Webinar: Teen Earth Optimism – Coral Reefs
Aired May 12, 2020
Meaghan Cuddy:
Hello. Thank you all for joining us today. Hi, my name is Meaghan Cuddy, and I'm a museum educator at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. And while our museum is closed, I am coming to you live from my home in Washington, D.C. So thank you all so much for joining us today for our Teen Tuesday Earth Optimism Program. Today, we're going to be talking about how scientists are working collaboratively across countries and research groups to better understand and protect coral reef's ecosystems. We're going to be getting started in just a few moments, but while we're waiting for everyone to join us today, you can use the Q and A button at the bottom of your screen to let us know where you're joining us from. That's the button with two speech bubbles at the bottom of your screen. If you'd like to type in where you're joining us from and say hello, we'd love to know who's joining us today.
Zasha's here from Richmond, Virginia. Hi. Shannon from Colorado. Julia from College Park. Winston Salem, North Carolina. Brookville, Maryland. Richmond, Virginia. Hello. We got a lot of local people. Alexandria, Virginia. And some not local too. California, Vancouver. Hi. Bethesda, New Jersey. That's where I'm from, repping the Jersey. Arlington, Germany. Hello everyone. While you're all joining and letting us know where you're joining us from, I'm going to go over some details about our program today. You can use that Q and A box that you're typing into right now to ask questions to our scientists. You can submit them at any time during our program, but we're going to be asking them during the second half of the program, so make sure you stick around until then. Two of our educators, Jen and Lara, are also going to be in the Q and A, answering your questions if we're not able to get to them on air.
Throughout our program, you can also use that Q and A box to answer our questions for you. But please keep in mind that those comments are only going to be visible to Smithsonian staff, so please keep them right on topic. We're definitely interested in hearing what you think of this program. So at the end of today's program, you'll be getting a survey and please fill it out and let us know your thoughts on how we can make this a better program for all of our teens who are out there watching. We have some other people joining us from Maryland. Hello. All right, and we're going to get started. Looks like everyone is here. Just to clarify, if you want to put all of your comments in the Q and A box instead of the chat, that is where we'll be reading them from.
Today's program is all about Earth Optimism. And if you've seen some of our programs before, you might know that things like climate change and pollution and a whole host of human impacts are really affecting our planet and the organisms that live on it. But here at the Smithsonian and at research institutions all around the world, scientists and lots of different experts are working really hard to solve these issues and come up with some creative ways to address them. Today, we're going to explore some of this work with Dr. Melanie McField from the Smithsonian Marine Station in Fort Pierce, Florida. She's going to tell us about her work protecting coral reefs, and also give us some ideas for how we can be a part of the solution to protect them. I'm really excited to introduce our scientists for today, Dr. Melanie McField. Melanie. Hi, how are you?
Melanie McField:
Hi, I'm fine.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Good to see you. We are so excited to have you with us here today, Melanie. You are a marine biologist at the Smithsonian Marine Station, and you're also the director of the Healthy Reefs for Healthy People program. I know your work has taken you all over, studying disturbance and management of tropical reefs, but where are you joining us from today?
Melanie McField:
I'm in my home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Awesome. Down south a little bit from us, probably a little bit nicer weather.
Melanie McField:
Quite nice.
Meaghan Cuddy:
All right. If you want to share your screen with us, I know you have some great photos.
Melanie McField:
Here you go. This is where I would like to be.
Meaghan Cuddy:
That looks great. I would like to be there, too.
Melanie McField:
Nice reef in Belize, which is kind of in the middle of this Mesoamerican Reef.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Cool. I bet some of our viewers are wondering a little bit about you. Can you tell us a little bit about your background? How did you become a marine biologist?
Melanie McField:
Sure. Well, it probably all started around here, high school. A lot of you kids are in high school. I had went digging through my old annuals and found my senior year high school under hobbies. That's a picture of me with the old scuba gear. I was already a diver, I loved the ocean. I was just so excited about every vacation my family would take was to the coast in South Carolina. I knew I wanted to be a marine biologist from the time I was quite small.
Meaghan Cuddy:
That's amazing. That is a really cool photo. Can you tell us a little bit about what you do, your work, and where you do your work?
