Sunscreen and Environmental Impact

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Search click. book today on the Verbo app. If you know you erbo, terms apply. seeee verbo d. com slash trust for details Oh, hey, it's twenty twenty six. This is Allie. I'm in the American Southwest. I'm in New Mexico. This is my forty ninth out of fifty states I visited. You're thinking, which one's next? whichich is the final one West Virginia crayfish guy that I'm going to go out there to see eventually. Anyway, I'm in New Mexic. I'm interviewing skunk expert that I have been waiting to meet Over six years, I'm meeting him in about an hour I'm wearing black and white striped socks. I'm so nervous. My palms are sweating I knew I was getting married for about S months before I got married, wedding day jitters. Now imagine six years of waiting to meet a skunk expert. Can you believe it? Imagine how I'm feeling Nervous, I'm shaking. I hope I say the right thing. Ja's coming with me. We're gonna talk skunks. But because I'm in New Mexico, I'm hopping around. We are giving you this encore episode of one that I love, love love. This was absolutely a joy to record. It was a beautiful setting wonderful stories about fieldwork, personal stories. This one is just an absolute banger. So if just get into it, enjoy. okay So this episode was recorded in beautiful Hawaii ever heard of it, you're about to just get an earfulull of coral. But before I recorded it Honestly, I knew neither Jack nor shit about Coral. All I want to do is stare at videos of Coral. Honestly, I used to just consider them to be like the really plucky kind of quirky settings of a snorkeling jaunt, kind of like like a splashy backdrop in a community theater play. likeike, oh, that's nice, but you know What's happening in front of them? What kind of fish do we have? Oh contrere After this episode, you'll be like, moveove out of the way, fish, I'm staring at a And yeah totally fun, if you don't what a polyp is, we willll get to that. But first, thank you to all the folks that support the show at patreon. com slash alllogies for as little as a dollar a month. You can submit questions. Also thanks to everyone who buys and wears shirts and hats and such from oogies merch. com. We have some new denim Dad hats If you need a new lid that says I like weird facts Good intentions and bad puns. It doesn't literally say that. I'm just saying that it's like people will go, o, that must be what you're into. although that's a bad idea for a hat. Stay tuned Also, thank you to everyone who tells friends and coworkers about the show and who rates and subscribes and lose reviews, which you know I read Okay, it's me again twenty twenty six. This is a fresh review from a longtime listener, an elementary school teacher, Serena G, who wrote that every one of your episodes inspires awe, even when it's a topic I didn't think I'd be interested in. Serena G, let's get you some quarrel. Also, if anyone needs kids safe alllologies episodes, no swears, we now have smallologies M O LO GIS. They're shorter G rated edits of classic episodes. They're out weekly for free. They're just in their own feed. So go to your podcast app and search smallmologies SM O LO GIS. there you go Okay, Nidariology Totally a word. It's a well documented legit term. It's a study of animals there are over ten thousand species who have nidocytes, which are these specialized cells for catching prey And where does this lovely silent consonant weird word come from? It looks like when your mom tries to weasel a fake term into a words with friends play, and you're like, No way, Nancy, that's not enough vowels. But it comes from the old Latin nide, which means a nettle And it might also have ties to old Latvian and Lithuanian words meaning to itch and to tickle. So corals are Nidarians, they're underwater animals that poses these kind of beautiful plant looking things for Mars, and they want to just tickle you to death I'm already sold. I already love them, but let's hear more. So I was introduced to this oologist by your favorite toologist, Squid expert, Sarah McNuly, Sarah Mactack on Twitter, foollow her, love her. And she invited me to tag along on a squiding trip to Hawaii, a research trip she was doing. A company called Atlas Obscurure was facilitating it. They were awesome. They do wonderful science and history trips. It was a joy Rachel, she led it. I love her. Anyway, one day the group got to take a little boat to Coconut Island. and the very island featured in the opening credits of Gilligan's Island. And this was once a weird getaway for Hollywood types, but now it's a research station where grad students tend to marine life. We spent the day looking at these gurgling outdoor tanks and watching a bay of hammerhead sharks, strolling some beachy trails to stations with urchins and sea cucumbers and cowary snails. They're all being monitored by these wonderful marine biologists there. This oologist got his bachelor's at UC Santa Cruz, double majoring in environmental studies and feminist studies got his masters in Biology and ecology, evolution in Conservation Biology in San Francisco and is working toward his PhD right now at this famed Gates lab at the University of Hawaii Minoa and the Hawaiian Institute of Marine Biology The Gates lab is a coral lab. This dude has his hands full. The coral werere in the middle of a spawning event that we but he is amazing and took an hour out of his day to come to my hotel and chat about cororals. I was waiting so excitedly in the lobby and I thought like he was maybe five or ten minutes late, which is fine. But it turns out we were in the same lobby exactly on time, but just perfectly obscured by a pillar. So once we figured that out, it was all smooth, saling. we talked about what coral even is, why they're important, how he feels about diving, what a dead reef looks like, the state of some reefs around the world. if it's reef or reees pererhaps the importance of balancing work with being your true self, some advice for aspiring maran biologists, how screwed or Cal? What movies get it right? What's up with sunscreens? What is bleaching? and what else can we do to help our hard, squishy pals beneath the sea? So anchor down Get ready for a wave of coral info with the amazing Nedariologist Shaail Metssuda nine, fifty nine, shalesue here at ten. I'm sitting by the pool We have so little time I'm just essentially gonna to throw this microphone in his face and like start rolling Be we even hit the elevators. the call A ten minutes. got you too But I came to the other side. E Send me around The coral This' my mis. And you are aidaryologist? Did they say it, right Sure. I was thinking about that our coralologist maybe. I mean, is our corals nidaria? Yeah, the Nidarians. Okay Nidarians of a family they're part of. And What unites all of those animals is their stinging cells, their nidocytes What's the common thread? We must be related. Yeah, so like anemones or jellyfish and corals all produce these little stinging cells that they used in defense or prey capture I've already learned so much about corals. I didn't know that. They got little stinkies And so what exactly is a coral That's a great question that we think about all the time, actually So Corals are animals. first and foremost, but The corals when you think of a coral reef corals, they're much more than like the sum of their parts. The coral animal Looks white They have clear tissues and they secrete a white calcium carbonate skeleton. But the reason that when you're snorkeling around a coral reef, they don't appear white to us is because they have symbiotic algae, which live inside their tissues that provide up to like ninety five percent of their daily nutritional needs. And the algae color themselves are what what we're looking at when we see corals. Oh my God And just like you and me, corals also have a microbiome. They have bacteria that live inside of their tissues that also play a lot of really important roles So to recap, corals are animals and they often have a calcium carbonate white skeletal structure and a squishy skin bag that can be filled with colorful algae and bacteria pals that live under their skin and provide their nutrition If you pitched that creature in a sci fi series, people would be like, h, no, that's too weird. What about just like a short skinnyer human with bigger eyes and everyone would be like, yeah That's more possible. Now, what is with them being a skin backag This is like the hardest question. I know. It's like, oh man, we have a term for this. It's called the coral holobiionont. and that is like the coral animal itself. It's symbiotic algae, it's bacteria, there're fungi, they' archea. There are a lot of different obligate symbiots that these corals have that are critical for their life and function. So it's kind of like a skeleton a soupy mix of goodness and then like a little transparent skin And the parent skin is the animal itself. So If just like trees that grow in forest, if you count their rings, you get an idea of how old they are Corals actually work the same way, where they are constantly secreting this calcium carbonate skeleton and growing and researchers will actually take a core of that skeleton and you can actually count the different layers and get an idea of the age of the corals and also what was going on the planet at the time. Oh my gosh. Is it similar to trees in that there's a ring for every year of growth because of seasons or is that different U it's kind of like seasons in the ocean. Different corals will grow at different rates. so kindind of like different plants as well. In a nutshell as the coral begins to grow and keeps putting down these layers of calcium carbonate. we can use things like carbon dating to get an idea of what was happening in the