Rebuilding the reef one year on

Rebuilding the reef 

Alex: [00:00:02] Hi, everyone, and welcome to Science in Focus, a free public lecture series showcasing the latest research from prominent UTS scientists and researchers. My name is Dr. Alex Thompson. I'm an industry engagement manager here at UTS in the Climate Change Cluster Research Institute, and I myself am actually a marine ecologist. I'll be the moderator for today's event, collating all the questions and asking our speaker these questions at the end of the talk. So coral reefs are synonymous with the Australian marine environment and a source of inspiration to many. They are diverse ecosystems, bursting with life, bringing enormous value to communities and the broader environment through the ecosystem services they provide. And I've heard many marine scientists refer to them as real life magic. In the past decades, we've seen a monumental shift in the impact to global coral reefs through climate change and other impacts. But there are a group of scientists here at UTS who are working to investigate and implement innovative techniques to restore and rehabilitate reefs both in Australia and across the world. Our speaker today is one of those researchers involved in global coral reef restoration, and this talk today builds on a Science in Focus from 2021. And today we'll hear about the updates to the research efforts on the Great Barrier Reef. Before I introduce our speaker for today, I'd like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, whose ancestral lands our city campus now stands and extend that acknowledgement to all the lands that our audience is joining from today. I'd also like to pay respect to the elders, both past, present and emerging, acknowledging them as the traditional custodians of knowledge for this land.

Alex: [00:01:35] So Professor Dave Suggett, who will be speaking today, is a marine ecologist and leader of the Future Reefs Program within the University of Technology Sydney's climate change cluster. His research over the last 20 years has been to understand how changing environments affect coral growth and survival through development of novel techniques to unlock coral functional biology from genes all the way up to ecosystems. Dave’s work has examined reefs across the world, but has intensively focused on the Australian Great Barrier Reef for the last eight years to understand the limits for coral survival under climate change. This led to founding and leading a world first partnership between tourism research, a program called the Coral Nurture Program to implement new tourism-led coral propagation reef maintenance and rehabilitation approaches. He chairs the International Coral Reef Restoration Consortium, field based Coral Propagation Working Group and is currently the Vice president of the Australian Coral Reef Society. So Dave, I'd like to introduce you today.

Dave: [00:02:34] Hello there.

Alex: [00:02:35] Hi, Dave. I'm going to let you share your slides.

Dave: [00:02:38] Okay. Thank you very much, Alex. So thanks again, everyone, for joining today. And a huge thanks to Alex for the really generous introduction to what we'll be covering today. As Alex said, I lead a program here. I also lead the Coral Nurture Program, which is what we're going to be presenting. And I really want to acknowledge the other co-founders of the program. I see this presentation as really a sort of shared vision that we all have. I particularly also want to pay my deepest respects and acknowledge the traditional elders, past, present and emerging beyond Alex's acknowledgment to all of those custodians, the traditional custodians of knowledge of all the land and sea countries that were really fortunate to operate. And this is a Great Barrier Reef wide program now. And so we have a very heavy footprint throughout many, many countries. We also partner with a huge range of tourism partners, as you'll see, as we unpack this a little bit further, and I've put some of the key names of those involved significantly in the program, either through our core management research, but also operational practice. Without all of these individuals, we really wouldn't have built the scale and the impact that we've been really fortunate to achieve. And of course, all of our funders that similarly have been very generous, enabling us to reach some really ambitious goals over the past few years.

Dave: [00:04:00] But what I'm going to talk about is really where we're at one year on, and I'm hoping many of you joined us 12 months ago to really hear the state of play with which the Coral Nurture Program was evolving as a really significant development in terms of a new stewardship model for the Great Barrier Reef that revolves around propagating and replanting coral to augment natural recovery. It is a historical turning point for reef management, not just in Australia but worldwide. Historically, we've rested on very much passive protection measures, but also acts of mitigation to reduce our stress impacts, certainly not aggressively enough in the case of climate change. And we now realise that of course, that those measures are simply not enough. There's now 1 billion people estimated on planet Earth relying on healthy reefs for survivorship or economies, and quite simply, those stakeholders do not have time for us to reach the really clear goals that we need in terms of mitigating climate change. So we need new solutions in the short term to ensure we have reefs to save. And that is really the goal of a lot of these new active intervention measures that are in play.