Melanie McField:
This is where the Mesoamerican Reef is. If you can see my cursor, you can see Florida on the small little inset map here. Here's Florida, Cuba, Cancun. I figure you people know that, that's a very popular place. But the entire Mesoamerican Reef region, that's Belize there. Here we go. This is the long reef system. It continues for like a thousand kilometers. It's a very long system. These are the Bay Islands of Honduras, and this is the area we're talking about. We include the watershed because the land has so much importance to the sea.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Wow, that's so cool. So it's a huge reef system that goes through many different countries.
Melanie McField:
Yes, four different countries are involved.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Cool. I imagine your work probably brings together lots of different scientists and lots of different perspectives, which must be really, really interesting to work on.
Melanie McField:
Yes. Challenging and fun.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Challenging and fun. We're going to talk a little bit about that work today and what you get up to, working on the coral reefs and the Western Caribbean. But before we get into that, can you explain to us a little bit about what exactly coral is? What is a coral?
Melanie McField:
Yes. This is the basis of the coral, these little polyps. You think of a coral reef and most people think of fish and movement and color and giant structures, but at the heart of it are these little guys. They are very small, a millimeter across or something. They've got these tentacles and a mouth and that's about it. They're like the anemone in "Nemo" and "Finding Nemo." But there're millions of them on a reef and they live colonial, they're sharing food resources. They're kind of both a plant and an animal. Here in this photo down here in the lower right, you can see the color that's inside the tissue. Those are called zooxanthellae. They're little single-celled plant organisms that give the polyp, give the coral its energy. Most of its energy comes from the sun.
So they're like little solar cells built into their skin. That's why they need clear clean water because they need that full-force solar energy to get their food. And then they create their skeleton. This calcium carbonate is here through photosynthesis and calcification. It kind of works hand-in-hand.
They build the limestone skeleton that forms the structure of the reef. That's like the cinder blocks of the city. It's built by the coral itself and it's all solar powered by the sun and recycling the nutrients that the coral expels. It's a very nice tight system when it stays clean and clear.
Meaghan Cuddy:
That's amazing. It's like a sustainable city.
Melanie McField:
Yes. They did it long before us.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Long before people.
Melanie McField:
Yes.
Meaghan Cuddy:
When you say that coral reefs are kind of like a city, what do you mean by that?
Melanie McField:
Well, these corals formed the basis of all this activity. I can show you this slide, which is where I first experienced a coral reef as a Peace Corps volunteer, 1990. I was assigned to this park in Belize. These structures back here are the corals and inside and hiding and all the cracks are all of the invertebrates and the fish shelter and these things.
They're like the apartment buildings that all of the life is living in, and that's formed by these corals. This is a magnificent little park down in Belize. It was one of the first marine reserves where they really focused attention and protected it from fishing and there's just enormous fish life. It means "little channel" in Mayan. You can see right here, it's a natural break in the barrier reef where the waves hit the reef and create a lot of energy. But then you have this nice calm lagoon behind it. So tons of fish coming in and out of this. So it was just a fantastic place to kind of wet my fins as it was and learn about coral reefs and the ocean and the culture in Mesoamerica. And then yeah.
Meaghan Cuddy:
That is amazing. It looks like such a beautiful place and a really great example of just how complex and important these habitats are for the humans that live there and the animals that live there. Cool. So Melanie, do you have a question for our students who are watching right now?
Melanie McField:
Yeah. I'm curious as to how many of these kids have actually gone to a coral reef, have seen it firsthand. I know there's a lot of great nature programs out there, but how many people have actually gone to a reef on vacation or any time in their life?
Meaghan Cuddy:
Cool. So students, you should see a poll pop up on your screen if you want to answer, "Have you ever been to a reef?" We'd love to know what your experiences with these. All right. Our results are coming in. Melanie, I think you can probably see them too.
Melanie McField:
Yeah, yeah.
Meaghan Cuddy:
All right. Okay. So we have a 67 percent say that they haven't been, and about 30 percent say that they have been, which is actually pretty great. I'm pretty impressed that we have so many people who've been to a coral reef in real life.