atmosphere and in the oceans at those times. And so kind of it gives us a geologic history of what was happening in these environments So when you see, let's say, out of the ocean and it's like a piece on a. yeah, know, number one, it's not a happy coral. but when you see like a decorative coral Are you seeing esssentially just at skeleton But when we say coral reef corals, there're a particular type of a group of corals that live in the shallow waters that have these algos symbions that rely on photosynthesis to get their food Corals are a really large group of organisms and we have deep sea corals that don't have these symbioses that just feed heterotrophically by eating know planktin or things in the water And a lot of corals like can have pigments and their skeletons do have pigments of their own. And so like black corals, you know, red corals those things that you see see in the stores, like that's still the skeleton, but those are organisms themselves we shouldn't pull out of the ocean. Which we should leave in the ocean leave in the ocean. Now, are those getting harvested just for decorative purposes? Yeah, very often. There's a lot of protections in different places about corals, but it's, you know, not everywhere Okay, so side notes, some figures have estimated upwards of two hundred million dollars annually. worth of coral is poached from the oceans for things like jewelry and decor. And in some places, just taking a coral skeleton bit from the beach is illegal. If you're going to get arrested on a beach, do something else have a better story, you know? So maybe don't have coral decorations. Yeah. Okay. you know, But what you can have is that where, you know, with technology increases where we're doing a lot of work with like thirty imaging and you can like go home or, you know gotot a museum or you know, a tech place and get a coral printed and put that in your house. Yes. You can admire them in a way that's a replica. Yeah. absolutely. That makes sense. This is beautiful. Right. You could I'm sure you can even cast cast them ter of Paris in there. Exactly. We fixed it. Pes yes, I did look it up and there are hollow coral shaped molds. you can pour plastera paris in them. and it just it seems more convenient than getting yourself to an ocean and then out of jail. And now how long have you been studying corals I've been studying corals formally for four years during this degree But I've been interested in corals for much longer and have studied corals as a volunteer researcher at the California Academy Sciences on expeditions and volunteer expeditions actually kind of like Thats obscure.. As a younger person Were you always maybe drawn to the sea? wereere you always like an aquatic person? That's a good question too. So I grew up just outside of Chicago, where even though I felt like I was growing up in a body of water, like Michigan, it's not a marine environment, it's freshwater environment. So it looks like I wasn't growing up swimming on coral reefs But for me, you know, looking back I My first like taste of, you know the ocean was growing up and going to the Shed Aquarium and seeing all the exhibits there. And I think that's a really common thad that you hear for a lot of us who pursued degrees in marine biology, that You know, most of us the United States aren't luck enough to grow up on a coral reef. And so a lot of our first exposures to this, you know, especially those of us before like the YouTube era and whatnot, was going to our local aquariums and really seeing these organisms that, you know you don't even read about the ocean. If you're wondering, where are corals? I asked corals. org and it said essentially around the equator plus where currents flow out of the tropics, like in Florida and southern Japan, it's a little bit warmer. They make up zero point two percent of the ocean floor, but they're home to this blew my mind twenty five percent of marine life So if sea animals were like the cool kids, the coral reefs would be like the mall if this were a movie from the eighties And so there was there a moment like at the aquarium where you thought I would love to do that in life It's an interesting I'm going to give you my journey story and you can like hack this up I love a journey story. It's a journey story. Okay, let's get to know Shale's science background. Settle in. So I had one of those moments where like I I was always drawn to nature and to being outside and to playing outside. I was a very like I was not a video game kid. I was a wound up getting muddy kid But When I got to college, I kind of went a different science route. I studied you know water policy and sustainable organic farming and that was something that I was like really into and really excited about. and I never I just like marine biolog wasn't something I thought I could really do And I ended up actually pursuing a different path. I had a dual degree in ennvironmental science and women's studies and I kind of went the second route and kind of worked with the youth in nature in u underserved communities and I kind of got to this point, you know, my little bit later twenties. I decided to, you know my job and move to my house, and sell all my stuff and travel and figure that out. And something that happened for me on that trip was I finally decided to learn to scuba dive. I'm a really claustrophobic person, so I kind of put that off for a while. I really explicitly remember, you know that first time I descended into the water And this was in Thailand. And I remember like being so overwhelmed with how beautiful all the corals were and how this environment, like different than just snorkeling just like opened up in a really three dimensional dynamic way And then I also remember seeing a lot of garbage on the reef too And so I was having a lot of I' having these like, you know, push pull moments of being like so overwhelmed with the beauty around me and so curious about, you know what these animals were, what You know, what is this environment that I'm in? and I want like looking at everything, but also being You' really struck by how polluted it was as well. Yeah. From there basically went I wanted to make sure that was right choice. And so I applied to sitting these little internet cafes, like applying to these like coral reef monitoring, like volunteers shhips just to like learn a little bit more, make sure this is the like big life switch I was ready to make. and I I joined one that was in the Yucat ten in Mexico where I went out and lived for three months and learned to identify all the species of coral out there. and we participated in monitoring transects that were then used by local NGOs to compare the protected sites that they had gotten protection for versus the sites that weren't. And so that experience really kind of solidified that You know, I mo back to San Francisco. I went to city college to make up on some coursework that I hadn't done the first time. I was volunteering as a diver at an aquarium to get more hands on experience. startarted volunteering in a research lab at the California Academy of Sciences, and then I was bartending to you know pay the bills. And then from there, I realize that, you know, being being at A museum was such an exciting place because you've got researchers studying everything, right? You've got that, you've got tourists and Like community folks from the neighbor who are like Right upstairs that you can just go upstairs and to about like all the really cool things that we're working on and then moving on, you know, from there to my to my PhD, where I am now was You know, I was at that point, I was like pretty much sold. So I have never been yet snorkeling in an alive reef Oh you gott to do that here. What is that like? I mean, You do that for your job and also as a passion. like what is it like to be underwater like that? It's so beautiful. Yeah. It's so beautiful. Corals come in like all shapes and sizes and just like, you know, you have your favorite city Are your favorite you know, major trail you like to walk on Every reef is going to be a little bit different. They have huge structures and these corals will have these You know these big branching corals, you look a little closer and you see they're homes to all these different kinds of animals. like the more You know, the more structure you have in your in the ecosystem, the more different types of organisms you're going to see when you're down there. And it's just it's It's so exciting. likeike there's so much to see. And you know, you'll see your turtle and your shark every once in a while, which is really exciting. But for me, it's like kind of just like swimming up to like one kind of coral and just like staring at it for a while. And then things will start to come out. you'll see like crabs that live inside the coral. you'll see, you know snapping shrimp. sometimes you'll see eels or octopus and just like you just It is like it's like you can think of it almost like a metropolis in the ocean and full of a diverse cast of players. When you're doing research, is it ever difficult for you to say, okay All right, Chhyl, we're done We're get out of the water. Are you like one more? Oh yeah, absolutely.. And sometimes you forget like there have been times when know since I work on corals and I'm working on an experiment right now where I'm focusing on individual coral colonies, I can be like upside down in the reef for like an hour at a time, just staring at this one coral and then we'll come to the surface and people be like, oh, did you see that shark that went by before? what are you talking about? you know? So it's always still really nice to go out when you're not working really appreciate, you how lucky we are to be able to see these environments. You know, I've worked with researchers who know