, science research in the medical industry.
Speaker 3: It's a great example of that.
Speaker 2: PS side note. I had heard that women weren't included
Speaker 2: in some medical research trials, but I didn't know how
Speaker 2: big a deal or how recent this was, Like cell
Speaker 2: phones existed by the time. A law called the National
Speaker 2: Institutes of Health Revitalization Act of nineteen ninety three past
Speaker 2: stating that the Director of NIH shall ensure that a
Speaker 2: Women are included as subjects in each project of such research,
Speaker 2: and that b members of minority groups are included in
Speaker 2: such research. A twenty sixteen article in Pharmacy Practice said
Speaker 2: that when studying diseases prevalent in both sexes, males frequently
Speaker 2: of the Caucasian race were considered to be the norm
Speaker 2: study population, and that was a direct quote from a
Speaker 2: Journal article there, but ps haas Up I didn't know
Speaker 2: this until this past year. But the word Caucasian has
Speaker 2: super racist origins. It's no longer widely used, so scrap
Speaker 2: that white works. And nearly twenty years ago, the Institute
Speaker 2: of Medicine clarified and made a really important distinction between
Speaker 2: sex and gender. Gender being the self representation, social and
Speaker 2: cultural views of sex. So if anyone ever tells you
Speaker 2: that they know your gender based on your body, tell
Speaker 2: them that science says that is hogwash. Thank you very much. Also,
Speaker 2: Schale says that having a mentor you trust and respect
Speaker 2: is so important. He had situations that called for allies,
Speaker 2: like preparing for fieldwork in countries where certain identities could
Speaker 2: put you at risk, or navigating passport issues. Just sings
Speaker 2: that some of us might really take for granted.
Speaker 3: Because it's really hard to be alone and struggling, you know,
Speaker 3: I'd say, like, for me, like the hardest things have
Speaker 3: been you know, personal in this journey as opposed to
Speaker 3: like science is hard, but I have lots of people
Speaker 3: to talk to you about my experiments, and so like
Speaker 3: I think that like, you know, besides all the like
Speaker 3: systemic things that we need to do to help make
Speaker 3: stem actually more inclusive. We need to find our communities
Speaker 3: and like lift each other up in that sense.
Speaker 2: Do you find that maybe underrepresented folks tend to have
Speaker 2: a little bit more imposter syndrome?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, oh imposter syndrome. Yeah, yes, definitely, And
Speaker 3: sometimes you you see it like it's very obvious. You're like, oh,
Speaker 3: I know, like you walk into a room and like
Speaker 3: I feel like every person of color, probably every woman,
Speaker 3: probably you know, every LGBTQ person When you walk into
Speaker 3: a room, whether it's like a new class or conference,
Speaker 3: like you kind of look around the room and you
Speaker 3: look for your allies, got my back here, and I
Speaker 3: think that you know, so like there's these imposter syndrome
Speaker 3: is never like it's a standalone feeling, you know, It's
Speaker 3: it's built up over you know, over so much that's
Speaker 3: going on in the world. Like do you are there
Speaker 3: people like you that you have as role models? Do
Speaker 3: you see people are your are the interests of your
Speaker 3: communities being addressed in like societal science?
Speaker 2: Did you end up at a lab that you felt
Speaker 2: you had a little bit more community? And also you
Speaker 2: work on Coconut Island, which is a beautiful place in Hawaii.
Speaker 2: I mean it's also this little isolated pocket of marine science.
Speaker 2: How did you how did you end up there and
Speaker 2: what was your feeling when you when you found out
Speaker 2: you'd be researching there.
Speaker 3: It's a good question. So I only actually applied to
Speaker 3: one program. You did my PhD. It's great, And I
Speaker 3: applied because I wanted to work with doctor Ruth Gates,
Speaker 3: who's an excellent core biologist and also someone who really
Speaker 3: valued science communication and connecting to communities public and inspiring
Speaker 3: like people to care so deeply about reefs, and those
Speaker 3: are two things that were very very important to me.
Speaker 3: I also really wanted it was very important to me
Speaker 3: to work in a large collaborative lab where there's a
Speaker 3: lot of yeah, collaborative work and a lot of sharing
Speaker 3: of ideas and support, and also in a place where
Speaker 3: I would feel safe. And safe means you know, access
Speaker 3: to safe healthcare, finding, you know, community on the islands, university,
Speaker 3: or a place that actually has you know, anti discrimination
Speaker 3: policies in place. There's a lot of places that don't
Speaker 3: have a lot of friends who are part of universities
Speaker 3: that you know are in places that you can be
Speaker 3: you know, thrown in jail for using the wrong restroom,
Speaker 3: wrong right quotes. And then we've seen a lot of
Speaker 3: actually some really great response around that from like the
Speaker 3: scientific community, canceling conferences and areas that are putting up
Speaker 3: these really discriminatory policies and things like that, and that's wonderful.
Speaker 3: Like the UC system has done a lot of actually
Speaker 3: great work in that sense by saying you're funding travel
Speaker 3: to these places.
