Dr. Nikki Fogarty, UNCW associate professor in the Department of Biology and Marine Biology, gave WHQR a tour of her newly expanded research facility that grows baby corals. Her lab mainly focuses on developing technologies that will inform reef restoration efforts around the world.
“We have our corals in these glass tanks under these what are called spawning cubicles. So it is a black box that keeps all the ambient light out, so we don't have any light pollution and we can spawn them in our land base facility. This right here is an Acropora cervicornis, our staghorn coral. This is a threatened species,” Fogarty said.
Related: UNCW researchers are helping to restore the health of coral reefs
That’s important — because traditional methods of rehabilitating might not save them in the long run.
According to a 2018 report from the International Panel on Climate Change projects coral reefs will decline by 70-90% if average global temperatures warm by 1.5°C (2.7°F). If it warms by 2°C (3.6°F), these reefs will decrease by 99%.
And even if the current warming projection continues, which is approximately 1.1°C (2.0°F) since the 19th century, the world will start seeing large declines in reef ecosystems by 2050 or sooner.
“I think everyone that has been studying coral reefs, for a couple of decades, we're at the point that we need some radical idea, and we need to do something before all coral reefs are gone,” she said.
That’s where UNCW assistant professor Dr. Jake Warner comes in. He’s on the grant award with Fogarty.
“The goal is, at the end of the three years, to have the technique streamlined to where we can genetically engineer corals to include different gene products, whether they provide antimicrobial activity or protection against heat stress, to have that technology ready to go. And with the possibility that we can engineer and grow our corals,” Warner said.
Fogarty, who’s been studying coral reef production for over two decades, said “traditional approaches means that we would go out on a boat at night, wait for them to spawn, put a net over the coral colony, collect the coral gametes, take it back on the boat, drive the boat back to the lab, and then conduct fertilization assays and rear larvae. Now that my lab and other similar labs can spawn corals in a land base facility, we can hand the eggs and sperm over to Dr. Warner and he can conduct the gene editing here in the laboratory.”
Warner said there’s scientific precedence for this work.
“Papaya trees were all but wiped out by a ringspot virus, and with genetic engineering, we created a papaya tree that resists the virus. And as a result, in some part, we've saved the species. So you can imagine with a disease, like stony coral tissue loss disease, which is devastating the Caribbean, that there were a lot of groups working hard to identify protective products or protective genes, which could provide some kind of protection to this disease, if we could isolate that and put it in corals, then we can maybe have a cure for [it],” Warner said.
Dr. Nathan Crowe is an associate professor in UNCW’s history department. He’s also on the grant to evaluate the risk of placing gene-edited corals in the wild — even though scientists aren’t doing that just yet.
“So the one thing that CRISPR has provided a lot of scientists is a new tool for genome editing, that is far more robust and precise than how we've done in the past, which makes kind of a leap forward in kind of creating organisms that have those traits that we're looking for," Crowe said. "And so with that brings risks, but again, it's this trade-off about at what point is it too risky?”
These researchers all agree on one point: there’s the possibility that reefs around the world could disappear — potentially costing the economy up to $375 billion each year from industries like fishing and tourism. So they say it’s important for them to at least try to re-establish these coral communities.
Warner said that the risk of creating an invasive species of coral is low, but Crowe helps them to “try and envision all of the possible contingencies.”
They say that coral researchers are ready for novel techniques, as the situation is becoming increasingly dire.
“My colleagues in Florida are ready to try something new because not only their reefs have died because of stony coral tissue loss, but they were slammed by a thermal stress event this past summer, where they were moving corals from their in-water nurseries onto land just to get them out of the hot water,” Fogarty said.
When asked if corals are doing well anywhere around the globe, Fogarty said, “usually those areas are far from any anthropogenic factors, so it's remote areas where they don't have sewage onto the reef; where they're not overfished; where they're not dredging because of different ports.”
However, she added that no matter how remote the reef is, the water temperature is still going to increase.