I'll go to a coral reef and I'll say this is beautiful. Look at all the diversity here and they'll be like, you should have seen it twenty years ago. they're seeing these changes that at such a rapidace that we're witnessing them in our lifetimes. and that's new. Yeah. So what is Shao working on in terms of protecting these bony, soupy, squishy, mysterious, gorgeous little critters? What we're working on our lab group is working on is you know really a whole wide range of questions, but we're really curious about know, what's going to happen to corals under these future climate conditions and what can we do to intervene to give them a better chance of surviving. I'm trying toide if I want to go like broad or like my stuff Iually let's go abroad a little bit just because People don't know shit about corals. That's true.. But they're the coolest animals Yeah, so correlals are all coral species are all really, really different. that's something that makes them super exciting and interesting, but makes it also a lot harder to come up with like strategies to help them survive because they reproduce differently. know someome will brood, like releasing coral larvae into the water, some will spawn, releasing coral gametes, eggs and sperm into the water and some are large and they grow in these really big shapes, someome are very small, even single polyped corals. And so and they have very different life strategies. They're so different. they associate with different types of these symbionts. And so what we're really interested in is doing is seeing if, you know Are there types of interventions that we can kind of scale up that managers and conservationists all around the world. work with these different corals and in these different coral reef environments that are all widely different can can use or like can use as signals for what might happen in the future or to use to kind of help those corals that are that are out there survive. Some of the stuff that we're working on in the lab is lookingooking at like can we expose corals to non lethal stressors to condition them to then be put out in the reef and if they experience these higher temperatures downstream will that initial exposure helpel them survive is coral bleaching? you're asking I get it. We're going to explain that in a second. donon't worry. I got you. And with coral bleaching, what's really hard about that is it's this whole balance of how hot and for how long. So if there's like a really short temperature spike, how does that affect these organisms versus if this is more of a prolonged only a degree or two above that thermal maximum that they have How does that affect if they're gonna to bleach, the severity of that bleaching, and then also their ability to recover afterwards? So we haven't really talked about what coral bleaching is. Yeah, I know. I was like, okay, that doesn't make any sense yet So Corals have these symbiotic algae that are obligate, That means they're required for the corals to live. They provide up to ninety five percent of their daily nutritional needs and Everything when the temperatures are good, everything is happy. the corals get what they need, the symbts get what they need bite When the water temperature rises, like I said, just even slightly above that thermal maximum that the corals can handle it Cirlals are starting to stress out. Freaking out. And One of their stress responses is to expel these algae So kind of how we get sick, we'll get a fever And that's good. It's our body's way of helping protect us. But if that fever gets too high or goes on too long, that can actually be detrimental to us. And the same thing's true with coral bleaching. As the corals are purging out these algal symbts, it's not just all the time. L you can watch a coral start to pale, losing its color, right? Be as the symbionions leave, that white skeleton is showing through. And then as that's happening, the longer goes on, the corals aren't getting the energy and they can begin to starve Okay, so under temperature stressors, corals toss their internal friends and they bleach because they lose that color. So they're not dead, but they're certainly weaker and they're in danger It is not cute And what you'll see is if you go got into a coral reef when this is happening If you see these corals that are white, you're seeing that skeleton through the tissue, but the tissue is still there, the corals are still alive. And if that stressor leaves corals have a chance to recover. Those symbiot communities can proliferate again in the corals, they'll be pigment be okay. But if that stressor goes on too long the corals can die. we've seen this happen on massive scales on a reef. And once the corals die, you'll start to see macro algae growing on top of them. And that's when you the structure of the reef environment will then start to really break down. And also someome corals are aren't bleaching some individuals. like in Canyuee Bay during the twenty fourteen and twenty fifteen bleaching events that we had There would be two corals, the exact same species right next to each other, touching on the reef. And one of them would be bleached and one of them would be visibly totally normal. And so we're really trying to understand like what is it about that corals like genetic makeup or symbion communities that is allowing these corals to perform And so when you're looking at say two different examples of coral next to each other, are those different Individuals genetically are those different groups of a bunch of individuals When you're looking at a fan of coral, how many people are you looking at? That are coral? Yeah,'s good question. So a coral colony is a coral, you can think of a coral itself as a coral polyp. What is a polyp Well, it's a squishy little bugger with a feathery head and it secretes calcium carbonate at its base to anchor it on a surface, kind of like a cup holder, filled with one of those gas station windsock dancers, only made out of jello salad. Also, as long as this train has tootot made a stop into Pollpville, it comes from the words pollly, many, and pe mean foot So Ply And in old Latin, it meant cuttlefish I personally tend to associate polyps with bad news about colons, and that's because a polyp is a little intestinal dingle dangle that can grow and if not checked it can turn into a tumor, so get checked. Okayk, let's get out of our butts and back into the ocean, though. What is a polyp So you look a little mouth, kind of like if you took an anemone, that' kind of structure of the mouth in the middle, tentacles on the outside. And as a coral grows, it buds off and creates a genetically identical And as those polyps continue to multiply and spread and grow, you've got a coral colony that is made up of polypseral, one genetic individual Do you think that that's all the same person or do you think it's a person and a bunch of clones? Yeahstand That's a hard question. I understand that a coral is not a person too, but maybe? Yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, definitely. And that's a hard question. and actually people in the lab are looking at that too. L at what life stage are corals able to fuse together and share resources or not? Do some species do this more than others That's definitely a really good question. Okay, good, but we don't totally know the answer to that all. You can't just like look at one and be like, that's Three or four genetic like genetically distinct individuals Sometimes when they do grow up next to each other, you can see kind of like a scar between colonies where one individual ends and the next one begins. butre like we're also seeing evidence of of fusion How much do you think research has changed in the last five or ten years with DNA sequencing and how much cheaper and faster that's gotten. So much. Yeah. That's cool. I mean it's a really exciting time to be a biologist right now and asking questions that we were couldn't afford to ask for itone the technology to ask for on these really large scales. And now what about their stinkiness? their little stinger, stingers,ers stingers. How is that helping them survive or thwart predators or are there predators to coral other than just human Yeah O bantals ye Yeah. But yeah So corals don't have a lot of predators. There's a lot of fish that will like you've probably heard of parrot fish that will try to like eat the macro algae around corals. sometometimes they will nibble the coral too. But for the most part, there's not a lot of animals coming towards them to eat them in that sense They they use their stinging cells a lot in prey capture So if you see if you like stare at a coral long enough under the scope and you know, if you've Plankton, you know, swims up. ll you'll see it almost like kind of like a, you know, Venus slide trap. You'll see the plankton get stuck to the coral tentacles and then the coral tentacles will pull it into its mouth and suck it in and digest it. It's really neat to watch. but those you the stinging cells, if you touch a coral, which you shouldn't do, it will try to sting you too but our skin is too thick But you know, other animals like you know, Portuguese M of warar, for example, like there are stinging cells that can affect us too, but Cser. t safe, don' touch them. Sale says that one thing that changed in his academic lifetime is that gene sequencing technology has improved vastly. So they're able to get hundreds, thousands, millions of reads getting a much better idea of what bacterial communities associate with corals Just imagine your haircut six or seven years ago, like yikes, right? Just imagine what gene sequencing thinks of its TBTs. So embarrassing. And what this world? do is I can go out there and take a really small tissue sample Extract the DNA sequence the DNA, get back like, you