Dave: [00:05:12] Australia is pretty new to this and when we look back, probably only five years ago was when we started having the first conversations about should we introduce new management, active management approaches that revolve around more aggressive interventions and fast forwarding to now, this is an array of some of the examples that we have in play and the middle top and the top right images are really from the Coral Nurure Program. But through our work at UTS, within the Future Reefs Program, we've also integrated into a wide range of other types of intervention through research and development, spanning in the top left reef stabilisation and the bottom right, looking to augment sexual reproduction of corals and how they can better survive on reefs. But really our story starts with the main stakeholders of the Great Barrier Reef, the tourism industry. So when we think about the Great Barrier Reef in terms of its economic value and of course there's many values we can consider, whether it's biodiversity or traditional knowledge, it's really the tourism value that carries the dollar value that is quite often talked about through the media in terms of the reef value. And there's maps available demonstrating where the visitation rates are and consequently where the heaviest footprints are. And this is important for lots of reasons. It tells us where the economy is concentrated. But what happened in 2016, 2017, when we had the very first catastrophic impacts through mass coral bleaching throughout the Great Barrier Reef, and we've had many since, many of these stakeholders, the livelihoods were really threatened overnight. And the reason is quite simple. Many of the tourism operators on the Great Barrier Reef have fixed moorings, which means there's of course real importance to preserve, retain and rebuild the sites where those moorings are at. They're very high value sites. They represent only 7% of all sites of all reefs on the Great Barrier Reef. And where we came into this was through a series of conversations with the tourism industry, was recognising a real hunger for the industry to be equipped with more active measures to aid, restoring or rebuilding or regenerating some of the site health post the mass bleaching event. Waiting for natural recovery alone was simply not sufficient. In the past, these tourism operators have had capacity to intervene through removal of aggressive predators such as crown of thorns starfish and of course, highly motivated to conduct green tourism through sustainable measures as best they can. But having the means to actively contribute to regeneration of degraded areas was seen as a real motivational factor moving forward, not only to retain livelihoods and retain the quality of the sites, but really to help contribute to fast recovery rates that were needed in the face of potentially repeat bleaching events. So we developed a new program in partnership with the tourism industry. Really, and a simple model. The model is the operators themselves conduct propagation and planting activities at scale as a network at those sites, and us as UTS researchers, we are here to provide the science to validate and provide credibility to those activities.

Dave: [00:08:40] So in other words, if the operators are able to claim that they've planted 1000 corals, we can assess how effective that's been and subsequently what is the return on investment. And actually, are those efforts indeed feasible and worth it? That's a really important part that we play. And in order to undertake this as a network, we developed collectively a code of operation. This was incredibly important in terms of retaining trust across the partnerships. This is just a small snapshot of some of the key features of our code of operation, but it really was about focusing on being in line with the World Heritage values, of course, contributing to retaining the tourism industry and the tourism economy and ensuring some social resilience, but really ensuring that this was credible, meaningful and worthwhile.

Dave: [00:09:32] So we presented a lot of this last year in terms of the nuts and bolts of the program. So I'm not going to take the time to do too much of that now. But fair to say, we use a lot of really sophisticated but low tech solutions to be able to do this at scale. We're one of few programs worldwide, and I'll talk about that a little later on that has actually started to really have gains at scales that weren't really considered feasible if you just rewind a few years ago. And these statistics here are taken directly from our Coral Nurture Program website and really convey the footprint we currently operate at.

Dave: [00:10:05] And I won't read these out. You can obviously see these for yourselves, but importantly, the stats and the numbers should hopefully speak for themselves. They are in the tens of thousands in terms of the scale of replanting. Huge number of staff and volunteer hours contribute to this and we're increasing the diversity of corals that are propagate and replanted all the time as we learn more in terms of how to do things better and more effectively and certainly contributing to much more rigorous and accurate ecological values. And if we look at this sort of development over time, and I've shown here the previous, where we were at 12 months ago is in blue, and I'm not going to repeat some of that now, but you can see that we've been through various phases as a program, as we've learnt how to do things and we've developed networks and we've built scale. The area on the red on the right hand side is really where we've been in the last 12 months. We've continued planting at pretty much the same sort of volume as we have throughout other phases. But the important point here is that although we use our plant number as a measure of our activity, it isn't a measure of our success. And those are two important things to distinguish with restoration programs. And I'm going to unpack a little bit more what I mean by that. Those numbers are impressive nonetheless, but I want you to be able to look beyond those numbers.

