For two decades, Theresa Fyffe was a medical researcher. Now, she’s focused on a different kind of medicine: Coral triage.
Fyffe is the executive director of the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, an organization that connects and funds on-the-ground work to restore the world’s largest coral reef.
She likens the coral reef crisis to the medical world where she started her career.
“Many cancers don’t have a cure, but a cancer diagnosis is no longer a death sentence, due to the expanding toolkit of treatments. This is how we must think of coral reefs,” Fyffe said in a recent TED Talk.
“Yes, we need a cure; the solutions to climate change itself. But right now, corals also need treatments to buy them time.”
Half of the world’s coral reefs have already been lost to climate change, and Fyffe said that by 2050, 90% of corals could be gone.
“We could witness their extinction in our lifetime,” she said. “Coral reefs are the absolute lifeblood of a thriving ocean. They are too big and too important to fail.”
Home to more than a quarter of all marine life, coral reefs are also food, livelihoods, and coastal protection for more than a billion people worldwide. Their biggest threat is a warming ocean.
Coral polyps, the tiny organisms that build reefs, are incredibly sensitive to higher temperatures. When stressed by heat, they expel the algae that nourishes them, which in turn exposes their skeletons and turns them white. This is called coral bleaching.
But, Fyffe said: “A bleached coral isn’t dead, but it is sick and starving. If temperatures stay too high for too long, it dies.”
The good news is that scientists have discovered a number of heat-tolerant corals, which makes it entirely possible to breed more of them.
And reef restoration work has been around since the 1970s, mainly through coral gardening, where scientists take small pieces of coral, grow them in an underwater nursery, and replant them in a reef when they’re big and strong.
While important, Fyffe said, this approach is “slow, expensive, and very difficult to scale.” In fact, this method led to less than 200,000 corals planted around the world’s oceans last year, many of which did not survive.
Fortunately, the Great Barrier Reef Foundation is on the frontlines of a breakthrough.
Over the last five years, Fyffe said, 350 Australian scientists and engineers have been working to scale reef restoration.
In this time, they have developed an automated process that can produce millions of baby corals, naturally increase their heat tolerance, and deploy ceramic cradles for mass deployment. This means divers do not have to manually plant each and every baby coral by hand.
“We’ve made more advancements in the last five years than the previous 50,” she said.
The experts are implementing the solution by targeting the reefs that are most connected to other reefs via the ocean’s natural currents. That means the offspring of the corals they plant will subsequently spread throughout the ocean, repopulating more areas with little to no effort from the scientists.
With this approach, Fyffe said, restoring as little as 3% of reefs can drive the recovery of 50% of the entire ecosystem.
“By 2031, we will be planting 1.2 million heat-tolerant, surviving corals per year, about 30 times more of what is planted across the Pacific today,” she said. “This is restoration at an unprecedented scale.”
To get the idea off the ground and into the water, the organization has packaged this technology into “micro nurseries” that coastal communities can own and operate.
“We’re going out with local communities into their corals’ space and looking at corals that have survived bleaching events,” Fyffe explained to Good Good Good. “We know that they’ve got heat-tolerance, so we bring them back to the micro-nurseries, and then they spawn.”
Picking the heat-tolerant corals is essentially a breeding tactic to increase populations of corals that can handle a more stressful ocean. Researchers have also found that the algae living inside corals can become heat-tolerant, as well, leading them to “swap” which algae is included in the repopulation process.
“We’re just speeding it up in a lab setting, ramping up that peak tolerance,” Fyffe said. “The way that we look at the work we’re doing is we’re supporting natural recovery, but we’re just giving Mother Nature a helping hand.”
Once those heat-tolerant corals are brought to the lab, scientists use a device called an auto-spawner, which essentially concentrates all of the egg and sperm from a spawning event down to a certain density. From there, the auto-spawner helps settle baby coral polyps into the ceramic cradles that will be sent back into the water.
“It all happens in an automated production line. Corals go in, coral spawns, spawns concentrated, and then they settle on these devices,” Fyffe said. “Then a couple of days later, the devices are then dropped off the side of a boat in an area where we know that we've got a degraded reef that needs restoring. It's amazing. It's actually really simple.”
While the Great Barrier Reef Foundation works with key partners like the Australian Institute of Marine Science, Marine Park Authority, and area universities, the goal is for the on-the-ground work to be owned and managed by the saltwater First Nations peoples.
“We know the technology on its own isn’t enough,” Fyffe said in her TED Talk. “To have real impact, this tech needs to be in the hands of those on the front lines, those that know the oceans best. [We’re] blending modern innovation with their ancient knowledge.”
Together with tourism operators, Indigenous communities offer regenerative tourism, all while sustaining their own livelihoods and environments.
“When we looked at expanding into the Pacific in providing the micro-nurseries to communities, we didn't want to provide something that ended up being a stranded asset. How do they maintain that in the long term?” Fyffe told us.
By building on partnerships that already existed between tourism ventures and First Nations communities in the South Pacific, the Foundation has helped facilitate the capacity to manage these micro-nurseries at scale.
“We've got a fantastic group of Indigenous rangers — and a really big cohort of female Indigenous rangers. We’re looking at getting them [trained on] these sexual reproduction coral processes and having them being the ones that are delivering and running these nurseries.”
While a strategic economic approach and a breakthrough in protecting the reef ecosystem, the deployment of this initiative is also a spiritual calling for the people who call these coastal communities home.
“[Coral reefs] anchor the economies of over 100 nations and hold deep cultural significance for saltwater First Nations peoples who see coral reefs as their families and creators of life,” Fyffe said in her TED Talk.
“We have a plan — a lifeline … to sustain not just coral reefs but the livelihoods, cultures, and futures they safeguard.”
Fyffe knows that the real cure to the coral reef crisis is to slow the rate of warming, to tackle the two-degree future that climate change presents. But in the meantime, she feels confident in this work, which was recently bolstered by a large donation from TED’s Audacious Project.
“We have this thing called Reef Grief, and it’s real. A researcher who started this work 30 years ago had their favorite reef. That reef isn’t there anymore. It’s gone. It’s rubble,” Fyffe told us. “How do you keep them going? You show them the reef that should be.”
She echoed this call for hope as she wrapped up her TED Talk.
“For many coral reefs, unfortunately it is already too late,” she said. “But for half of the world’s reefs, including the Great Barrier Reef, there is still time. These corals haven’t given up. They are still resilient. They can still regenerate. So if the corals haven’t given up, how can we?”
Header image courtesy of Tourism and Events Queensland
.jpg)