know, ten, twenty thousand reads of all these different organisms that We were able to amplify. And from that I can see, you know, who is there? Who's there Wh is it get an idea of like what are the functions of these organismsind how important might that be to the health and survival of the coral? A lot of the bacteria, like, you know Bacteria have different different roles. like in us, like your skin bacteria is going to be different than your gut bacteria. you don't want those to mix. and like corals have bacteria that you know help in likeike defence and nutrient cycling and things like that. So we're interested in like what what those are doing there, we can get a way better idea of what's going on now than we could know ten, fifteen years ago ter now And what do you think is the biggest coral bummer for the coral. wouldould it be a rise in temperature or ocean acidification? pollution, like is there What's their big What's their big sad trombone So corals are dealing with a lot of threats right now. The biggest one being impacts of climate change. And we're seeing this on Refs today in the form of sea surface temperature warming and ocean acidification, as you mentioned And what Why this is so bad is that we're seeing an increase, even in our lifetimes of these massive coral bleaching events worldwide and a coral bleaching event can can wipe out entire reef ecosystems in like one season. And we're seeing them not only, you know It's not just like a one off anymore. And here in Hawaii, we've had we had the events in twenty fourteen again in twenty fifteen. The Great Barrier Reef has also experienced these successive events. And so while you know, we're seeing corals that are able to survive one round of this warming and recover, it's like you keep un hitting them. What is that affecting? Like we've got research groups at the Hawi Institute Marine Biology who are looking at like how how does the reproduction affected by these events? Like are we going to see a lot more downstream things that are happening? And you add things like the local stressors like, you know, overfishing or sedimentation and pollution runoff from a lot of the local environments that are there those are the kind of the the added pressures that corals are facing and It's It is so good, like it is so good and so important to mitigate some of these local stressors, right? Like Diverting pollution and sedimentation. Really important, like a coral can't live if it's covered in sediment aside what is up with sediments? Well, apparently it's been long known that sediments and coral they are not happy roommates. Sailors would know that they could enter a freshwater river because that's when the raays would stop because the sediment in their outflows would kill the coral. So why can't coral deal with a little river dust or erosion, or storms caused by weather events or say, tsunamis. So in a paper titled Mechanisms of Damage to Corals expxposed to sedimentation, researchers say that sediment blocks sunlight, which means that their photosynthetic inneralgae buddies get blocked. there goes their nutrient and energy source. Now if there's also organic material in the sediment, it tends to hog all the nearby oxygen in the water, and then those byproducts lower the pH, and then other organic compounds in the sediment get digested, they release toxic hydrogen sulfide. So the sediment covered coral can die in twenty four hours. It can happen really quickly. Okay, so even though coral is an animal, just like imagine a favorite house plant and then imagine coating it in a heavy spray paint and dipping it in an acid bath and then pumping poison in the room. Your plant would be like, wow Can you not? The most important thing that we need to address, if we want correlals in the future is climate change. And why are coral reefs important? alsoso, Is it reefs or is it reefs? Is it Reeves? I always want to say like reeeves. like rooves or like cooves. I like that. I haven't heard that actually. I always want to say Reebs and I know that's not Rees.. Okay, like you know, like like multiple. Okay. you know foots or feet. But it reeeves Okay. I've asked an expert and it's not Reeves. Listen. If elves had hooves, the second halves of their lives, would they be tall enough to reach the shelves? when they kept their knives to cut up loaves of bread, or would their wives have to put down the scarves they're knitting, to get themselves believe it's not reefs. So why are reefs important? Why do Why do we want to save the reefs other than their fucking gorgeous and awesome and fish live there. but Clearly they are important. Yeah. Yes all of that. Yeah they're really important and they're really important for a lot of different reasons really personersal to many people, but also then on a community and national international scale as well. So You know, having a coral reef environment is They're one of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the world. They're a bank for biodiversity. And Within that, you know, the coral rofs themselves are the breeding grounds and homes for tons of marine life. We've got animals that will come in from the deeper oceans to breed fish as a really important, you know food resource. For a lot of coastal communities, it's their main source protein, main source of protin for many people in the world. reeeef environmentments where a lot of those larger gamefish reproduce and come back to coral reefs and a lot of our coastal ecosystems are really important for mitate mitigating coastal damage. So you've got they they absorb a lot of that, you know, wave action, that wave power that's coming in. We've all seen reallyally awful that have been happening out of our coastal communities around the world because of, you know flooding and you know, coastline erosion and things like that Shale stresses that he doesn't like to focus too much on the potential pharmaceutical benefits of nature because there are other intrinsic reasons for conservation But you know, a big somethingomething that we' learning more and more about. The ocean in general is that there's a lot of these chemicals out there that can be used to help humans. so And For me, like one of the most exciting moments that I had actually during my master's degree. I studied C slugs, new to ranksine during that time was I was like in my advisor's office, looking through some old papers. And I found this paper where one of the so this the slugs that I study Really cool animals. They will eat things like sponges or different organisms that produce these toxic chemical compounds, and they will slightly alter them when they eat them and they'll put them in their own tissues and use them to fend off their own predators Re really cool I did a little digging. and for more information on this, you might want to dip into just a light beach read entitledote Selective Toxicity of a Persian Gulf sea cucumber Holorithheia Parva on Human chronic lymphocytic leukemia by B lymphocytes by direct mitochondrial targeting ilert I'm going gonna let Shale tell you the plot of the paper. But these toxins that are like antimicrobial, antiv viral also can be used inical biomedical research that It benefits humans. so I'm like looking through this box of papers and found this paper and I'm like, oh my gosh, I like call my mom, right? And I'm like on the phone with my mom and I'm like, mom, like guess what? Like there's this newibrank that they're studying that They're using to see if they can treat the adult form of cancer that I had as a kid. Which was like mind blowing to me. Wait, what?ike this organism that I didn't think I was gonna study. And I don't study pharmaceutical things or anything like that, but just that like this kind of a group of animals that I didn't know much about before could actually have such like a personal impact on me. And there's like tons of things out there that we haven't discovered yet. Oh my God, what kind of cancer was that? Childhood leukeemia Oh my gosh. It's wild, right? So it's like I was like, this all came full circle But it's those kind of moments where there you know the reasons to protect coral reefs We might not even know all of the reasons yet. right. And are we going to lose these opportunities because of like It's not becausecause we don't know better, but it's because it's like we're not Ready Politicians aren't ready. It's not for a lack of science, I should say that we're not making these big changes, but I'm hopeful bad We're getting there. We're getting in the right direction. Do you think having had that experience with cancer as a kid changed the way you approached what you wanted to do in life att all or U yeah, not in the way you wouldd expect. Like everyone thought I was going to grow up and want to be a door.? That's like a really typical narrative that people ascribe to Childhood cancer survivors. For me what was hard I think the way that it affected me the most, like in my personality is that I from a very early age didn't have this idea of like all the time in the world. It was like, if I want to do something, I have to do it now. And so I from a very early age, I was very, you know, for better or for worse, Bake everything that I want to happen, has to happen. So it resulted in me being a very driven human being, but then at the same time it also you know, causes a lot of anxiety and pressure. And I think that it got me really curious about science, about answering questions and about the fact that, you know Oh man, this story too. So Lukemia is a really interesting thing. because for like, you know centuries and whatnot of studying thing we didn't know what caused it. And there's been a lot of hypotheses out there that have talked about, you know it's going to be like an environmental thing, whatnot. And it was only it