Dave: [00:11:30] When we really think about the reef, we actually have quite a hard time demonstrating the impact we've had. And the reason for that is the sorts of tools and technologies that have been developed with our planting approaches were deliberately designed to be non-invasive and retain the aesthetics of the sites. These are tourism sites and the important thing is that we didn't want it to look like a construction site. And so what you can see here are various examples of reefs that have been repopulated through the coral propagation. This is probably all about 1 to 2 years old, everything that you're seeing here. And when you take visitors to the reef and I was fortunate enough to do this just earlier this week, it's actually really hard demonstrating what impact you've had in terms of the actual replanting and regeneration process other than asking the visitors to cast their minds back maybe a year ago and imagine, all of this was bare reef. So the visual impact alone is incredibly important. But that's again, just one measure of our success, if you like, in terms of how we operate. What's been critical for us in the last 12 months and part of the reason why our planting numbers have been steady but not necessarily spectacular compared to some of the other phases is we've really been thinking about how do we advance what we do in terms of the effectiveness and scale. That's always a key consideration for us in terms of feasibility and effectiveness and operating as a network. And 12 months ago, this is where we were at. We were operating in the Cairns Port Douglas region. The little markers in yellow are our key sites. The little markers in blue are ones we're looking to expand into through the same operations. But in August this year, we actually launched our activity into the Whitsundays as well. That's the second major reef tourism hub for the Great Barrier Reef. The Whitsundays has a lot of different challenges compared to the Cairns Port Douglas in the far north. The Whitsundays was devastated by the series of cyclones, but most recently Cyclone Debbie in 2017. And that really created a very flat reef and a highly turbid reef with lots of sediment reef suspension and this has caused real challenges for us in thinking how do we apply our model to this new area?

Dave: [00:13:47] So as I said, we launched the program this year and the key questions were rather than can we just expand the network and plant lots of coral, it was really thinking, how do we take our approach, our workflows and our technologies and tailor them to even more challenging initial reef environments that have been hit by unprecedented impacts? And these are just some of the pictures, as you can see on the screen here. It's a beautiful place to work. We've really changed, for example, from floating nurseries to table nurseries. We actually now have changed planting coral from laying them flat on the reef to really standing them upright. Now, all of these workflows take a little bit longer than usual. So arguably our return on investment or effectiveness is perhaps a little bit cost effectiveness is perhaps a little bit lower. But the important thing with this project, it's about learning how to do things effectively. And so we're looking here at quality over quantity without question.

Dave: [00:14:48] The other part of advancing our network over the past 12 months or so has been thinking about the global footprint that we have somewhat unexpectedly materialised and the little device that we use, the cheap, low cost device that's used to reattach coral non-invasively has now been distributed to 19 countries worldwide, largely through trials. And this has made us realise that we've had a huge footprint in terms of exporting this Australian-led technology all around the world where there's huge interest amongst stakeholders to similarly adopt these these sorts of workflows and technologies. The other major win for us in terms of advancing our network and this again is through the Coral Clip technology has been integration into the Reef Joint Field Management Program. This is a program that's run through the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, and it really is, if you can imagine, a sort of taskforce that's aimed as a first responder to the reef. So if there's a ship grounding or a storm, the field management program will come in and try and actively manage that site in real time and ensure that the right actions are taken. And Coral Clip has now been integrated into that program officially and we're currently developing how that will look into the future. So, the sorts of practices that started through a stakeholder-led vision in partnership with us here at UTS and the research has now had both a national and a global footprint that's been extremely exciting in seeing how some of these concepts have really captured the attention of others.