Speaker 2: One professional mentor who meant so much to Shale was
Speaker 2: doctor Ruth Gates of the Gates Coral Lab he's at now,
Speaker 2: and she was a veteran coral biologist. She apparently had
Speaker 2: such a zeal for her work. She passed away just
Speaker 2: this past October at age fifty six of cancer. And
Speaker 2: when we went in toured the labs in Hawaii, Ruth's
Speaker 2: name was brought up a lot, and you can tell
Speaker 2: that she's dearly dearly missed. But it seems like he
Speaker 2: ended up in the right place. Oh and also before
Speaker 2: patron questions, it's a big day for you because they
Speaker 2: started spawning last night.
Speaker 3: What kind I was like, because it's pride, Yeah, happy pride.
Speaker 2: Yeah they did they but spawn it spawned apalooza right
Speaker 2: now it is.
Speaker 3: It is so something really amazing about corals that there's
Speaker 3: not enough amazing stuff is is coral spawning events, and
Speaker 3: so corals, Right, you're a sedentary animal. You're not moving
Speaker 3: around to find your mates. How you're in the ocean,
Speaker 3: how are you going to reap produced, you know, besides
Speaker 3: fragmenting off. And so the way it works is it's
Speaker 3: a combination of cues. It's the moon cycle looking moon
Speaker 3: from the planet, the moon star. It's the temperature. It's
Speaker 3: like the pressure in the environment that will all come
Speaker 3: together and cue the corals to release their gammetes into
Speaker 3: the water column. And for the coral species that we study,
Speaker 3: the rice coral on tipper capitata out here in the lab,
Speaker 3: they spawn two to three months during the summer, on
Speaker 3: the night of the new moon and a few nights after.
Speaker 3: And if you're lucky enough to be out in the bay,
Speaker 3: you kind of peer over at around eight forty five
Speaker 3: pm and you'll start to see these little cream colored
Speaker 3: bundles slowly floating to the surface of the water with
Speaker 3: the size of a pinhead. And on a really big night,
Speaker 3: like the entire surface will be just like covered in
Speaker 3: these little white dots. After about like half an hour,
Speaker 3: the wave action will cause them to burst. Their little
Speaker 3: tiny eggs inside will float in, the sperm will start
Speaker 3: to sink, and you know, in the next day or so,
Speaker 3: there will be swimming coral larvy, these little DBD jellybeans,
Speaker 3: and then those larvy will then you know, swim around
Speaker 3: and look for some suitable substrate to metamorphose into the
Speaker 3: first polyp, which will hopefully grow into too many to
Speaker 3: form the next colony. We didn't get a lot of
Speaker 3: spawning in June. Usually we see it like June, July, August,
Speaker 3: and since we didn't see a lot in June, we thought,
Speaker 3: you know, maybe this will be our big month. And
Speaker 3: so going out of last night, we decided to take
Speaker 3: a quick look on the bay see what we saw.
Speaker 3: And there was a pretty big event. So that kind of,
Speaker 3: you know, you being a coral biologist, you have to
Speaker 3: be kind of ready to respond to whatever is going
Speaker 3: to happen. So we've kind of changed our plans and
Speaker 3: we'll go out and you know, see what.
Speaker 2: We can do.
Speaker 3: And this is a great time for us because a
Speaker 3: lot of the questions we have of our early life
Speaker 3: stages we can only ask during the summer months, and
Speaker 3: so right now this is a really exciting way for
Speaker 3: us to get a lot of genet diversity and to
Speaker 3: run some of these preconditioning tests to see, you know,
Speaker 3: if you cool them down, if you heat them up,
Speaker 3: what's that going to do to the settlement or survivorship.
Speaker 2: So you can kind of scoop up and run them
Speaker 2: in tubs and in the lab and see how they
Speaker 2: respond best.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. The technology that we use, you know, for
Speaker 3: like DNA sequencing is like one end of the spectrum
Speaker 3: and then on the ground in the lab is very
Speaker 3: like DIY you know, grab some buckets. We make these
Speaker 3: big scoops out of like these like plastic shoe boxes
Speaker 3: where we cut like windows and hot glue on mesh,
Speaker 3: kind of use those to scoop out the bundles, carefully
Speaker 3: put them into like little containers where they do their fertilization,
Speaker 3: and then oftentimes we'll even just leave them to sit
Speaker 3: overnight and buckets see, you know, then then carefully clean
Speaker 3: them out the next morning. But a lot of our
Speaker 3: tools are stuff that we have to kind of just
Speaker 3: come up with on the fly to use. They don't
Speaker 3: sell Coral spotting supply kids.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of home depot five gallon buckets.
Speaker 3: Yeah, lots of buckets everywhere in any lab. Yeah. Absolutely,
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: Show rode up blog post last year about correlspawning, and
Speaker 2: in it he describes setting out on the night of
Speaker 2: the New Moon with life jackets and a first aid
Speaker 2: kit and headlamps. They use red lights so they don't
Speaker 2: interfere with any lunar cues for the coral, and they
Speaker 2: have as many two and a half gallon buckets as
Speaker 2: we'll fit on the floor of a small whaler boat.