Melanie McField:
Given that most of the places we talked about earlier where people were from are quite far ... Thought I had that off. Were quite far away from the reefs.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Yeah, it's amazing that people are getting to experience these habitats. But even if some of our viewers haven't been to a reef themselves, why do you think that that's something that people should care about? Why or should we be invested in these types of habitats?
Melanie McField:
Well, they are incredibly important for the biodiversity of the ocean. We all want to have a productive and healthy ocean. So let me get rid of that. For the Mesoamerican Reef, it is incredibly important. They support tourism, which is the main economic driver down in the region. Fisheries support both the local economies and provide food for the people that live there.
But there it's also an important export earning industry. So lobster in particular, and even conch and grouper coming out of this region and being sold in the U.S. and around the world. And then coastal protection. These small communities living right on, at sea level are protected by the coral reef from hurricanes and storms. And we know that there's also potential medicines and benefits that the world could gain from new medicines that are being determined from coral reef organisms because there's such high biodiversity, it's the highest biodiversity in the sea.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Yeah. That is incredible. It's amazing how important these ecosystems are, not just for the health of our planet and the things that live there, but also the human communities that rely on them and they're so important. But we do know that there's a lot of threats that are facing these reefs and that they're pretty fragile. So do you want to tell us a little bit about some of those?
Melanie McField:
Yeah. That's probably what most people have heard about a lot is these threats because they are so prevalent and almost all reefs in the world are threatened by these three things. Coastal development and pollution kind of lumped together, overfishing, and then bleaching. And that's global climate change. Climate change is the one that's gotten a lot of attention recently. We had bleaching in 2015, '16, '17, and '19. So it's just been a bad run. As the planet gets hotter, these corals are really having a hard time because they've been living at their kind of highest tolerance anyway, being in the tropics and these warm waters. And now we're really seeing more of this problem.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Yeah. Can you quickly describe what bleaching is for our viewers?
Melanie McField:
Yeah, so if you remember that picture of the little polyp of the coral having those zooxanthellae in it, the algae that make it its food. When it gets too hot, they overproduce and they get expelled. So it's like the coral kicks out its little solar panels that give it its food and just the system breaks down. So then they're sitting there, you see the white skeleton without the color of the algae, that should be in the tissue and it looks more bleached out. Like this picture here, you can see normal coloration here and bleached there, but it leaves the coral in a starved state cause it can't get all of its nutrients. And then you compound that with stressors like the coastal development and pollution, we've got sediments on it or you've got pollutants from agriculture or from sewage contamination. And that just makes everything worse and makes it more difficult for the coral to recover.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Yeah. So it sounds like unfortunately these corals are dealing with a lot, they've got a lot of stress on them right now. So what are you guys doing as part of your team to help address these issues?
Melanie McField:
Well, when we talk about healthy reefs, this nice little logo of our Healthy Reefs for Healthy People, it's really all of these groups.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Whoa. It's Large.
Melanie McField:
It's like all of these groups are collaborating. So my job as the director is to keep everyone working together nicely. So we have the same goal, which is to conserve the health of the Mesoamerican Reef. But all of these different organizations have different approaches. They might have an area that they're managing or they're not all the same, they're very different. Some are academics, some are conservation.
So we work together and sometimes we get to go into the sea and do our measurements. And we only do this once every two years. The reef system is not changing that quickly. And this is a major undertaking. So every other year we do that in the summer months and it takes about four months to do these kind of surveys. So far we've trained 250 biologists down in the region in how to do these surveys. And we have a database that's open access, you can find it from the healthyreefs.org website. So you can see what kind of information we have gained over the last 12 years of monitoring this.
Meaghan Cuddy:
That is amazing. That's a ton of data. And I know that you guys put together what you call a report card for the reef. So how do you grade a reef? How do you give it a report card?
Melanie McField:
And that was the trick. We had to come up with, what are the classes that we're going to be measuring? So you know you have to take your English and math and history and a few other things. So these are the core elements for our report card grade for the healthy reef. We need to have enough coral cover. So that's a brain coral. You have this little image here and you want to have more of this on the bottom of your seabed because that's building the structure and you want to have less of this fleshy macroalgae. That's a problem. And in many places it's come to completely overrun the coral reef. We want to have less of that one. Then we want to have more of these two types of fish. So we've broken them down into the herbivores, who we need more of to eat these plants, and then the commercial fish, that's a good indicator of if you have overfishing, if you have too much fishing activity, it just decreases the populations.