Dave: [00:16:23] One of the most exciting steps for us this year was attending the International Coral Restoration Conference. There's only been one held before and this was the Reef Restoration Conference was held in Key Largo. We actually had to deal with Hurricane Ian halfway through, which was a challenge in itself. But one of the exciting features of this event was the Coral Nurture Program had the opportunity to actively exchange ideas with the three other largest restoration programs in the world. So between the four of us, it was quite a unique opportunity to start testing how all our different methods into compare and where they might be best suited in different circumstances. It was a really unique event and one that has actually built long lasting relationships that we're looking to build into the future. The bottom right hand side is just an example of the sort of propagation that is undertaken in the Florida area, throughout the Caribbean, actually using these sorts of coral trees. And it's actually quite amazing when you dive through these coral trees, they are really like plantations. They're in their hundreds, some of these coral trees and they retain tens of thousands of coral at once. And it was really exciting to see the sort of scale that the the US partners were having to deal with. They have different sets of challenges, again, fewer species, but actually much more challenging environments than some of ours, believe it or not.

Dave: [00:17:52] And within that framework of building our practice on the reef and expanding our activity has of course been the role of our research. As I said, the Coral Nurture program itself is a unique partnership between tourism and research. That works synergistically. It actually acts as a positive feedback loop so that the more we learn in terms of how to do things bigger and better, the more the tourism operators are able to plant. And of course, the more information we get to be able to refine our research questions to do things bigger and better. So because of that, we've been advancing our science portfolio and it now really spans a huge range of activities and those are all listed here spanning everything from coral attachment biology all the way through to the socio economic impacts. And one of the things I'd like to do for the next few minutes is just share some examples of that science that we've really championed over the past 12 months and how it feeds through to inform our better practice.

Dave: [00:18:52] So the first example is, as you can see here, this is work championed by one of our PhD students, Isabelle. And what we've known for the last few years now is that our corals grow in our nurseries almost ten times faster than they do on the reef. And there's lots of reasons why that is, and I'm not going to go into those now. One of our concerns was just producing coral faster, make them of less quality? And what I mean by that is do they carry less resources for the things that would feed on them on the reef? And also, as they calcify and form a skeleton, that skeleton is critical to dissipate wave action and the role of reefs in coastal protection. But if we're growing corals faster and they're weaker, then they actually could have really low value in replanting them on the reef. So we were very concerned with these particular questions. So Isabelle conducted a 12 month study and really looked at lots and lots of fitness metrics of all of the corals on the nurseries compared to the reef. And what Isabelle was able to demonstrate was that the faster growing corals actually were as robust and as high quality as those on the reef. And in fact, in terms of some of the quality of material as a food source, arguably they were better. So this has been very exciting development showing that we can grow corals faster and that they're the same quality as corals that we grow on the reef.

Dave: [00:20:19] The second example has been really thinking about corals microbiomes. And this was another factor really that we were concerned with, I guess, where we were growing corals in nurseries. We have 120 nurseries now and really we're propagating corals at near agricultural scales. And of course, one of the big things you have to worry about in agriculture is pests and disease. Once you start thinking about monocultures especially, and many of our nurseries have restricted numbers of species on them. So one of the key questions that one of our other PhD students, Paige Strudwick, asked was do the microbiomes, the bacterial communities within our nursery corals, start to show signs of perhaps less desirable bacterial communities? And similarly, when we put them back on the reef, are we propagating some of those bacterial communities? And what Paige demonstrated was actually in the nurseries, the slightly different environments that the nurseries are in compared to the reef, actually nurture a very specific type of bacteria in some coral species community, I should say. And when we replant those corals back on the reef, they actually revert back very quickly to having the same bacterial communities on the reef. So actually what we've demonstrated is the microbiomes are very plastic and we believe that that plasticity is important in similarly aiding really, really healthy nursery growth and similar to the points we made in the previous slide.