was very recently that a paper came out with like this new hypothesis that It's kind of like a combination of things. It's like a genetic thing, like a genetic predisposition And then also The hypothesis is that. Babies who were not exposed to like the right bacteria in their like first year of life were prone to this. my God. and You know, So that that was like super interesting because like a lot of, you know, bacteria is like another really big thing in my research today. Like there's a lot of work going on with like coral probiotics. Like can I, you know, I'm studying like what bacteria is there other groups are working in. Like can we take the bacteria that we know is helping coral survive and like andocculate them with that at an early age and then will that help them down the line? So this whole idea that, you know, mayaybe we could prevent childhood leukemia by creating a probiotic cocktail for babies. and then all a suddenly, can we solve, you know or help mitigate, you know Cal diseases, by also creating like a probiotic. there's the amount of knowledge we're gaining about bacteria just in general right now has just been like a huge driver for knowledge. Right. And the notion that it's not just one necessarily species you're studying, but it's interaction with several species that almost makes it able to survive and adapt. Shale says that some corals even need both bacteria and certain viruses present to survive these thermal events. So the symbiotic connections go deep get complicated kind of like a group of adults who've been friends since college. justust like a girl's weekend without stuff, thingsings at a cororal party just the same without bacteria and viruses. The ocean is full of different things and you know, we're looking at like a lot of these like interactions. like how many partners need to be in play to get this result or to prevent something from happening? It's just it's a really exciting to be studying like all of this stuff Home to twenty five percent of the world's marine species, potentially home to a cure for cancer weir interesting alien like live sculptures full of other beings and also also Our new friend Coral is just plaining pretty and nice to look at. So there's that factor, Shale explains. And they're also, you know really important for for tourism and the economy. And that's also a really great way to kind of switch our The way that we think about our economy is instead of extracting from the reef and damaging the reef, we can actually like do you know, eco friendly tourism, bring people, educate people to see the reef. And you know, it's hard to find an appreciation for something that you never seen before. you know, we can all kind of relate to that.. And we all have those moments where like you know, you saw something for the first time, even you know any place in nature like we can have those kind of moments. but I think that's really important also And especially like here in Hawaii, coral reef ecosystems are incredibly important culturally. And there's a lot of history there's a lot of stories, a lot of history wrapped up in these these ecosystems and it's You know, there's a lot of reasons to protect them. And with eighty five percent of the US. coral reefs surrounding Hawaii, there's also a really big cultural necessity of protecting and preserving those ecosystems. And there's a piece called Huamai Heikoa, the significance of corals in Hawaiian culture, and it's featured in the book, Eetnobiology of corals and coral Refs with anough Refs find and the lead author of it Tony McConney Gregg writes quot, Hawaiian people consider coral to be an Ikua, something that provides birth and death to both the people and the islands and possesses much mana, which is the essence of spirituality Corals are considered the beginning of life and are thus the most ancient ancestors of all living things in Hawaii. And that's something that Shale seems to approach with a lot of reverence. He seems to have a lot of empathy, which may be from feeling conscious of ping ponging between a few science subjects before he landed on Reefs, but also he blazed through grad school with challenges that most of us don't face. not only did I not have a you know, a direct like go to undergrad go to your masters or Groerate your PhD kind of experience. but I'd experienced also a lot of Um that obstacles and challenges that You know, folks who don't typically see themselves in science, face as well. And that's not something that you would necessarily get from looking at me today and for me I experienced a lot of sexism When I was younger U so I didn't transition until I was just' until it was in my master's program. And so I had the experience of being a woman in science for my entire coming into science. And in high school, I was put on like the the honor science track and it took me a while to realize that this is something that happened. Those experiences in particular like really came to a head for me when I showed up at my PhD program like well into my medical transition and all of a sudden had access to like conversations in space where People really kind of let you know what they really think ways that I didn't before reallyally. And those, you know, it's It has been a very interesting experience to see on the other side, you know Really a lot of the things that I thought were happening are you the old ways of thinking and kind of the gatekeepers for a lot of opportunities in STEM from this point of view And so I think that like taking a longer time in your journey is something that's very typical for folks, you know from many underrepresented backgrounds in the sciences, especially after decades, centuries of You know, being excluded not only from science careers, but also like, you know, science research Yeah for the medical industry is a great example of that.. Yes, side notote, I had heard that women weren't included in some medical research trials, but I didn't know how big a deal or how recent this was. Like cell phones existed by the time a law called the National Institutes of Health Revitalization Act of nineteen ninety three passed stating that the director of NIH shall ensure That A, women are included as subjects in each project of such research and that B, members of minority groups are included in such research A twenty sixteen article in phharmacy prractice said that when studying diseases prevalent in both sexes, males, frequently of the Caucasian race, were considered to be the norm study population. And that was a direct quote from a journal article there PS head up, I didn't know this until this past year, but the word Caucasian has super racist origins it's no longer widely used. So sccrap that white works. And nearly twenty years ago, the Institute of Medicine clarified and made a really important distinction between sex and gender. Gender being the self representation, social and cultural views of sex. So if anyone ever tells you that they know your gender based on your body, tell them that science says That is hogwash. Thank you very much. Also, Shale says that having a mentor you trust and respect is so important. He had situations that called for allies like preparing for field work in countries where certain identities could put you at risk or navigating passport issues, just things that some of us might really take for granted. because it's really hard to be alone and struggling. you know, I'd say like for me like the hardest things have been you know personal. in this journey as opposed to like science is hard, but I have lots of people to talk to about my experiments. And so like I think that like, you know, besides all the like systemic things that we need to do to make STEM actually more inclusive Um We need to find our communities and like lift each other up in that sense. Do you find that maybe underrepresented Folks tend to have a little bit more imposter syndrome. Oh yeah. yeah. Oh impmoster syndrome. yeah. Yes, definitely. And sometimes you see it, like it's very obvious. You're like, oh, I know. like you walk into a room and like I feel like every person of color Probably every woman, probably you every LGBTQ person, when you walk into a room, whether it's like a new class or a conference, you kind of look around the room and you look for your allies.ally my back here. And I think that, you know, so like there's these Imposter syndrome is never like it's a standalone feeling. You know,s it's built up over, you know I'm over so much that's going on in the world. like do you Are there people like you that you have as role models? Do you see people are the interests of your communities being addressed in Like societal science. Did you end up at a lab that you felt you had a little bit more community And also you work on Cogonut Island which is a beautiful place in Hawaii. I mean, it's also this little isolated pocket of marine science. How did you how did you end up there? And what was your feeling when you when you found out you'd be researching there That's a good question. So I only applied to one program. You did or my PhD. That's great. And one hundred percent, I applied because I wanted to work with Dr. Eutth Gates who It's excellent cor biologist and also someone who really valued science communication and connecting to communities in the public and inspiring people to do care so deeply about reefs and those are two things that were very, very important to me. I also really want it was very important to me to work in a large collaborative lab where there's a lot of collaborative work and a lot of sharing of ideas and support, and also in a place where I would feel safe. And safe means you know access to safe health care finding community on the islands, university or a place that actually has you know anti discrimination policies in