And the main target fish, which are groupers and snappers will be hit the hardest. So we have these numbers that we rank just like you have a 90 to 100 is an A, we give them a five. If they have over 40 percent live coral cover and like that. We have then these four indicators with five numbers, a one-through-five ranking, and we get a mean index value. So we have one number for every reef site and then we can apply it to a country, all the reefs in Belize, or we can look at all the reefs in the whole MAR. And that is essentially the reef's GPA.
Meaghan Cuddy:
So you can rank the reef just like how students get a GPA in school, which is pretty impressive that you guys have figured out how to do that.
Melanie McField:
Yeah. Cool. So what does this look like? How are our reefs down in the MAR doing?
Well, here's the latest. So we just came out with this in February of this year. This is the ranking. So if you look first at the little dots, here's the reef system, all of the sampling points, these 286 sites that were sampling, sampled and look over here at the colors. So you see blue is very good, green is good, yellow, fair, orange, poor, red, critical. You see there's a sprinkling. Here's the balance of all those colors for the whole Mesoamerican Reef. But you see it's not like all in one place or the other. That's the way it's kind of distributed, but there are certain differences that you can look at.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Absolutely.
Melanie McField:
Yeah. By country. We can come over here.
Meaghan Cuddy:
So students, we want you guys to take a look at this. Take a look at this graphic that Melanie has showed us. Can you type into the Q and A box, "What country do you think reefs are doing the best in right now based on this grading system that they're using?" So you can type your answers into that Q and A box and we'll see what Melanie thinks. All right. Getting some answers of Belize. Belize seems to be the consensus right now. All right. Melanie, what do you think?
Melanie McField:
Yes, they read the graph correctly. Belize was the country with the highest GPA this time, so ...
Meaghan Cuddy:
Cool.
Melanie McField:
In the previous year it had been Honduras. So Honduras took a slip and Belize continued to get better.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Interesting. So what does this kind of look like over time? I know you guys do this every couple of years.
Melanie McField:
So this is the number of report cards we have done over the years and we were very happy that all along things have been improving. So this is out of a perfect score of five. We started with the 2.3 and we got up to a 2.8. But then this last report card we did slip, we fell back to a 2.5. So that was discouraging.
But then when you look deeper into that, you can see that it wasn't across the board. Like Mexico and Guatemala didn't change much. Belize actually got better, but Honduras really took a dive and it was largely both those fish categories just were depleted in half. So that shows that was social conditions and the economic conditions and problems in Honduras to just led it to lose a lot of its standing, the reef and those fish were fished. Even though there were regulations, they have some regulations, they should have been in parks.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Yeah, it's amazing that the work that you're doing lets you pinpoint those impacts, especially when these are such complex issues and there's so much that goes into the health of a reef that with all this data you guys are able to really tease out where the reef needs help and what the actions to improve it would be. It's incredible.
Melanie McField:
Right.
Meaghan Cuddy:
So today's program is a little bit about that. It's about Earth optimism, sort of how we can use all of this data to help improve these reefs. So what are you guys doing to address some of the problems that you're seeing?
Melanie McField:
Well we saw back in 2009 it was looking really bad in terms of these macroalgae. So if you follow this brown line. Macroalgae across the whole region was really looking terrible. So we encouraged the countries to protect this family of parrot fish. So it's many different species, but by protecting that whole family of fish, we would increase, be able to increase the herbivory, the natural grazing on the reef and let them eat these macroalgae so they wouldn't be overgrowing the reef.
And it took some time, but this is very encouraging to be able to see that that brown line finally has started to decrease. So the macroalgae this time has gone down and at the same time that the parrotfish, which we protected in 2009 in Belize, has gone up. So it takes some time. So the protection was probably done here in 2009. You didn't see anything the first year. Because it takes time for the regulations to be able to be monitored and evaluated actually on the reef. But over time you can see that they have. The fish increase, the algae decrease. And that's exactly what we wanted to see. The coral have also kind of continually risen slowly.