Speaker 2: And he says in it, our tools are not glamorous,
Speaker 2: but they get the job done. And there are photos
Speaker 2: of these milky trails of coral bundles popping to release
Speaker 2: eggs into the water, and a glimpse of what field
Speaker 2: research looks like. So for more of that, I'm going
Speaker 2: to link the post in the show notes and on
Speaker 2: my website. Now we're about to ask your Patreon questions,
Speaker 2: but before we do, a few words from sponsors of
Speaker 2: the show. These sponsors make it possible for ologies to
Speaker 2: donate to a charity of each ologists choosing, and this
Speaker 2: week shale pick two. The first one is Pepe oh.
Speaker 2: It's a private nonprofit organization caring for an ancient Hawaiian
Speaker 2: fish pond located on a Wahu and its vision is
Speaker 2: to perpetuate a foundation of cultural sustainability to provide intellectual
Speaker 2: and physical and spiritual sustenance for their community. This fishpond
Speaker 2: serves as a place of learning to weave ancestral knowledge
Speaker 2: together with Western ways of knowing to achieve their goals
Speaker 2: and a second donation went to Point Foundation and Point
Speaker 2: Foundation dot Org is the nation's largest scholarship granting organization
Speaker 2: for LGBTQ plus students of merit and Point promotes changed
Speaker 2: through scholarship funding, mentorship, leadership development, and community service training
Speaker 2: and links to both those charities and to our sponsors
Speaker 2: who make that possible. Will be in the show notes. Okay,
Speaker 2: some things I'm liking this.
Speaker 1: Week Bionlanton, Margot boga On the Hardnir, the Hola, the Hymena,
Speaker 1: hecl ah ersuen Orslance, LADENI Detained, Nudovshukatarhu La Hula, schromperodes
Speaker 1: On udherosh as lanse Is Phaser, Latgan's Throw, Tasha Tapa Siranashka,
Speaker 1: August nav Is FuGO More Hey, h I A punk
Speaker 1: ie is called on tudoros or raslanza. If we realed
Speaker 1: this in the heron.
Speaker 2: Okay, your questions now. First question we got from Laura
Speaker 2: Crippen's and a bunch of other folks including Jessica f Fritz,
Speaker 2: Jennifer Alvarez, Caitlin Fitzgerald, Jenna Martin, Ira Gray, Jessica Zarninsky
Speaker 2: to go to Harriman, Crystal Mendoza, tofer Hennes, Kasey Kaiser,
Speaker 2: Lauren Krupens, and jesse E Scott asked how harmful is
Speaker 2: sunscreen to coral? This is a big question, how harmful
Speaker 2: or what does it do? It's it's oxy benzonate's certain
Speaker 2: non chemical some non mineral sunscreens. It's a tough question.
Speaker 3: It's a tough question. So, like people have definitely, you know,
Speaker 3: seen movements in different coastal communities to ban on safe sunscreen,
Speaker 3: and like this is a field of research that is
Speaker 3: beginning to grow. It's a new thing that we're seeing
Speaker 3: and it's like really important to consider these kind of
Speaker 3: like stressors. Are these daily things that we're doing that
Speaker 3: may or not be harmful to reefs? Right, considering what
Speaker 3: sunscreen you use, just like considering any type of chemicals
Speaker 3: that you're introducing to a natural environment is a really
Speaker 3: important thing. However, where you know, a lot of what
Speaker 3: we are concerned about is that you know, in the
Speaker 3: grand scheme of the impacts facing corals, it is a
Speaker 3: very small drop in the bucket compared to climate change,
Speaker 3: and that you know, it can be a really that's
Speaker 3: always a really hard thing. Like we're still like, you know,
Speaker 3: the research is ongoing with how bad these chemicals are
Speaker 3: and the effects that they have. But what we the
Speaker 3: danger is when that's where we stop right, Like you know,
Speaker 3: considering your sunscreen choice is a really great point of departure.
Speaker 3: You know, same thing with like plastic straw bands and
Speaker 3: things like that for people you know who might not
Speaker 3: consider how their daily actions affect coral reefs. To begin
Speaker 3: to learn more and to like understand, like, you know,
Speaker 3: how are my actions affecting the reefs? What else can
Speaker 3: I do? And to kind of like figure out what
Speaker 3: it is that each of us are doing every day
Speaker 3: right that affects the planet. But if that's the stopping point,
Speaker 3: that's a really dangerous thing, because you know, just changing
Speaker 3: your sunscreen is not going to slow down our loss
Speaker 3: of reefs.
Speaker 2: Afterwards, Shale sent me a link to a piece written
Speaker 2: just a few weeks ago by two coral scientists in
Speaker 2: Florida who said that people are being led to believe
Speaker 2: that there's extensive scientific evidence about the impact of oxybenzone
Speaker 2: on corals, and it's simply not true. So it went
Speaker 2: on to site three main factors that are actually killing
Speaker 2: coral climate change. There are biological changes like diseases and
Speaker 2: invasive species. There's overfishing, and the overfishing depletes the fish
Speaker 2: that eat the algae that overgrow on corals. There's also
Speaker 2: water quality issues like wastewater and land runoff that dump
Speaker 2: those pollutants and sediments into the reefs. So sorry, right,
Speaker 2: so don't just change for a mineral sunscreen and be like,
Speaker 2: nailed it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, let me so, Actually, okay, I got a permission
Speaker 3: to tell this part of that story.
Speaker 2: Oh okay.
