Coral are a fundamental ecosystem in our oceans.
We really need to save them.
They support one quarter of all marine life in the ocean.
My name is Mary Hagedorn and I work on coral conservation and preservation.
We are here in beautiful Curacao to study coral reproduction.
My name is Kristen Marhaver and I study coral spawning
and the methods to help baby coral survive their earliest life stages.
Elkhorn corals are beautiful and they're like living works of art.
They're one of the most important species in the Caribbean
because of the structure and the shape they make.
They protect shorelines from waves, they create habitat for fish to hide underneath
and they're also powerful species because when they do break apart,
they can attachback to the reef and make more colonies.
Around the Caribbean we've lost something like 98% of this coral species
and in Florida it's even worse than that
because we're finding that there aren't very many genetically distinct individuals.
You have these organisms that are glued to the bottom
and yet they're affecting the oceans in some of the most important ways.
Coral first and foremost is an animal.
When it starts out, you have a fertilized egg or embryo
and then goes through development and becomes a swimming larva.
It stays as aswimming larva for about four or five days.
And then it goes through a metamorphosis
where it changes from something that's swimming to something that's settled.
Eventually it forms a polyp, then that forms two polyps
and then it forms a colony.
You have to be really creative in how you think about them
in order to figure out what really matters for them.
We've been applying human reproductive techniques like freezing sperm to coral
and it allows you to preserve those cells for a year or hundreds of years.
We are going to thaw sperm that's been in our banks for over ten years
and use them on fresh Curacao eggs to create embryos that wouldn't occur normally in the wild.
For this particular species of coral, there's a western population, genetically speaking,
and then there's an eastern population, which is here in Curacao.
It's the first time that assisted gene transfer will be used in coral.
We're bringing individuals from Florida and Puerto Rico and Curacao,
which are hundreds of miles apart, together, and we're gonna be able
to fertilize fresh eggs from Curacao with these different sperm samples.
We don't know if these populations of corals will even be able to fertilize themselves.
If it does work, if the corals do fertilize, then we have a whole new tool for coral restoration,
which is the ability to bring different genotypes from one region to another
and that's what the goal is here - to help diversify the population
and to give us cues as to whether those newly made, newly created reproductive organisms
are going to be better at adapting for the future.
This species has bundles of eggs mixed with sperm and it holds them in its mouth
and then we know in the next ten or twenty or thirty minutes
that they're going to release them all at the same time.
The eggs move away and the sperm has to swim and fertilize a nearby neighbors eggs.
And it all happens within 45 minutes,
so it starts and then ends and it's over. it's amazing.
This species does not have a really tight reproductive schedule.
They will spawn either on or sometime after the full moon.
We can narrow down the window when it will spawn too a few days and a couple of months
within about an hour, hour and a half window.
We need to go diving before it happens and make sure we don't miss it,
and if nothing happens we just have to keep diving until
we're sure we covered the whole window.
And if they don't spawn this week we have to dive until night 14
and if they don't spawn that night then we will dive next month
and start it all over again.
Tonight the full moon is going to rise and if the coral are going to spawn
they'll begin spawning right around 9 o'clock.
I thought everything was going to happen all at once, but nothing happened.
Just when you think it's all going to happen, you'll be like
I'm at a baseball stadium, but there's no baseball game.
Night three anything could happen.
Everybody's got their hunches and they're tarot cards out,
but we really don't know if they will spawn tonight or not.
You have this mix of calm and peacefulness that you're underwater,
but also this adrenaline that anything could happen at any minute.
Super pretty. Nothing spawned.
There's more stuff in the water column than I've ever seen before
and none of it was coral eggs.
Every time we go out, I think this is going to be the night.
and then when I see the dive team come in very slowly
my heart just sinks knowing that
we're not going to have any samples to work with that night.
The coral finally spawned!
We have all sorts of nets and contraptions that we use to collect the eggs
once they're released from the colony.
Then we have to get back to shore.
That gets transported into the laboratory.
We will remove the eggs from the sperm.
We will thaw the samples. Hopefully we'll get all excellent sperm samples.
Woah! Okay one of these is a champion. An incredible champion.
Then we'll begin adding sperm.
If it all goes great, you actually get to relax for about an hour, maybe.
as the eggs go from 1 to 2 to 4 cells and start dividing and forming the larvae.
And finally when they start to swim, we feel like okay we got them through the process.
We will put them into water bottles and we'll transport them to Miami
and our partners, Florida Aquarium and Mote Marine Lab will meet us there.
Our coral babies!
And they'll begin the process of settling those larvae.
This is it. Here is all of our coral babies, they're all doing fantastic.
I was super scared when I first got these things
that they were going to be so totally different that they wouldn't work out,
but thankfully I was wrong.
They're extremely healthy, they're growing extremely rapidly.
These look so incredibly beautiful.
There are so many variables that you have to keep in mind
and you have to watch and you have to tinker with,
and it could have been that they would have never even crossed
which would have been the end of the story,
but clearly they did and that's that's exciting.
Any one thing that you don't pay attention to can cause lots of death and so I'm in awe.
We couldn't ask for a better result than what we're seeing right here.
This is the largest wildlife population of cryopreserved animals in the world.
Except for humans of course, and then maybe cows.
But it's very rare that we make these kinds of populations with cryopreserved sperm
and that we have the opportunity to do something that impacts wildlife.
You can take even just a few examples of these polyps and turn them into something that is much larger
You can now more effectively test for resilience, you can simulate ecological challenge
where you put them into high temperatures or ocean acidic waters.
It's really a game-changer for what we can do to test these organisms that we're producing
for more effective restoration in the future.
This is amazing. It really is.
Calling that a win.
Absolutely.
There's a lot of work that went into these little guys.
To get to this place today, it's taken us 15 years.
We really can do this and so I remain very, very hopeful.
Iit's super important that we make really robust banks to conserve the genetics
in as good a state as we can.
This not only can work,
but it can work in the kind of numbers that can be assistance for restoration.