Dave: [00:21:50] Some of the more ecological work that we've been involved with, and this is literally being published today, is one of our other PhD student, Christine Roper, was working on some very cool work demonstrating how planting small fragments tips the size frequency distribution of our populations. Now what I mean by that is when you look at a reef, there's always a certain number of small corals and a certain number of large corals, and that's really critical to the ecological balance of the reef in terms of how biomass and diversity is retained. One of the concerns we had through mass bleaching was that, of course once you die, once the large corals and adult corals die, they can't sexually reproduce. So what we call recruitment onto the reef has stalled. And that's a real worry because it means it's very hard to regain your large corals quickly. And that's why we use our asexual propagation practices with small fragments to overcome that bottleneck. And this is really what Christine's paper was able to demonstrate, that by planting lots of small fragments quickly, we can overcome this recruitment bottleneck and fast track recovery back to a reproductively viable population. The figure on the left hand side is actually some of the very first corals we planted as just single little fragments in 2019. They reproduce, they sexually reproduced for the first time last year, and that was that was a world first for us in demonstrating that the material we're repopulating back onto the reef is growing to the point at which it can self recover. And that's absolutely fantastic news. And again, earlier this week we checked these same colonies and they're ready to spawn again next week. So we're very excited to see a second generation of new recruits come through.

Dave: [00:23:38] And with that, that's everything I have to present to you today. I think I'm bang on my time, at least I hope I am. And at this point in time, I'd really like to welcome any questions. I hope it's stimulated lots of thoughts and lots of ideas going forward. And thank you once again for joining me on this very brief journey that we've had over the past 12 months. So thank you.

Alex: [00:23:58] Thank you, Dave. That was a fantastic presentation. So we had quite a few questions come through the Q&A. So I will try and get through as many as I can in the time that we've got. We've got quite a bit of time. I'm just going to pop these up. We've got a few, so I've got a couple of ones that have been uploaded, so I might start with those first, if that's okay.

Dave: [00:24:20] Course.

Alex: [00:24:22] So we've got a question here. What proportion of the Great Barrier Reef has been replanted with new coral?

Dave: [00:24:28] It's a great question, isn't it? Well, the proportion of the reef, it's sort of hard to say. It's a very small proportion. Part of the reason for that as well is that this is not a commercial activity at the moment. It is a research activity. We're still learning how can we do this effectively. That's the critical thing to realise. So with that in mind, the Coral Nurture Program focuses on 30 sites. And remember, tourism sites themselves only reflect 7% of all Great Barrier Reef sites. So it's an extremely small proportion and a small amount. But the goal is again is this is never intended to be deployed across the whole Great Barrier Reef. It's designed to be effective at strategic sites that have disproportionately high value. Now I've mentioned here tourism value, but when we think about high value sites, it may also be, for example, reefs that are positioned oceanographically to supply other reefs with larvae. So there's also sort of ecological values we can be strategic with. So at the moment, reef restoration itself is not conducted at many sites, but where it is conducted it is proven to be extremely effective to augment natural recovery.

Alex: [00:25:38] Fantastic. Thank you. So I might just flick now to some of the questions that were submitted ahead of time, just so I can get a bit of a mix. So we had a question that was submitted ahead. What does the future of coral research look like to you?

Dave: [00:25:54] That's a really interesting question. So, I think it's... Research in general recently has really reflected the shifting needle of management. I would say. So, although an example would be within future reason, within coronation programme, much of our research now is very much applied, so it's led by questions directly needing answers from our stakeholder partners within the Coral Nurture Program. However, that doesn't change any of the science we do. In fact, we still do exactly the same science. It's just that how we ask the questions has changed, has a much more applied sense, and I suspect that that is the future for research in general for coral reefs. Many researchers are still doing their core research, but it's embedded within these much more applied programs and importantly programs that are co-designed with the stakeholders. I think that's the other thing to remember is although as scientists we have what we believe are very good ideas, they're not always the ideas that are needed on the ground right now. Sometimes we're ahead of our time. So I think those sort of co-design research with stakeholders and the applied nature with which we conduct research is obviously becoming more common. Certainly funding landscapes are looking towards those sort of co-designed and stakeholder led applications as well. So the future of research is, I would say, evolving. But to be honest, we're not really doing anything we've ever not done before. And if anything, we're seeing that we're seeing the direct applications. It's extremely exciting and empowering as a scientist to see the impact in real time or near real time of the sort of science you're able to conduct. And I think that's true of many of our students in our group, for example, who have joined partly because, again, through even a PhD program, you can see the impact you're having almost immediately. It's extremely rewarding.

Alex: [00:28:04] All right. We have another question submitted. They want to know how does the Coral Clip actually work?