Speaker 3: And like an example of that is a colleague of
Speaker 3: mine recently went into a local classroom to talk about
Speaker 3: corals and the research we do, and she asked the students, like,
Speaker 3: what was the biggest threat facing corals and everybody said sunscreen. Oh,
Speaker 3: and you know, that's a really that is like the
Speaker 3: kind of oh no moment. And she actually spoke with
Speaker 3: some of the teachers and they're like, we had no idea,
Speaker 3: Like this is what people have been telling us, this
Speaker 3: is what we've been telling our students, and that's and
Speaker 3: that's where you know, that's not that's not good, you know,
Speaker 3: it's it's it can be. It's a great way to
Speaker 3: get people to understand that, you know, small actions that
Speaker 3: we take every day can have really big impacts. However,
Speaker 3: you know, in no way is like we have to
Speaker 3: focus on climate change.
Speaker 2: This next question was asked by a listener who started
Speaker 2: making these beautiful paintings inspired by episodes, So to see them,
Speaker 2: you can check out the ologies Instagram and then follow
Speaker 2: her too, because she is wonderful. Maria Hancocks wants to
Speaker 2: know how excited are you that Pantone's color of the
Speaker 2: year is coral?
Speaker 3: Super excited anytime that corals can go, you know, make
Speaker 3: it into social media, get across people's radar, Like why
Speaker 3: is that? You know? Do I want to learn more?
Speaker 3: It's really great because there's a lot of animals in
Speaker 3: the world that are endangered, right, like corals are you
Speaker 3: know part of why corals are such a great you know,
Speaker 3: organism to talk about these kind of things is that
Speaker 3: they're gorgeous, you know, and so like like having having
Speaker 3: you know, companies celebrate coral bring attention to coral is
Speaker 3: always greatly appreciated and really exciting.
Speaker 2: I didn't know that there was Pantone's.
Speaker 3: Color of the Year, but yeah, we're always excited, you know.
Speaker 2: Also side note, huge ups to Pantone for naming the
Speaker 2: color not just coral, but living coral, a live, non dead,
Speaker 2: non bleach thriving. Magical coral was too long, but living
Speaker 2: coral works. Seratary asked what makes them so colorful? Is
Speaker 2: it that symbiosis? Yeah?
Speaker 3: So very often, like most there's I feel like everything
Speaker 3: I'm saying and every coral thing or like, except then
Speaker 3: this other thing does of something totally different that we
Speaker 3: didn't expect. So yes, in general, like the a lot
Speaker 3: of the color we're seeing are these symbiants. However, corals
Speaker 3: also do produce their own colorful pigments. You can take
Speaker 3: a black light and shine a black light on corals
Speaker 3: and they'll oftentimes you see like fluorescence. If you've seen
Speaker 3: Chasing Coral the movie, you'll see actually during some of
Speaker 3: the bleaching events. As the corals are bleaching, they actually
Speaker 3: will start to like glow in like these loose and
Speaker 3: purple colors. And there's been a lot of hypothesis and
Speaker 3: why they're doing that. It could potentially attract new symbiants.
Speaker 3: It could be sort of like their own kind of
Speaker 3: like sunscreening method to protect their own tissues. So we're
Speaker 3: still learning more about that. But the corals, you know,
Speaker 3: are able, some species are able to also produce their
Speaker 3: own their own pigments themselves.
Speaker 2: So that was a doc called Chasing Coral. And if
Speaker 2: you want to see what coral bleaching looks like and
Speaker 2: just get hyped to mobilize other folks to care, this
Speaker 2: is a great doc to watch. Are there any movies,
Speaker 2: any fictitious movies that honor or or really a fuck
Speaker 2: with coral that you're like, come on, any movies that.
Speaker 3: You're like, I was actually really impressed with the coral
Speaker 3: and finding Nemo. Really yeah, there, they did a really
Speaker 3: good job. Like there's some other like inaccuracies in their biology,
Speaker 3: but there. But I remember, like when I first saw
Speaker 3: it that came out like right when I was graduating college,
Speaker 3: I was really like, this is like the They did
Speaker 3: a really nice job with some of the with the forums,
Speaker 3: so I was like, that's that's pretty awesome. Corals don't
Speaker 3: tend to get a lot of spotlight, yeah, and a
Speaker 3: lot of mainstream, you know, films.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna go on IMDb and find out who the
Speaker 2: coral consultant was, and chances are you probably know the
Speaker 2: quick aside. So I tracked this down and I think
Speaker 2: I think it was a very passionate ichthyologist who's done
Speaker 2: research on the Great Barrier reef now at the University
Speaker 2: of Washington, and he's credited as Adam Summer's Fabulous Fish
Speaker 2: Guy in the special Thanks of the two thousand and
Speaker 2: three film Finding Nemo. And Yes, I found him. I
Speaker 2: called his office to ask him. He was out of
Speaker 2: the office, so I sent him an email. I didn't
Speaker 2: hear back from him yet, but yes, I do want
Speaker 2: to be his friend. Brooke Ruddinger wants to know does
Speaker 2: coral have a smell?
