Bertarelli Summer2024 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 37
E NV IRO NM E NT
|
RE W I L D I NG
MI CH AEL AW / O CE A N I MAGE BA NK
KEYSTONE SPECIES Acropora coral, like this one, are vital to the
ecosytem’s health. But a number of factors—like rising water temperatures
and invasive species on nearby islands—are putting the coral in danger. Jamie
Craggs has figured out how to reproduce the coral in a lab—which expands the
options for conservation efforts.
This insight led to a “phase-shifted spawn,” where a system is programmed to induce spawning whenever scientists most need larvae for
their research. For example, coral restoration scientists can produce larvae
year round, grow them into colonies, and put large numbers back on the
reef. Or coral scientists can test many larvae to see which can withstand
warmer temperatures before putting them in a breeding program. Or they
can produce gametes from coral from different locations at the same time
and fertilize them to form larvae that might not otherwise occur in nature.
These hybrids might be able to withstand warmer seas. “By manipulation,
ex-situ spawning [or spawning outside the reef] creates huge opportunity.”
After Craggs had cracked the code for ex-situ spawning, requests for
information arrived from around the world. Craggs wrote up blueprints in
what turned into a doctoral dissertation and started a company called the
Coral Spawning Lab to provide coral reproduction equipment and services.
One product is a large rectangular unit designed to be wheeled through a
doorway into a lab. All that’s needed is to mount the lights, plug it in, and
add seawater. “Off you go, basically,” Craggs says. “We tried to make it as
plug-and-play as possible.” To date, 50 coral species have been spawned in
these units in about a dozen countries.
As Craggs’ innovations have accrued, so have his questions about how
to best support coral conservation. “How do we scale up?” he asks. That
has meant taking the step from coral reproduction to rearing larvae into
coral colonies.
In the Maldives in the Indian Ocean, Craggs has designed a new kind
of aquarium system. This “V-shaped raceway takes its inspiration from a
meandering river,” Craggs says, “but also thinking about a model railway
as a kid.” He explains that animal waste has to be carefully removed from
aquaria or it will kill the coral. Building the bottom of the aquarium into
a “V” means gravity does most of the work. “We can just run a siphon
hose along the middle and remove the detritus,” he explains. Like building a model train track, the system is composed of five different parts that
can be bolted together in any number of configurations, and the riverine
design minimizes the size of pumps needed and therefore energy use. Each
raceway can hold upward of 10,000 corals, so linking together four or five
raceways quickly multiplies the colonies a system can support.
And Craggs is already thinking about the next challenge: cost. While the
systems he’s engineered have opened new realms in coral research, they
35
Progress
understanding
coral reproduction
has been
unbearably slow
for decades.