Meaghan Cuddy:
That's amazing. It's so clear in a graphic like this what those sort of complex ecosystem interactions are that as you increase your herbivore, your parrotfish, your algae goes down and your coral goes up. And over time you can see those changes happening.
Melanie McField:
Yes.
Meaghan Cuddy:
That's amazing.
Melanie McField:
A little bit patient.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Yes, definitely. Which I'm sure is a really important thing to communicate to all of those partners that you have.
Melanie McField:
And it's unusual to have studies that go this long, sadly. And that's largely due to the funding not always being there. So one study starts and another study stops and continuity and having these long term data is really important.
Meaghan Cuddy:
And it's amazing that you have all this data. So what are some of the other things that you guys are doing with it?
Melanie McField:
Well, we were encouraging by getting that group of partners. So you saw all those logos. Getting them together gives a lot of power. And it's saying we all agree that these are some of the main things we can do to help improve the grade or improve the health of the reef. That's the goal here. So one of the first things that we said in our report card this year is we recognize we've got an enforcement problem and we just need to do what we can to help encourage abiding by the regulations, whether they're fisheries regulations or pollution regulations, coastal development, whatever, that we've got to abide by them or that's not going to work.
Got a lot of good regulations out there. And then one of them is about fish replenishment zones. So this idea that this area and the beautiful picture there, you see tons of coral and fish that's in a replenishment zone in Mexico that is well-enforced.
So by having these little seed areas that you don't fish, you allow the biodiversity to increase. The fish get large, they reproduce much more when they're bigger and they reseed other areas.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Cool. That's amazing.
Melanie McField:
Yeah, I want to get private sector and we've got dive shops and hotels that are benefiting from this. We need to get them engaged and involved and help pay for the monitoring.
Meaghan Cuddy:
That is really incredible that you're able to do all of this with the data that you're collecting. Thank you so much for sharing all of this cool stuff with us today. In the interest of time, I think we're going to go to some audience questions. So do you have some time to answer some questions for us?
Melanie McField:
Yeah.
Meaghan Cuddy:
All right. So students now is your chance to ask some questions to Melanie. If you have questions about her work as a coral biologist, what you can do to help protect corals or anything else that you might be curious about. You can type those questions into the Q and A box at the bottom of your screen and we're going to try and get to as many of them as we can. So you can feel free to type those questions in now. And we already have a bunch coming in. The first question I have for you, Melanie, is from Michelle. They'd like to know: How can youth and teens get involved in helping to protect reefs no matter where they are?
Melanie McField:
I would say you could engage online, all the groups, our group, every NGO I can think of has online presence. They have campaigns that they want people to write in about or to get involved in. Support different activities that are going on globally. World Ocean Day would be a good one. You can look into that and every community, whether you're on the coast or not, can participate and just raise awareness.
You can do a lot by raising awareness and getting involved in I think the climate movement, because that is one issue that is — the long term health of reefs or ability of reefs to survive for the long term is going to be if we can get our handle on climate change. So your generation is the one that's going to have to fix it.
And I think participating in all those things links it back to coral reefs; and use the coral reef as your canary in the coal mine, your sentinel that's saying we have to protect this ecosystem. We have to get climate change under control.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Yeah, absolutely. And corals are a really great canary in a coal mine that is a great link to all of the climate effects that we're seeing in ecosystems all over the world. So things that we do to address climate change are going to help corals and lots of other things as well, including us, which is important.
All right. And students, I'd just like to remind you to please type your questions into the Q and A box instead of the chat, because that's where we're looking for them. But we do have time for some more questions. Melanie, if you want to end your screen share, that would be fine. All right. We have another question about some of the threats that corals are facing. So you spoke about three major issues that they're dealing with. Are those issues only problems on the Mesoamerican Reef or are they affecting corals all over the world?
Melanie McField:
Yeah, those are almost everywhere. Definitely climate change is a problem everywhere. Overfishing I think is a problem everywhere. Even the remote reefs out in the Pacific have this problem because of the big industrial boats that go everywhere. So the only one, coastal development and pollution, that might be a little more related to areas where there are human populations nearby.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Yeah, I remember when I was in grad school, I did some work in Micronesia, which is very remote. There's not a lot of people there. And we saw similar impacts on corals there, which was incredible, where there's even no people, but you're still seeing the impacts, which is wild.