Speaker 3: You can so right now if you go on to
Speaker 3: County ay Bay, you can smell their gam meats. Yeah,
Speaker 3: after a big spawning event, you can definitely smell them. Noice, coral,
Speaker 3: mucus deaf. I mean, like I feel like the longer
Speaker 3: you work with anything, the more you gain a nose
Speaker 3: for it. Yeah, underwater, you know, we're not really smelling anything,
Speaker 3: but like, uh, once you're covered in it, you definitely
Speaker 3: its earthy stink, you know. Lusky, that's actually a great
Speaker 3: question because you know, a lot of while we might
Speaker 3: not smell the corals, like a lot of marine organisms
Speaker 3: use chemical senses to you know, interact with their surrounding
Speaker 3: environments and things like that. So there's a lot of
Speaker 3: smells in that sense.
Speaker 2: Going on in the water in the ocean. So this
Speaker 2: next question was also asked by listener Grace and Allegro. Violetta.
Speaker 2: Benismon wants to know what role does concrete truly play
Speaker 2: in the health of our coral And.
Speaker 3: I know nothing about this concrete's composition, and we'll look
Speaker 3: this up. Is it has a lot of same attributes
Speaker 3: as like chasm, carbonate, coral skeletons. It's a really great
Speaker 3: substrate cause it's also kind of porous, So a lot
Speaker 3: of times you'll see, like I think it is in
Speaker 3: Mexico where they have that underwater sculpture installation, made a
Speaker 3: concrete that different corals and sponges and whatnot are all
Speaker 3: recruiting to so it can actually act as a pretty
Speaker 3: good substrate. It's a really great substrate for artificial reefs.
Speaker 2: So he's talking about an underwater museum in Cancun, Mexico.
Speaker 2: It consists of nearly five hundred sunken sculptures and they
Speaker 2: serve as a base for new coral. Why did they
Speaker 2: make this, you ask, because too many tourists were snorkeling
Speaker 2: in the natural local reefs and destroying them. So they
Speaker 2: were like, hey, hey, look over here, look over here,
Speaker 2: look at these look at these sculptures. And it worked.
Speaker 2: So people go there now and coral can grow on
Speaker 2: it being perfect. Also, some of the sculptures serve as
Speaker 2: scathing environmental critiques, like the ones of men in tuxedos
Speaker 2: burying their heads in the sand. Ooh a burn, so
Speaker 2: sick it's scorched underwater. Zaane Librum wants to know, hello, Ahi,
Speaker 2: is the news about the Great Barrier reef being declared
Speaker 2: dead true? And if so, is there anything that we
Speaker 2: can do about it?
Speaker 3: That's a great question. So there was that article that
Speaker 3: came out I think a couple of years ago now
Speaker 3: that declared the Great Barrier Reef dead. It's not dead, OK,
Speaker 3: that's the answer. However it's not doing so great, right.
Speaker 3: And that's why articles like that can be challenging to
Speaker 3: the overall conversation because we don't want everyone to say, oh, good,
Speaker 3: it's not dead and move on. Right. But the Great
Speaker 3: Bearrier Reef, it just experienced two horrific leaching events back
Speaker 3: to back. And you know, a new paper by Terry
Speaker 3: Hughes' group out in Australia showed that the recruitment of
Speaker 3: like baby corals to the reef post those events has
Speaker 3: significantly declined. And so that's one of those like, you know,
Speaker 3: not only are we dealing with the impacts of dying
Speaker 3: coral on the reef, who's going to replace them?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: And so these like that, these are these kind of
Speaker 3: the smaller impacts that we're looking at. So the Great
Speaker 3: Barrier Reef, you know, it did experience this massive bleaching event,
Speaker 3: lost like you know, in some regions, lost like you know,
Speaker 3: fifty percent or more of the coral on the ground,
Speaker 3: and they're you know, they're trying to come back. Different
Speaker 3: sections of the reef are still healthy. You can still
Speaker 3: go out and see corals in the Great Barrier reef.
Speaker 3: But if it keeps getting hit by these events, like
Speaker 3: there's not going to be enough time for things to recover.
Speaker 3: Just to go back to what they were, Educating yourself
Speaker 3: on the politicians and on the laws and bills that
Speaker 3: are coming up that would directly impact and the reefs
Speaker 3: here and where we are, like that's where we have
Speaker 3: the most sway is a really important thing. Like going
Speaker 3: to town halls also not just voting, but like actually
Speaker 3: showing up and becoming parts of the conversations that are
Speaker 3: directly influencing the legislators in your own area can be
Speaker 3: a really good way to start. And then also if
Speaker 3: you're going to a place like the Great Barrier, if
Speaker 3: you know, you know, essentially voting with your dollar, doing
Speaker 3: your due diligence to look up operators that are eco
Speaker 3: friendly that with some of the funding from that might
Speaker 3: actually go to research refrustoration, but look looking for you know,
Speaker 3: making sure that your footprint in those spaces are supporting
Speaker 3: organizations that are doing it right.
Speaker 2: And our tour operator for outlets was saying that they
Speaker 2: don't provide fins because so many times tourists will just
Speaker 2: absolutely slap a coral reef with the fin and so yeah,
Speaker 2: I thought that was great. I didn't know that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely. And that's the thing like some corals, their
Speaker 3: structures are big, asking any surfer like they hurt when
Speaker 3: you you should get hit violin.
