"How to Fall in Love with a Coral!"
Wednesday, Sept 4, 2019
About the Topic
A coral reef is not simply a bunch of fish swimming around rocks. Rather it is a stunning example of a time-honed ecosystem: how millions of species, over millions of years, have evolved together with a rich complexity of behavior, symbioses, communication, and intelligence.
But we all know the bad news about coral reefs: nearly half of the world’s coral reefs have been destroyed already, and we are likely to lose almost all of them by the time we break our fossil fuel habit (that’s in only 20-30 years). For this Cafe Scientifique, however, I don’t want to discuss about how bad it will be. Rather, let’s talk about how much better it can be. We can make a big difference with a plan to save enough reefs to reseed a future ecosystem. That will require a lot of coordination, work, money, and checking of egos. And it will require shifting the human reputation as being bad for coral reefs, to one where we are good for coral reefs. My small team in Costa Rica is restoring coral reefs with nursery-grown corals, but the most satisfying – and probably most effective – part of our work is how it restores the human fascination with nature. I love coral reefs, but I am biased by more than 30 years of working on them!
Bio
Joanie Kleypas is a marine ecologist/geologist that focuses on how coral reefs and other marine ecosystems are affected by changes in the Earth’s atmosphere and climate. Global warming, for example, is causing tropical ocean temperatures to increase faster than corals can adapt, resulting in high rates of coral bleaching. This is one of the major causes of the present, rapid degradation of coral reef ecosystems. Ocean acidification is another major threat to coral reefs, because as the oceans absorb much of the CO2 released to the atmosphere by fossil fuel burning and deforestation, seawater pH declines and reduces the ability of corals and many other organisms to build their skeletons and shells.
Joanie strives to conduct research that guides efforts to conserve coral reefs and other marine ecoystems during the high-CO2 window that is inevitable over the next few decades. She is currently using high-resolution modeling to address these issues in the Coral Triangle, a region of extreme marine biodiversity in the western tropical Pacific.
PhD: Tropical Marine Studies, James Cook University, Townsville, Australia, 1991