Dave: [00:28:12] I realised I glossed over this. It's a great question because we sort of described it last year a little bit. And I didn't have time to talk about it. But it's a small spring clip. And the way it works, I have a video, but I'm not going to dig it out now, unfortunately. But you simply hold the clip on one end. You hammer in... It's amazing how many people you learn don't know how to use a hammer, by the way, when you teach how to play with the Coral Clip. You hammer in the nail into the substrate and then you simply use the spring clip to wedge your coral fragment underneath it. And the reason that's important, the reason we designed that, is because the other way you can reattach corals onto a reef is using chemicals, glues and cements. And there's two problems with that. The first with chemicals is that you don't want to be pumping lots of chemicals on a reef. The second is within the tourism industry, there were some really hard health and safety walls of having chemicals on a boat with tourists. Much of our Coral Nurture Program activities integrate into the daily tourism operations. It's one of the reasons we're so cost effective. So we needed a sort of a non chemical based solution. So John Edmondson actually invented the Coral Clip. We're on, I think version six now. It's gone through various iterations. It costs about ten cents. So again, it's extremely accessible and it's why we've sent so many to our overseas partners are largely low to middle economy countries that are looking for low cost solutions. So the coral clip has been useful. Now, the question we always get in relation to that is what does the Coral clip sort of have a lasting impact as a foreign object on the reef? And the answer we like to say is, is no. It is a metal, so it corrodes over time. In fact, if you if you find an old coral clip with, say, for example, the corals died or fallen out, which occasionally happens, you can feel that the thin arm of the coral clip has become extremely brittle. So it naturally corrodes over time or is overgrown and engulfed by the coral. The little metal nail has a longer lasting legacy because it's embedded within the reef and it's slightly less biological and sort of the chemistry is different within the reef substrate. So that's why we're able to use the metal detector to find the nails and not the clips. What we've learnt recently, and it's a hypothesis we're working on related to this, is that certain metals we believe may actually aid coral survival. And so there's a prevailing hypothesis certain metals are needed for not just corals, but other organisms to build stress tolerance molecules within their metabolic machinery. And one of the questions we're testing now is whether the the additional metal that's provided through Coral Clip might actually be a benefit in providing some additional stress tolerance. So it's 'watch this space' time. It's part of our sort of wider research portfolio as well.

Alex: [00:31:16] Great. Thank you. It's got another question. How do you encourage or can you indeed encourage artificial spawning or foster coral growth?

Dave: [00:31:26] Really a good way to start with that. I'll try not to make this too long an answer because it can probably be a very long answer, but some I'll start off with the first part. So can you encourage corals to spawn? Some very cool research has now actually developed into a spin off company in the UK, and what these researchers were able to do was by fine tuning over an annual cycle the lighting, you can actually shift the timing of spawning. So they've had, for example, Great Barrier Reef corals in London and got them to spawn at different times of year. And so now what this company is able to do is say have 12 tanks. Each tank is set up to spawn in a different month. And so theoretically you can produce larvae, you can get corals to sexually reproduce year round. So it's a really, really exciting development thinking about how do we better promote the sexual reproduction phase for restoration activities. So there's a lot of work in that space all around the world, but primarily there's some, for example, with aims, there's some in other countries where they're now trialling these systems to promote more reproduction over time. Obviously you can't really get the same coral to spawn multiple times throughout the year because it is an energetic cost to the coral. So obviously it's a stress. So one thing you're very mindful of is that although you want multiple spawns, you don't want more from the same coral, hence multiple times.

Dave: [00:32:57] The other thing that was asked was can you encourage coral to grow faster? On the reef, that's a really challenging question because the coral is subjected to a series of predators. There's lots and lots of grazers around. However, what we discovered in the nurseries, I mentioned that we were able to grow them ten times faster on the reef. That's primarily because the little corallivores are not brave enough to venture out from the reef on to our nurseries. The second is that the higher flow rates that the coral nurseries sit in just adjacent to the reef seem to provide the corals with more opportunity to feed. So we we often see, in fact this is very common, that the coral polyps are extended on the coral nurseries during the daytime. That's really unusual on the reef because of course coral predators are looking to snip off and eat those little polyps that are extended. Of course, again, on the nursery, those predators are not there or are not there as high abundance. So the corals are able to actively feed during the day. There's other factors, sort of physical factors that also age that faster growth on the nurseries. But as I said, by being able to use nurseries not only to rebuild biomass quickly, but do so, generating material quality has been a real game changer for us, and especially for the operator partners who are now replanting at such scales that the access to material actually starts to become the bottleneck very quickly.