Speaker 2: Okay, side note, I just watched a bunch of videos
Speaker 2: of surfer bailing on coral. Not only are the coral sherf,
Speaker 2: but oh man, oh the blood, oh the scars. So
Speaker 2: there was one video of a Tahitian pro surfer who
Speaker 2: got a pretty bad scrape up and they show her
Speaker 2: on the boat afterward and they have to brush the
Speaker 2: coral bits out of your skin and then for some
Speaker 2: reason they have to rub citrus in it and she's
Speaker 2: like biting a towel. I cannot imagine the pain. Now,
Speaker 2: other remedies for this reef rash, according to some surfer
Speaker 2: message boards that I just totally lurked on, are hydrogen peroxide, alcohol,
Speaker 2: people use iodine. Others say just baby shampoo and scrubbing
Speaker 2: it with a toothbrush and antibacterial ointments work. But you
Speaker 2: have to treat it right away because you can be
Speaker 2: left with a staph infection, which would be Helen Arnar
Speaker 2: not in a good way. Please note I am neither
Speaker 2: a surfer nor a doctor, so consult one of the
Speaker 2: two or both. Also, as for the coral, I don't
Speaker 2: think they have a strategy for first aid.
Speaker 3: But they're also super fragile. Some of them that I
Speaker 3: was really nice, like branching shapes, you know, just a
Speaker 3: tiny kick that you can kick over a coli that's
Speaker 3: been growing for over one hundred years and like one kick,
Speaker 3: and so that's you know, that's great. Yeah, that's great.
Speaker 3: It's a great way to educate people on that. A
Speaker 3: lot of people think they're rocks. Yeah, so they're like
Speaker 3: feeling You're like, oh, I'm gonna go stand them that
Speaker 3: and the poly ups like they're just thin layers of tissue,
Speaker 3: so and.
Speaker 2: You can to crush them like facebone. Other patrons like Erica,
Speaker 2: Sarah Peck, and Izim had questions about Shale's favorites. Hufflepuff
Speaker 2: Hillary wants to know which reef has been your favorite
Speaker 2: to dive in. Do you have a favorite? Can you
Speaker 2: pick a favorite?
Speaker 4: Man?
Speaker 2: All the other reefs are going to be like, really,
Speaker 2: I know, what's a favorite?
Speaker 3: Ooh, this is really hard. So I was lucky enough
Speaker 3: to dive the blue Hole in Belize, which is like
Speaker 3: a big etel you can just like sink down to,
Speaker 3: Like there's all these sharks everywhere, and that dive and
Speaker 3: the surrounding reef there I saw way more if you
Speaker 3: for someone like me, like in this environment, if you
Speaker 3: see like a shark, that's really cool, like one, And
Speaker 3: that's because we don't have as many anymore, right, And
Speaker 3: like sharks are actually a really good sign of like
Speaker 3: a healthy reef environment. You want to have all the
Speaker 3: levels of the food chain. And I had never been
Speaker 3: in a reef before that environment where there were so
Speaker 3: many apex predders just living there. So like the coral
Speaker 3: was beautiful, there was diversity of fish, and but then
Speaker 3: also like there I got to see it all together.
Speaker 3: And so for me that was just a really exciting moment.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, have you ever been scared of a
Speaker 2: shark bite? Are you?
Speaker 4: Like no?
Speaker 3: Not? Really? Like sharks have a really sharks are doing
Speaker 3: awful were shark fitting is decimating world shark populations and
Speaker 3: so much of you know, like we're talking about how
Speaker 3: do we change these laws, how do we ban shark fitting,
Speaker 3: how do we like not allow shark and be sold
Speaker 3: in commercial senses in our country. It relates to our
Speaker 3: own like emotional reaction to sharks. Are we scared of sharks?
Speaker 3: The majority, the vast majority of all shark species want
Speaker 3: nothing to do with us. They've got very tiny mouths,
Speaker 3: or can be bottom feeders, or they're just not you know,
Speaker 3: they're just as scared of us as we are of them.
Speaker 3: Anytime you go into the ocean or nature in general,
Speaker 3: you have to respect the environment where you are and
Speaker 3: respect the organisms there, and so you know, it's always
Speaker 3: important to know what the like what the threats are
Speaker 3: or they could be, or what dangers there could be
Speaker 3: anytime you go. So whenever I go diving in a
Speaker 3: new place, I look up, like what organisms could I
Speaker 3: possibly encounter? And if you work with a good operator,
Speaker 3: you go to areas that are safer.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: But I always feel incredibly lucky every time I have
Speaker 3: the opportunity to see sharks anywhere. They're beautiful. They never
Speaker 3: you know that they're doing their own thing. They're swoon
Speaker 3: over there, not not disturbing me. There are some shark
Speaker 3: species that might have like a case of mistaken identity,
Speaker 3: like if we're swimming around like a seal at the
Speaker 3: surface in you know, white shark territory. They can't come
Speaker 3: up and like you know, poke you see if your
Speaker 3: food or not. And the way that their strategy for
Speaker 3: getting food is they don't have arms, right, so they
Speaker 3: use their mouths to grab onto things, so they'll come up.