Melanie McField:
Right. Yeah.
Meaghan Cuddy:
We got so many good questions. I hope we can get to most of them. And Jen and Lara are in the chat answering your questions as well. This is a question that I think a lot of people have. Why is sunscreen bad for corals, Melanie?
Melanie McField:
Oh yeah. Well there's some nasty chemicals in sunscreen and they've actually done the tests in the lab and it's particularly the larvae of the coral. So if you remember that little polyp, it has a mouth, but with, out of that mouth comes its little babies, its eggs and sperm come out of that, and that's floating around the water for a month. Very sensitive, very sensitive to these chemicals. And they float on the surface too. If you've been to an area where a lot of people are swimming, you, you'll notice this sheen on the water. It's like that's the sunscreen and that's where the eggs of the coral go when they spawn. So yeah.
Meaghan Cuddy:
And I know that there are some safe sunscreens that people can use and other ways that people can help solve or help deal with those issues as well.
Melanie McField:
No ozybenzones and then they're probably, we may continue to learn more about different things, but the zinc oxide, those old ones, they seem to be safer.
Meaghan Cuddy:
And very stylish on the nose. All right. Grace would like to know what is a typical day in your job like?
Melanie McField:
Well, unfortunately it's kind of sitting here at my desk. I do a lot of writing of reports and writing proposals. But back in the day when I was starting it out, I was in the water a lot more. And then my team, I have a country coordinator in each country of Mesoamerican Reef. They organize the field programs. I get to go in the field some, but just not as much as I did when I started.
So I'm having a lot of chats with them and relaying our plans and getting our sampling plan, our data collection, our data management and reports. If you go to healthyreefs.org, you can see the last report card and then just a lot of effort to get that done. Collaborating with all these different groups. Everyone has meetings and workshops where you go and you try to listen to their work and give your input as to how you think everyone could do better. Everyone's trying to help each other. It's really a collaborative, good process.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Yeah, I would imagine it's probably a lot of work to wrangle four countries' worth of people who are invested in saving their corals, which is a lot of good work, but a lot of work that needs to be brought together under your jurisdiction
Melanie McField:
Industry partners. And they have different schedules, different funding, getting everyone to getting it to work is, yeah, hard.
Meaghan Cuddy:
I would imagine. So Zasha would like to know, "What reefs need more help?" So where are corals being impacted the most right now, would you say?
Melanie McField:
I mean, it's all over. I focus on the Caribbean, that's where I have always worked, but there're reefs and the remote Pacific that are suffering the same problems. Even areas with small populations or without. I just like to think the United States is so close to the Caribbean, it's [inaudible] for our half of the Eastern Seaboard and we need to look at what's going on right in our backyard, which is the Caribbean. And for Florida, it's probably some of our propagules of lobster, at least for sure. And probably even corals and fish are related to this Mesoamerican Reef. So it's very important that we keep the help and keep them sustainable.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Absolutely. I do want to just let our viewers know that it is about 3:30, which is the end of our planned content for today. But we do have a ton of awesome questions. So Melanie, do you have a couple more minutes to stick around and answer some more questions?
Melanie McField:
Sure, I can stay.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Thanks. Okay, so Melanie's going to answer some more questions for us all if you'd like to stick around. And if you have to go, thank you so much for joining us. You can always check out our archived programs as well as our other video webinars that are on our website on the Natural History website. But Melanie, if you have some time, we'll take some more questions. All right. We got some good ones here. So one of our viewers we'd like to know are corals resilient to climate change. So how resilient are they to these changes that they're facing?
Melanie McField:
Yeah, there's a bit of resiliency and that's by species-by-species. They do, if you remember that picture of the polyp where it was making the calcium carbonate, where it has that calcification process is a little bit sheltered from the ocean water. So they can kind of control the microchemistry down in their interstices where they do all this work. So that gives them a little bit, like the water is acidifying. The temperature, is part of the problem, but the carbon dioxide in the sea has also made it more acidic.