Alex: [00:34:28] Great. Thanks, Dave. We have quite a few questions coming in about some of the different environmental and anthropogenic impacts that are, I guess, affecting corals. So people wanting to know things about are microplastics or microscopic plastics damaging to corals? Is temperature the biggest thing that's likely to impact corals? And what are the types of things that can be done to help mitigate some of those really big environmental and other stresses?

Dave: [00:34:59] Yeah, that's a big subject. That's a great question, really. The, you know, the biggest factor we have to deal with, of course, is climate emission, climate gas emissions. Ocean, I should say global warming for, using the generic term, is really, really problematic for reefs. Many of you will know all about this, but the process of having more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or more methane or other gases is threefold for coral reefs. The first is a process called ocean warming. The second is a process called ocean acidification. The last is a process called ocean deoxygenation. So all of those act together. And in fact, ocean warming itself is perhaps the biggest of the three because it does two things. The first is it really is the key driver of why we're seeing coral mortality at scale through mass bleaching and anomalously warm conditions. And as an example, this year we had the first bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef during a La Nina year where it's supposed to be cooler than average, but yet the waters were still anomalously warm. The other thing ocean warming does is that it also amplifies ocean deoxygenation. As you can imagine, warmer oceans are able to hold less gas. Oxygen is a critical gas for survival, as you might imagine, for any organism, any aerobic organism. It's why oxygen therapy is used in medicine, for example, to aid recovery post-surgeries. So ocean warming itself amplifies all these other stressors. So it is our biggest concern and being able to mitigate that is our absolute priority if we are to have reefs into the future.

Dave: [00:36:46] The other thing, of course, is all stressors that act synergistically or interactively. And so whether it's local pollution, spanning microplastics or herbicides, pesticides, oil, coal, runoff, you name it, all of those have an impact. Probably one of the and I'm not going to say too much about this, but one of the perhaps most controversial out there is sunscreen. There's a lot of lobbying to, for example, produce reef-friendly sunscreens, which is great. Any less chemical on the reef is important, but the scientific evidence for sunscreens' impact on corals is still, the jury is still very much out. In fact, there's very little evidence at play at the moment. And that's something to be extremely mindful of when you're making your choices to visit the reef. We always use reef friendly sunscreen because we feel it's the right thing to do to have less chemicals. But also you need to do your homework in terms of the real effect it's having. The other question really pointed to microplastics, and there's growing evidence demonstrating that corals and other organisms actually bioaccumulate microplastics into both tissues and skeletons. The cost this has on corals is still a little bit unknown. But the way I look at this and I think other researchers are probably really pursuing this much more actively than I am. And Jen Mathews actually here at UTS has done quite a bit of work on plastics and microplastics, has again, any sort of foreign body or stressor comes with an added energetic cost for coral and any energetic cost comes with the penalty of being able to not resist other stressors that it has to deal with.

Dave: [00:38:30] So the more we can mitigate anything, the better. And I know we focus on climate change mitigation as the key stressor because we should. We have to. We also need to be mindful that any other stressor amplifies on the reef. So any action we take is absolutely critical, whether it is reduce straws or reduce plastics, use reef friendly sunscreen, restore reefs. All of it has a role to play in ensuring we're minimising our stress impacts. And of course that is more evident than ever as we have such a large footprint on the reef. What was really mind blowing this year was the paper that was produced that demonstrated we now have a billion dependent humans on earth relying on healthy reefs for their survival. We used to use the statistic half a million for the last ten years. A new census demonstrated that was vastly underestimated. So pretty much. One in seven people on the planet rely on a healthy reef to survive. And at the moment we need to do everything we can to ensure we have reefs into the future for that survival. And in many cases, many communities do not have time for us to solve climate change at the rate that our politicians and governance is able to commit to.