Speaker 3: And you know, if you think you're a seal, like
Speaker 3: try to take a bite. But people aren't dying of
Speaker 3: the You're not being eaten by a shark, right, you know.
Speaker 3: Unfortunately it has to do with like you know, it's
Speaker 3: coming to a wound from that shark bite, but not
Speaker 3: scare sharks and you shouldn't be either. There.
Speaker 2: For more on this, see this sella maca morphology Ella
Speaker 2: slac se Lack of morphology episode on sharks. Also, I
Speaker 2: snuck in this tiny question about any bitty garbage. Sorry,
Speaker 2: this one's a bomber, but it's good to know. How
Speaker 2: about plastics and corals? I was reading a little article
Speaker 2: when I was when we were waiting for each other
Speaker 2: of a pillar about microplastics being found in corals.
Speaker 3: Yeah, unfortunately microplastics, so plastic in general is awful for
Speaker 3: the environment. Right you hear these stories about you know,
Speaker 3: straws betting stuck on turtles noses, or you know, animals
Speaker 3: getting caught in plastic bags or eating plastic bags thinking
Speaker 3: that they're jellyfish are their kinds of food, and so
Speaker 3: those are a big problem. However, what we've learned, you know, recently,
Speaker 3: is that the plastics, as they start to actually break
Speaker 3: down so they're not like necessarily visible to the naked eye,
Speaker 3: these microplastics are having like a huge impact on these
Speaker 3: lower trophic levels on like a lot of these you know,
Speaker 3: the plankton are eating them plastics, and the larger animals
Speaker 3: are eating those plastics. And there have been some studies
Speaker 3: that are looking at are corals eating these plastics as well?
Speaker 3: And what does that mean? Right, Like, you can't there's
Speaker 3: no nutritional value. If you can't expel those, then all
Speaker 3: of a sudden, there's something inside of your gut that's
Speaker 3: taking up space where nutrition could be. And so these
Speaker 3: are huge, huge problems that are also unfortunately global.
Speaker 2: Anything that you've seen research wise in the last few
Speaker 2: years or any turnarounds that have given you hope, like, no,
Speaker 2: I think that's.
Speaker 3: Where you're going. Yeah, absolutely, Like I was telling you
Speaker 3: earlier when we you know, when you see a coral
Speaker 3: bleaching event and you're like, so many of these corals died.
Speaker 3: There's all those corals that didn't die. There are the
Speaker 3: corals themselves are there are some winners, there are some survivors,
Speaker 3: And that's really exciting because without any intervention from us,
Speaker 3: there are organisms, there are individuals that are already able
Speaker 3: to withstand these You look at an environment like you know,
Speaker 3: the Red Sea, which is on average way warmer than
Speaker 3: anywhere else, and the corals that are living up to
Speaker 3: temperatures that can't hear, and like, the difference is that
Speaker 3: that this happened over geologic time, whereas we are speeding
Speaker 3: things up, and can these animals keep up for that?
Speaker 3: But like just the fact that like these things exist.
Speaker 3: It is very exciting. Also in the last like ten
Speaker 3: years ago, if I had said like coral bleaching to
Speaker 3: somebody on the street, they might be like, I have
Speaker 3: no idea what you're talking about. But there's been a
Speaker 3: huge push and education and excitement around coral reefs in
Speaker 3: the last handful of years where people have heard about this,
Speaker 3: like people know, people are trying to really care about
Speaker 3: it and understand why it's important, Why it's important to them,
Speaker 3: like why they want this for their future generations. And
Speaker 3: so corals have really come into the national international conversation
Speaker 3: in a way that they haven't before. And because of that,
Speaker 3: there's a lot more hope for these big overarching changes
Speaker 3: that we need on the systemic scale to potentially start
Speaker 3: to happen.
Speaker 2: And I always asked these last two questions, But what's
Speaker 2: the shittiest thing about your job? What sucks in a
Speaker 2: way that's either like annoying? Is it moldy wet suits?
Speaker 2: Is it early mornings or more infrastructure? Like what sucks?
Speaker 3: The thing that sucks most about being a coreal biologist
Speaker 3: is watching something you love die and not being able
Speaker 3: to do anything about it. Yeah, and like, and that's
Speaker 3: something that's you know, shared by probably everyone in our field. Like,
Speaker 3: you know, I love corals, like biologically speaking, Like, I'm
Speaker 3: so fascinated by them. There's such interesting animals, but so
Speaker 3: much of my research is around keeping them around, right,
Speaker 3: And it's anytime you dive on a reef that's bleaching
Speaker 3: or a reef that's been devastated by any kind of impact,
Speaker 3: especially one that you know you'd seen flourishing before it's
Speaker 3: you know, you have an emotional reactions. It's a very
Speaker 3: devastating feeling and that pressure of it's not just you know,
Speaker 3: if I don't finish my dissertation, then I don't get
Speaker 3: to graduate. But like, so much of this work that
Speaker 3: we all are working on is going to have an
Speaker 3: impact right now or not? And are we doing it right?
Speaker 3: Are we asking the right questions?
Speaker 4: You know?
Speaker 3: And that's definitely the hardest part for sure.