place. There's a lot of places that don't. I have a lot of friends who are part of universities that, you know are in places that you can be, you know thrown in jail for using the wrong restroom, wrong, right? wrong quotes. And we've seen a lot of issues some really great response around that from the scientific community canceling conferences in areas that are putting up these really discriminatory policies and things like that. And that's wonderful. Like the UC system has done a lot of actually great work in that sense by saying you're not funding travel to these places. One professional mentor who meant so much to Shale was Dr. Ruth Gates of the Gates Coral Lab he's at now. And she was a veteran coral biologist. She apparently had such a zeal for her work She passed away just this past October at age fifty six of cancer, and when we went and toured the labs in Hawaii Ruth's name was brought up a lot and you can tell that she's dearly, dearly missed, but it seems like he ended up in the right place. Oh And also before Patreon questions, it's a big day for you Because they started spawning last night. What That's. I was like, 'cause it's prride. I was like yeah, heavy breide. Yeah, they did. But spawn, it's spawn a palooza right now. It is it is. so something really amazing about corals that there's not enough amazing stuff is coral spawning events. And so corals, right you're a sedentary animal. you're not moving around to find your mates you're in the ocean, how are you going to reproduce, you know, besides fragmenting off? And so the way it works is it's this combination of cues. It's the moon cycle from your Isn't the moon a star? It's the temperature, it's like the pressure in the environment that will all come together and cue the corals to release their gametes into the water column And for the coral species that we study, the rice coral, Monte Pcaata out here in the lab They spawn two to three months during the summer. on the night of the new moon and a few nights after. Oh And if you're lucky enough to be out in the bay, you kind of peer over at around eight forty five PM and you'll start to see these little am colored bundles slowly floating to the surface of the water like the size of a pinhead. It was so little. And on a really big night, like the entire surface will be just like covered in these little white dots After about like half an hour, the wave action will use them to burst. their little tiny eggs inside will float and the sperm will start to sink. And you know in the next day or so they'll be swimming coral larvae, these little ity bitty jelly beans. and then those larvae will then you swim around and look for some suitable substrate to metamorphose into The first polyp, which will hopefully grow into many of to form the next colony. We didn't get a lot of spawning in June. ussually we see it like June, July, August, Since we didn't see a lot in June, we thought maybe this will be our big month. And So com going out of last night, we decided to like take a quick look on the bay, see what we saw. and there was a pretty big event. That kind of, you know, being a coral biologist, you have to be kind of ready to respond to whatever iss going to happen. So we've kind of changed our plans and we'll go out and know see what we can do. And this is a great time for us because A lot of the questions we have of our early life stages, we can only ask during the summer months. And so right now this is a really exciting way for us to get large genct diversity and to run some of these precondnditioning tests to see, you know Cool them down, if you heat them up What it's that going to do to their settlement or survivorship So you can kind of scoop up and run them in tubs in the lab and see how they respond best? Yeah yeah. The technology that we use, you know for like DNA sequencing is like one end of the spectrum. on the ground in the lab. o is is very like DIY, you know, grab some buckets. We make these big scoops out of like these like plastic shoe boxes where you cut windows and hot glue on mesh. kind of use those to scoop out Bundles have carefully put them into like little containers where they do the fertilization and then Oftentimes we'll even just leave them to sit overnight in buckets and see, you know, and then carefully clean them out the next morning. But a lot of our tools are stuff that we have to kind of just come up with on the fly to to use. They they don't sell coralpawnting supply kets. There's a lot of Home Depot, five gallon buckets. Yeah. lotots of buckets everywhere. An lab. Yeahah, absolutely. Oh my go Cha wrote a blog post last June about corresponding, and in it he describes setting out On the night of the new moon with life jackets and a first aid kit and headlamps, they use red lights so they don't interfere with any lunar cues for the corirreal And they have as many two and a half gallon buckets as will fit on the floor of a small whaler boat And he says in it, ourur tools are not glamorous, but they get the job done. And there are photos of these milky trails of coral bundles popping to release eggs into the water and a glimpse of what field research looks like. So for more of that, I'm going to link the post in the show notes and on my website Now we're about to ask your Patreon questions, but before we do, a few words from sponsors of the show, theseese sponsors make it possible for alllogies to donate to a charity of each oologists choosing. And this week shall pick two. The first one is Ppe Oheii. It's a private nonprofit organization caring for an ancient Hawaiian fish pond located onahu And its vision is to perpetuate a foundation of cultural sustainability and to provide intellectual and physical and spiritual sustenance for their community. This fish pond serves as a place of learning to weave ancestral knowledge together with Western ways of knowing to achieve their goals. And a second donation went to Point Foundation and pointointfoundation dot org is the nation's largest scholarship granting organization for LGBTQ, plus students of merit and Point promotes change through scholarship funding, mentorship, leadership development, and community service training. And links to both those charities and to our sponsors who make that possible will be in the show notes. Okay Some things I'm liking this week This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. If you haven't heard me gushing about Squarespace for years, it's an all in one website platform. Whether you're trying to grow a business you have or if you're just a baby business getting started, it has everything you need. That's where I secured my domain name and helped me build a professional site. I can update it so easily. I've been using Squarespace since before allologies existed. After procrastinating for years, I literally built my website In one evening. 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Elevate how you go Alfresco with quality pieces in every style from design's best brands. Shop in store and online at perigold. com Hi besties, it's Tinks. If you need a little inspo, a little tough love, or just someone to tell you that everything is going to be okay. Cang out with me on my podcast. It's me Tinks. We talk dating, confidence, friendships, healing, leveling up, and all the things we're working on together I share my frameworks, your questions, and yes, plenty of chaotic stories. New episodes drop every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. So whether you're on your hot girl walk, commuting, or hiding from your ex on Instagram, I've got you. Listen to It'se Tanks wherever you get your podcasts So you know that uneasy, anxious feeling you get when you think about dealing with your insurance company? Well, there's actually a term for that. It's called insoranoia. And if that sounds like something you're way too familiar with, you should really think about getting NJM insurance They go to great lengths to do what's best for their policyholders. by providing dedicated reps whose priority is you. And that means you'll find more peace of mind with them Relieve your insur an noia with NjM insurance by visiting njM. com for a quote today Your questions Now, first question we got from Laura Crpinens and a bunch of other folks, including Jessica F. Fritz, Jennifer Alvarez, Caitln Fitzgald, Jenna Martin, Ira Gray, Jessica Zarinsky, Dakota Harriman, Krystal Mendoza Tophher Hennis, Casey Kaiser, Lauren Crupinens, and Jessie E. Scott asked, how harmful is sunscreen to Coral? This is a big question orr what does it do? It's oxybenzenates, certain non chemical some non mineral sunscreens. It's a tough question. It's a It's a tough question. L people have definitely, you know, seen movements in different coastal communities to ban un safe sunscreen, and like this is a field of research that is beginning to grow. It's a new thing that we're seeing. It's like really important to consider theseese kind of like stressors or these daily things that we're doing that may or not be harmful to reefs, right? Considering what sunscreen you use, just like considering any type of chemicals that you're introducing to a natural environment is a really important thing However where you know, a lot of what What we are concerned about is that in the grand scheme of the impacts facing corals, it is a very small drop in the bucket compared to climate change. you know, can be a really That's always a really hard thing. Like we're still like' know, the research is ongoing with how bad these chemicals are and the effects that they have but what we the danger is when That's where we stop. Right? Like, you know, considering your sunscreen choice is a really great point of departure You know, same thing with like plastic straw bands and things like that. For people, you know who might not