So it makes it more difficult to create this calcium carbonate shell, essentially the base of the coral. But it looks like they might be able to control a bit of that, but it costs them energetically. So it's still not really, I mean it's resilient to a point. And then the temperature is the same thing. Some species seem to be able to handle it. Unfortunately, some of the big reef builders are not handling it. They're having a higher mortality due to the bleaching.
So the temperature and the acidification itself, they are somewhat resilient. They're getting through a few of these events. But as you do the projections out for the next 30 years, it's more and more events more frequently, how much are they going to be able to take? It's like a boxer getting hit over and over, eventually they can't get up again.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Absolutely. And it's like these compounding stressors facing them. It's not just the heat, but also changes in chemistry and also pollution and all different things impacting them at the same time.
All right. Andrew would like to know, do you think coral farming is a viable route for preserving coral reefs? What do you think about some of the coral farming?
Melanie McField:
Yeah, definitely a good piece of it. It helps. We have several groups in the Mesoamerican Reef that are doing that, and they've actually really increased the coral cover on the areas where they're working. The problem is it's a big ocean out there, it's a big reef. So we can't do that everywhere. It's expensive. So we need to do that and stop the pollution and stop the overfishing at the same time.
Meaghan Cuddy:
So a complex problem really needs complex solutions. It needs lots of different things to help protect them.
Melanie McField:
But they are looking at even taking the more resilient strains. So even for one species of coral, seems like some genetic varieties are better suited than others to withstand bleaching. So then taking that strain and propagating it so you have a better chance that those corals you planted will survive as temperatures increase.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Yeah. All right. So we have some questions and comments about the Healthy Reefs for Healthy People program and how cool of a program it is. Some of our attendees would like to know: How are you sharing this information with people?
Melanie McField:
Okay, well, it's all on our website. On the healthyreefs.org website. So you can see the report cards and you can see the partners and kind of a summary of what we've done. We have information on Smithsonian Global and on the Conservation Commons Working Land and Seascapes. So there's lots of information out there on the web.
Oh, you can watch the videos on the YouTube channel and in the region, we have a lot of outreach. So the national coordinators go out with the partners who are local community-based organizations and they get out to the communities. So that would be like the dive guides and hotel owners and the fishing community. And people are doing presentations in little community centers all over the place, giving the results of these report cards and getting it on the news in the country so everybody can see it.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Yeah, that's amazing that you guys work so closely with all your partners to get it out to the people who need the information the most, the people who are in those communities. But speaking of corals more broadly, can you tell us about any global regulations? Hayden would like to know if there's anything being done on a global scale to protect corals.
Melanie McField:
Well, that's interesting, an interesting question because I mean, I think all of the UNFCC, which is the climate change, that's the U.N. body that's trying to get, you've heard of the Paris Accord. That is not specifically for corals, but that's probably one of the most important things go that's going on. The regulations that the countries may sign on to reduce their CO2 emissions and to get carbon dioxide under control. In terms of corals specifically, I mean because these impacts, the other things other than climate change are mostly regulations that are on a local level.
So that's done either locally or country by country. We do have laws under the Red List, under IUCN, CITES, sorry. CITES does the permitting for shipments. So its supposed to make it difficult to be able to take corals and ship them from one place to another. So that whole aquarium trade of taking corals for the aquaria and sending them, in my mind, it's kind of become a much smaller issue because it's just not ... For the most part, those corals that are used in aquaria are grown in aquaria now.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Cool. We have a couple other questions about ocean acidification and how that's impacting corals. So if the water is becoming slightly more acidic that these corals are living in, is there a way to balance that out or deal with that? Is there any research going on about that?
Melanie McField:
Yeah, there are things like mangroves and seagrass beds help to reduce that effect. So having more of the interconnected ecosystems that are normally found around coral reefs like seagrass beds and mangroves, having them intact and not being disturbed by coastal development where they would let you clear it all and build a port or a hotel. That's the kind of thing that helps reduce the ... You can reduce the amount of acidity in a local environment by having seagrass right around it.