Speaker 2: What's your favorite part about your job or about corals?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 3: Man, we do a whole podcast like that. My favorite
Speaker 3: part of my job is I'm getting I'm answering it
Speaker 3: into part which I know you're supposed to do member
Speaker 3: reports you want. It's like it's the daily life in
Speaker 3: the people I work with for sure. Like in the community,
Speaker 3: when you're working on an issue that's this important, people
Speaker 3: are really passionate and really excited. And because we're trying
Speaker 3: to solve something on a really quickly, it's a very
Speaker 3: creative place to be. Like people are coming up with
Speaker 3: really creative, out of the box solutions and being able
Speaker 3: to be part of new technologies that are coming in
Speaker 3: new ways of like addressing these questions, trying just like
Speaker 3: crazy ideas that just might work, maybe something that we
Speaker 3: might not have had the luxury to do on a
Speaker 3: system that you know is doing fine somewhere. But you
Speaker 3: know that that kind of creative thinking and passionate environment
Speaker 3: is a really exciting place to be. So that's that's
Speaker 3: something great. And then also I take a boat to
Speaker 3: work every day. I can just like walk into the
Speaker 3: water and see the reef. And while that's amazing for
Speaker 3: research and asking questions, it's also just it's a luxury.
Speaker 3: I feel so lucky to be able to be in
Speaker 3: a place where my study environment is right here and
Speaker 3: I can appreciate the just the beauty of the reef
Speaker 3: on a everyday basis.
Speaker 2: Maybe that's why marine biologists are a little bit more chill.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 3: I feel like we're like we're really chilling there also
Speaker 3: like super stressed up.
Speaker 2: That's a good point. That's a good point. You're doing
Speaker 2: such great work. I'm so excited that I got to
Speaker 2: talk to you. Thank you for taking us. It's a
Speaker 2: lover of your time. I know that it's a busy
Speaker 2: day for Coral. Are you going back out tonight?
Speaker 3: I am, Yeah, definitely excited, very excited.
Speaker 2: So ask smart, amazing people sometimes stupid questions. And also
Speaker 2: just if you can, please vote, Let's just let's try
Speaker 2: to turn this vote around. Also for more about Shale,
Speaker 2: you can follow him at Wrong Underscore Whale on Twitter
Speaker 2: that will be linked in the show notes. Where at
Speaker 2: Ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at Ali Ward with
Speaker 2: one L on both, and thank you to Atlas Obscura. Further,
Speaker 2: really wonderful time in Hawaii learning about all this stuff.
Speaker 2: And thanks to the world's most charming touthologist Sarah McNaulty
Speaker 2: aka Sarah macattack on social media for hooking me up
Speaker 2: with this really wonderful naderiologist Shale. I look forward to
Speaker 2: calling him doctor Matsuda soon. Thank you also to Bonnie
Speaker 2: Dutch and Shannon Feltis. They have a comedy podcast called
Speaker 2: You Are That if you like funny, amazing people. They
Speaker 2: also manage my merch at ologiesmerch dot com. Thank you
Speaker 2: to Hannah Liippo and Aaron Talbert for adminting the Ologies
Speaker 2: podcast Facebook group. I was also recently told there's an
Speaker 2: Ologies podcast subreddit now, just in case you're on Reddit
Speaker 2: or you want to go discuss episodes. And share weird
Speaker 2: ological facts there. So Hi Reddit hollo. I. Thank you
Speaker 2: to Jared Sleeper of My Good Bad Brain podcast for
Speaker 2: assistant editing and being wonderfully supportive on not the easiest week.
Speaker 2: And thanks to the host of podcasts CE Jurassic Right
Speaker 2: About Dino's and the Percast which is all about kitties,
Speaker 2: Steven Ray Morris, who's the pillar serving as a sturdy
Speaker 2: substrate and putting this all together. Apologies for being a
Speaker 2: daily on this one, folks. I hate that it's late.
Speaker 2: I was in New York. I felt really under the
Speaker 2: weather and slept twelve hours a day two days in
Speaker 2: a row, so I just needed a wee extension. The
Speaker 2: theme music was written by Nick Thorburn of the band Islands,
Speaker 2: which is a great band. Now, if you listen until
Speaker 2: the end of the show, you know I tell you
Speaker 2: a secret. This week's secret is that when it comes
Speaker 2: to apples and baked potatoes, my favorite part is the skin.
Speaker 2: Like I want to eat other people's discarded potato skins
Speaker 2: at the table. I'll eat the whole shebang. But I'm
Speaker 2: just I'm like a goat. I just love like the
Speaker 2: chewy ruffage. I don't know why. But also in college,
Speaker 2: my favorite thing to eat in the dining hall, of
Speaker 2: all the things they had in the cafeteria, I loved
Speaker 2: bike potatoes with soy sauce and then sour cream on
Speaker 2: top of it. I think of it often, and I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 2: I still stand by that combo. It was pretty tight
Speaker 2: by Bye pack.
Speaker 4: Aderm ptology, homeiology or do zoology, lithology, new technology, meteorology, serology, ethnology, zeriology, ethology.
Speaker 3: I may look like a rock, but I'm certainly not
Speaker 3: Carl that's trying to survive.
Speaker 2: Oh please, don't let me die.