Alex: [00:39:52] I'm conscious of time and there's quite a few questions coming through, so we might do a bit of a quick-fire round.

Dave: [00:39:58] I like it. Okay, I'll keep it short and sweet.

Alex: [00:40:01] Okay, so there's lots of correlated questions. So really quickly, how many types of coral are there?

Dave: [00:40:09] Upwards of 650 for the Great Barrier Reef. Used to be 650 species, but new molecular tools demonstrate that that's probably underestimated by a factor of one or two.

Alex: [00:40:20] And who knows what mutants are out there?

Dave: [00:40:22] Who knows what mutants are out there? So it's cool. New science that we have going on in our group is finding new species.

Alex: [00:40:30] Awesome. What is your favourite type of coral?

Dave: [00:40:33] One that is alive!

Alex: [00:40:35] Lots of people wanting to know how to get involved. So if there was one thing that people could do walking away today to help the reef and reef restoration, what would it be?

Dave: [00:40:44] Please visit the reef. I think the critical thing is go and see how fantastic the reef is and by going to see the reef with the operator partners within the Coral Nurture program, of course you are contributing to how they can better steward the reef site. So that's of course one option. The other option is do everything you can to lower your emissions, lower your stress footprints onto the reef.

Alex: [00:41:06] If someone wanted to study the reef, get involved from a studying or job perspective, what would you recommend that they do?

Dave: [00:41:13] I would recommend get involved in being a part of current reef activities any way you can, whether that's through volunteering for reef-relevant activities or getting some work experience within some of the reef industries. Pretty much reef science spans everything from biological engineering to social science. So whatever science you decide to do, there's a role for it within improving the health of our reefs.

Alex: [00:41:35] Great. If people wanted to get involved and volunteer, is there something else they could do as well?

Dave: [00:41:42] Unfortunately, at the moment we're in a bit of a ... Sorry, this is where I get a bit of a long answer. The answer is it's difficult to actively volunteer within the Coral Nurture Program at the moment because it's set up as a research permit. But we are working with the authorities to transition it into a different type of permit where volunteers can can contribute.

Alex: [00:42:01] So watch this space, but in the meantime, go and visit the reef and see as much as you can.

Dave: [00:42:05] Absolutely. Absolutely. Please, please be involved.

Alex: [00:42:06] We have two more questions that came through. I'll end on that one as the last one. So we've got opportunities for people, things they can do. I should just end with this last question because I think it's a great one to finish with. So there was a science teacher that submitted a question that they're very hopeful for the impact that the next generation of students, young people, next generation scientists can have on coral reefs. What is the thing that you are most optimistic about for the future?

Dave: [00:42:42] I'm definitely most optimistic in that everyone I'm seeing coming through of a certain generation really wants to be more actively involved. I think in the past we believe that solving the problems of our reef were lobbying for climate change, which itself is an active process, but being actually able to get involved and actively contribute to reef recovery and management is really, really important part of it. And I'm optimistic because we're seeing that these are having a real effect. It's not something that we are just throwing around as a bandaid or an option. It really is something that has both an ecological impact but also a social impact as well.

Alex: [00:43:24] Fantastic. So in any way, shape or form that people can get involved, it really does have an impact.

Dave: [00:43:29] It really does. You should be optimistic that if you do something, it is helping.

Alex: [00:43:35] Amazing. That's, I think, a perfect note to end on, Dave. So thank you so much for the lively and informative panel discussion today. Thank you to everyone who attended and submitted questions. One last thing, Dave. If people want to visit and know updates about the research from Coral Nurture or from yourself, where can they find you? Where can they find that information?

Dave: [00:43:52] Yeah, the best place, we update the website monthly, so please go to the Coral Nurture Program website if it's something you specifically want to see about Coral Nurture Program activity, but otherwise don't hesitate to follow us on Twitter. Email us if you have specific questions about either this program or the wider research within Future Reefs.

Alex: [00:44:10] Fantastic. We'll send a copy of today's talk along with this Q&A to everyone who registered and it will be on our website very soon. Thank you again for all attending. We hope you are leaving inspired and feel like you can make a big impact on the coral reef. Thanks, Dave.

Dave: [00:44:24] Thanks, Alex, and thanks everyone for coming on today.