Meaghan Cuddy:
And if any of our viewers tuned into our program two weeks ago with Dr. Alex Lowe, he talked a little bit about how local ecosystems are impacting local pH and how things like seagrasses and other ecosystem engineers are driving down pH, or driving up pH, in places where it's really impacting it. So you can always check it back and check out that program on our website. We do have some more questions for you Melanie. So, Greta would like to know if she's interested in majoring in marine biology, what are some things that she should do as a student or maybe some colleges she should look at?
Melanie McField:
Oh, well I went to university South Florida, did my Ph.D. There are so many. Scripps has a great one there. I'm just going to tell you to go do your research and look up and think about one of the things, I mean, you're an undergrad, so just find a good basic program. Don't get too specific from the beginning. I think for your undergraduate degree, just get a good general program with a nice variety of different topics.
You may not even know for sure if you want to do more in the ecology, biology, or physical oceanography where you're measuring currents and you're doing a lot of computer models and simulations, or chemistry, you can be a chemical oceanographer and then you're getting in the nitty gritty of this carbonate system and how pH is changing. And maybe there are ways we can alter ecosystems in a way that will bring that pH down, but that will be lab work and a lot of people that understand that on the fine detail.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Yeah, there's so many different paths you can take if you're interested in the ocean and so many careers, which I think is so cool.
Melanie McField:
Right.
Meaghan Cuddy:
I know that you work on shallow reefs and reefs in the tropics, but Imogen would like to know, "Are there reefs in the deep sea?"
Melanie McField:
There are. They're just not quite the same. But they do have corals, there are deep sea corals. They grow very slowly and of course they don't have those zooxanthelae that use the sunlight. So they are feeding actively and just growing much slower. But they are very important to those deep sea ecosystems. And we're learning little bits and pieces very slowly from all this deep sea exploration. It's barely touched the surface of the deep sea.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Yeah, that is so cool to me. It's amazing the things that we're learning about that are in the deep sea. And to plug in another one of our programs, we have a program on deep sea corals coming up next week, so that'll be on Wednesday if anyone wants to tune in. We have time for just about one more question for you, Melanie. This I think is a really fun one to end on. Veronica, would like to know, "Have you ever seen a shark?"
Melanie McField:
Yes. Yeah, but not as many as I would like to. They're always really fun when you see them, but you normally don't see them very long. They kind of swim by and they're like, they're not that interested in you for the most part.
Meaghan Cuddy:
They're cruising.
Melanie McField:
Yeah, they're cruising by. You're lucky if you see one and you get excited and then you go back to work. But I've actually had a manatee come over my shoulder and hover behind me as I'm writing on my slate underwater and I didn't even see it. And so after the dive they're like, "That was so cool, that manatee."
Meaghan Cuddy:
Oh no. What manatee?
Melanie McField:
It was right behind your head for a couple of minutes.
Meaghan Cuddy:
That makes you a good field biologist because you're very focused on your data.
Melanie McField:
All the corals.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Exactly. The things that you're looking at. So Melanie, thank you so much for spending some time with us today. Do you have any final words that you'd like to share? Any final messages for our audience?
Melanie McField:
Well, I know most of these people are, you're not close to the reef, so it's hard to think about what you can do other than just go visit and do that and stay in a good sustainable hotel look into where you're staying and try to do it the right way. Be a good tourist and go visit these places, support the areas that are doing the good work and watch what you eat.
I think that's one of the ways you can have an impact. If you're eating seafood, make sure it's sustainable sources and there are some out there. It's possible to do that and eating more plants helps with the carbon and riding your bike more and all that stuff that helps reduce climate change is what you can do to help coral reefs.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Absolutely. There are so many ways that we as consumers and tourists can really make a difference and make choices that help these communities that we really care about and are so valuable.
Melanie McField:
Yeah.
Meaghan Cuddy:
All right. Well Melanie, thank you so much again for joining us and thank you to everyone for tuning in today. If you enjoyed this program, please feel free to join us again next Tuesday at 3:00 p.m. when we'll be talking to Frank Niepold about his work on climate change education. And definitely check out all of our other video webinar programs and you can register for those and see our full schedule at naturalhistory.si.edu. And just as a final reminder, we will be sending out our survey, so please let us know what you liked about this program and what you'd like to see more of. So Melanie, thank you again so much. It's so great to see you. Have a great day.
Melanie McField:
All right, bye.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Bye.