consider how their daily actions affect coral reefs, to begin to learn more and to like understand like, you know, how are my actions affecting the reefs? What else can I do? and to kind of like figure out what it is that each of us are doing every day, right That affects the planet but If that's the stopping point, that's a really dangerous thing because you know, just changing your sunscreen is not going to slow down our loss of briefs Afterwards, Shale sent me a link to a piece written just a few weeks ago by two coral scientists in Florida, who said that people are being led to believe that there's extensive scientific evidence about the impact of oxybenzone on corals, and it's simply not true So it went on to cite three main factors that are actually killing coral cllimate change biological changes like diseases and invasive species, or's overfishing, and the overfishing depletes the fish that eat the algae that overgrow on corals There's also water quality issues like wastewater and land runoff that dump those pollutants and sediments into the reefs. Sorry, everyone Right. So don't just change from a mineral sunscreen and be like, nailed it. Yeah. Let me so actually okay, I got permission to tell this part of that story. Oh okay. And like an example of that is a colleague of mine recently went into a local classroom to talk about corals and the research we do. and she asked the students like what was the biggest threat facing corals? And everybody said sunscreen. Oh no. And you know that's a really that is like the kind of oh, no moment. And she actually spoke with some of the teachers and they were like, we had no idea. like this is what people have been telling us. This is what we've been telling our students And that's where you know, that that's not that's not good. You know, it's it's it can be a it's a great way to get people to understand that, you know, small actions that we take every day can have really big impacts However You know, in no way is like we have to focus on climate change. This next question was asked by a listener if who started making these beautiful paintings inspired by episodes. so to see them, you can check out the Oolog's Instagram and then follow her too because she is wonderful Maria Hancox wants to know how excited are you that Pantone's cololor of the Year is Coral suuper excited. Anyt timee that Cals can go, make it into social media, get across people's radar. Like why is that? you know do I want to learn more? It's really great because there's a lot of animals in the world that are endangered, right? Corals are, you know, part of Why corals are such a great you know, organism to talk about these kind of things is that They're gorgeous. you know. And so like likeike having having Yoke. companies Celebrate coral, bring attention to coral is always Gly appreciated and really exciting. I didn't know that it was Pantononees color the year. I' excited. Yeah. I remember always excited, you know Also, side note, huge ups to Pantone for naming the color not just coral, but living coral. Alive, non dead, non bleached, thriving magical coral was too long but living coral. Sarah Terry asked what makes them so colorful. Is it that symbiosis? Yeah, so very often like most There's I feel like everything I'm saying and every coral thing like except that this other thing does us something totally different that we didn't expect. Yes in general, like the A lot of the color we're seeing are these symbiotes. However, corals also do produce their own colorful pigments. You can take a black light and shine a black light on corals andough oftentimes you'll see like fluorescence. If you've seen chasing coral, u the v You'll see actually during some of the bleaching events, as the corals are bleaching, they actually will start to like glow in like these blues and purple colors. And there's been a lot of hypotheses on why they're doing that. It could potentially attract new symbiotts. It could be sort of like their own kind of like sunscreening method to protect their own tissues. So we're still learning more about that, but you know, are able, some species are able to also produce their own their own pigments themselves So that was a dock called Chasing Coral. And if you want to see what coral bleaching looks like and just get hyped to mobilize other folks to care. This is a great doc to watch Are there any movies? any fictitious movies that honor or Re fuck with coral that you're like, come on. any movies that you're like? I was actually really impressed with the cororal and finding Nemo. Really Yeah, they did a really good job. Like there's some other like inaccuracies in their biology, but they but I remember like when I first saw it it came out like right when I was graduating college. I was really like, is They did a really nice job with some with the forum. So I was like, that's pretty awesome. Corals't tend to get a lot of spotlight in a lot of mainstream you know films I'm to go on IMDB and find out who the coral consultant was, and chances are you probably know them. Quick aside, so I tracked this down and I think I think it was a very passionate Ichologist who's done research on the Great Barrier Ref now at the University of Washington. and he's credited as Adam Sumers fabulous fish guy in the special thanks of the two thousand three film Finding Mo. And yes, I found him office to ask him, he was out of the office. so I sent him an email. I didn't hear back from him yet. But yes, I do want to be his friend. Brooke, Redinger wants to know does Corl have a smell you can So right now if you go on to Countyay Bay, you can smell their gametes Yeah, after a big spawning event, you can definitely smell them nine. Coral mucus definite I mean, like I feel like the longer you work with anything, the more you an a nose for it. undernderwater, you know, we're not really smelling anything. but like once you're covered in it, you definitely' earthythy st. you know. But that's actually a great question because, you know, a lot of while we might not smell the corals, like a lot of marine organisms use chemical senses to you know interact with their surrounding environments and things like that. So there's a lot of smells in that sense going on in the water. In the oceans the oceans So this next question was also asked by listener Grace. And Allegra Violeta Bennisman wants to know what role does concrete truly play in the health of our coral? And I know nothing about this. Concrete's composition and we'll look this up is It has a lot of the same attributes as like calcium carbonate coral skeletons. It's a really great substate, because it's also kind of porous. So a lot of times you'll see like I think it is in Mexico where they have that underwater sculpture installation made of concrete that you know different corals and sponges and whatnot are all recruiting to. So it can actually act as a pretty good substrate. It's a really great substrate for Artificial reefs. So he's talking about an underwater museum in Cancon, Mexico. It consists of nearly five hundred sunken sculptures and they serve as a base for new coral. Why did they make this? you ask becausecause too many tourists were snorkeling in the natural local reefs and destroying them. so they were like, hmm, hey, hey, look over here. L over here. look at these. Look at these sculptures. and it worked. So people go there now. and coral can grow on it. Ding, perfect. Also, some of the sculptures serve as scathing environmental critiques like the ones of men in tuxedos burying their heads in the sand A burn so sick It's scorched underwater. Zan Libram wants to know, hello. Oh hi. Is the news about the Great Barrier Reeef being declared dead true And if so, is there anything that we can do about it That's a great question. So There was an article that came out, I think, a couple of years ago now that to declare the greatreat barrier we've dead It's not dead. Okay. That's the answer. However. It's not doing so great, right? Like and that's why articles like that can be challenging to the overall conversation because we don't want everyone to say, o good, it's not dead and move on, right? But the Gay Bry Reef it just experienced two horrific Reaching events back to back And you know, a newpaper by Terry Hes' group out in Australia showed that the recruitment of like baby corals to the reef, post those events has significantly declined. And so that's one of those like you know, not only are we dealing with the impacts of dying coral on the reef Who's going to replace them? rightight? And so these like that these are these kind of the smaller impacts that we're looking at. So the Great Barrier Ref, you know, it did experience this massive bleaching event lost like you know, in some regions lost like you know fifty percent or more of the coral on the ground and they're You know, they're trying to come back. different sections of the reef are still healthy. You can still go out and see corals in the Great Berri reef, but if it keeps getting hit, Bye these events like There's not going be enough time for things to recover. J go back to what it words. Educating yourself on the politicians and on the laws and bills that are coming up that would directly impact the reefs here and where we are, like that's where we have the most sway. is a really important thing. like going town halls also, not just voting, but like actually showing up and becoming parts of the conversations that are directly influcing the legislators in your own area can be a really good way to start. And then also if you're going to a place like the Rate barrier, you know essentially voting with your dollar, doing your due diligence to look up operators that are eco friendly, that some of the funding from that might actually go to research refstoration. But looking for making sure that your footprint in those spaces are supporting organizations that are doing it right And our tour operator for Atlas was saying that they don't provide fins because so many times tourists will just absolutely slap a coral reef with the fin. And so yeah thought that was great. I didn't know that. Yeah, definitely. And that's the thing like some corals Their structures are big as any surfer, like they hurt when you you get hit by one Okay side note, I just watched a bunch of videos of surfers bailing on coral. Not only are the coral shirp, Oh the blood. Oh the scars. So there was one video of a Tahitian pro surfer who got a pretty bad scrape up and they show her on the boat afterward and they have to brush the coral bits out of your skin And then for some reason, they have to rub citrus in it and she's like biting a towel cannot imagine the pain. Now other remedies for this reff rash, according to some sururfer message boards that I just totally worked on are hydrogen peroxide alcohol People use iodine. Others say just baby shampoo and scrubbing it with a toothbrush antibacterial ointments work, but you have to treat it right away because you can be left with a staph infection, which would be Helen Narar Not in a good way. Please note, I am neither a surfer nor a doctor, so consult one of the two or both. Also, as for the coral, I don't think they have a strategy for first aid. But they're also super fragile. Some of them that have those really nice like branching shapes You know, you just a tiny cake you can kick over a colony that's been growing for over a hundred years in like one cake.. And so That's, you know That's great. Yeah, it's great. It's a great way to educate people on that. A lot of people think they're rocks. Yeah. So if they're like fing around like,, I'm going gonna go stand on that. and the polyps like they're just thin layers of tissue. so And you can to crush them like face bone Other patrons like Erica, Sarah Pck, and IzM had questions about Shale's favorites. Huffle puff, Hillary wants to know which Ref has been your favorite to dive in Do you have a favorite? Can you pick a favorite All the other reefs are going to be like, really I know. I know what's a favorite? Um Ohm This is really hard Um So I was lucky enough to Dive the blue hole in Belize which is like a big ateto that you can just sink down into like there's all these sharks everywhere. In that dive and the surrounding reef there, I saw way more like if you for someone like me in this environment, if you see like a shark That's really cool. Yeah. likeike one And that's because we don't have as many anymore, right? And sharks are actually a really good sign of like a healthy reef environment. You want to have all the levels of a food chain. And I I' never been in a reef before that environment where there were so many apex predators just living there. So like the coral was beautiful. there was diversity of fish and But then also like I got to see it all together. And so for me, that was just a really exciting moment Oh my gosh. Have you ever been scared of a shark bite or are you like No, notot really.. Like sharks have a really sharks are doing awful. Shark finning is decimating world shhark populations and so much of You know, like we're talking about how do we change these laws? How do we ban shark fitting? How do we like not allow shark fitt to sold commercial senses in our country. It relates to our own emotional reaction to sharks. Are we scared of sharks? The majority vast majority of all sharks species want nothing to do with us U they've got very tiny mouths or can be bottom feeders or they're just not, you know, they're just as scared of us as we are of them. Anytime you go into the ocean. Nature in general, we have to Rpect the environment where you are and respect the organisms there. And so You know, it's always important to know the like what the threats are or it could be, or the dangers there could be anytime you go. So whenever I go diving in any place, I look up like what organisms could I possibly encounter? And if you work with a good operator, you go to areas that are safer, right But I always feel incredibly lucky every time I have the opportunity to see sharks anywhere They're beautiful. They. never, you know, they're doing their own thing. They're swimming over there, not not disturbing me. There are some shark species that might have like a case of mistaken identity. likeike if we're swimming around like a seal at the surface in, you know, white shark territory, they can't come up and like, you know poke you see if your food or not. and the way like their strategy for getting food is they don't have arms, right? So they use their mouths to grab onto things so they'll come up and you know If you think you're a seal, like try to take a bite. But people aren't dying of being you're not being eaten by a shark, right? You know Unfortunately, it has to do with like, you know, succumbing to a wound from that shark bite. U Not scared shharks and you shouldn't be hith there For more on this, see the Celimacamorphology. Cella Saxalacomorphology episode on sharks. Also, I snuck in this teeny tiny question about Ity bitty garbage. Sorry this one's a bummer, but it's good to know How about plastics and corals I was reading a little article when when we were waiting for each other on off sides of a pillar about microplastics being found in corals Yeah, unfortunately, microplastic. so plastic in general is awful for the marine environment, right? You hear these stories about straws getting stuck on turtls' noses or you know animals getting caught in plastic bags or eating plastic bags, thinking that they're jellyfish or other kinds of food. And so those are a big problem. However, what we've learned you know recently is that plastics as they start to actually break down. so they're not necessarily visible to the naked eye. These microplastics are having like a huge impact on these lower trophic levels onli A lot of these, you know, the plankton are eating them plastics, and the larger animals are eating those plastics and There have been ye some studies that are looking at are corals eating these plastics as well. And what does that mean, right You can't, there's no nutritional value If you can't expel those, then all of a sudden there's something inside of your gut that's taking up space where your nutrition could be. And so these are huge, huge problems that are also unfortunately global Mh. anythingything that you've seen research wise in the last few years or any turnarounds that have given you hope You're like, I don't know I think it's very going. Yeah, absolutely. Like I was telling you earlier, when we you know When you see a coral bleaching event and you're like So many of these corals died, there's all those corals that didn't die. There are the corals themselves A There are some winners, there are some survivors, and that's really exciting because without any intervention from us There are organisms, there are individuals that are already able to withstand these. You look at an environment like you know, the Red Sea, which is on average, way warmer than anywhere else and corals are living up to temperatures that can't here. And the difference is that that this happened over geologic time, whereas we are speeding things up. and can these animals keep up for that. But like just the fact that these things exist is very exciting Also in the last like tenen years ago If I had said like Cribbleaching to somebody on the street. they might be like, I have no idea what you're talking about. But there's been a huge push and education and excitement around coral reefs in the last handful of years where people have heard about this. L people know people are trying to really care about it and understand why it's important, why it's important to them. why they want this for their future generations. Cals have really come into national international conversation in a way that they haven't before. And because of that There's a lot more hope for these big overarching changes that we need on the systemic scale to ventually start to happen And I always ask these last two questions, but What's the shittiest thing about your job? What sucks in a way that's either like annoying? Is it moldy wetsuits? Is it early mornings or more infrastructure something like what sucks the thing that sucks most about being a coral biologist is Wing something you love die and not being able to do anything about it. in like And that's something that's, you know, shared by probablyably everyone in our field, like, you know, I love cororals, like biologically speaking, like I'm so fascinated by them. They're such interesting animals by So much of my research is around keeping them around, right? And it's Anytim you dive on a reef that's bleaching or a reef that's been devastated by any kind of impact, especially one that you know you'd seen flourishing before, It's you know, you have an emotional reaction. it's a very devastating feeling and that pressure of It's not just You know if I don't finish my dissertation, then I don't get to graduate, but like so much of this work that we all are working on is going to have an impact right now or not. And are we doing it A asking the right questions? No, and that's Definitely the hardest part for sure. What's your favorite part about your job? or about Clals manan. You do a whole podcast on that My favorite part of My job is I'm gettingmstering it into part, which I know you're supposed to do. No, it's however many parts you want. It it's Lake It's the daily life in the people I work with, for sure, like in the community. When you're working on issues This important, people are really passionate and really excited. And because we're trying to solve something really quickly,