{"id":72754,"date":"2023-07-26T18:10:22","date_gmt":"2023-07-26T22:10:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/?post_type=r_cas_magazine&p=72754"},"modified":"2023-07-28T11:37:19","modified_gmt":"2023-07-28T15:37:19","slug":"unsuspecting-nature-of-rock-looking-corals","status":"publish","type":"r_cas_magazine","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/arts-sciences\/article\/unsuspecting-nature-of-rock-looking-corals\/","title":{"rendered":"Unsuspecting Nature of Rock-looking Corals"},"content":{"rendered":"
By Abby Van Selous (COM`24)<\/h6>\n

When Carsten Grupstra, a postdoctoral researcher in the Davies Marine Population Genomics Lab, arrived at the Newark Liberty National Airport from the Narita Airport in Japan on May 15, he was greeted by U.S. Fish and Wildlife inspectors, all eager to see the \u201clive animals\u201d he said he had packed away in his duffel bag.<\/p>\n

But, when he zipped open his suitcase and opened the lid of a Styrofoam cooler, the inspectors seemed altogether unimpressed.<\/p>\n

\u201cI took off the top of the cooler to show them the coral, and one guy was like, \u2018I hope they\u2019re not spiders, or I\u2019ll be gone,\u2019 and I showed the coral, and they were like, \u2018Oh, they\u2019re rocks,\u201d Grupstra said.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

While they may look unassuming to people unfamiliar with coral, these corals are unlike many other coral species, according to Assistant Professor of Biology Sarah Davies<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Found in the waters off of Palau, an island country in the western Pacific\u2014and now in aquariums in the basement of Boston University\u2019s Biology Research Building\u2014this species of coral, called lobe coral (Porites lobata), is able to withstand higher water temperatures \u2014 and thus have better survival rates in warming waters\u2014than most other coral species.<\/p>\n

Corals depend on the photosynthesis performed by algae for their nutrients, but when temperatures get too high, photosynthesis is interrupted and the algae may start producing toxins, harming the corals. The corals may then expel the algae or the algae dies, and the corals then lose their main means of obtaining nutrients. This loss of algae and nutrients causes the corals to turn white\u2014known as bleaching\u2014and they then may start to die.<\/p>\n

\"Coral\"<\/p>\n

As a postdoctoral researcher in the Davies Lab<\/a> in 2020, Hanny Rivera, now the Associate director for business development at Ginkgo Bioworks, identified these genetically distinct corals that appeared not to bleach in higher temperatures.<\/p>\n

Based on Rivera\u2019s discovery, the Davies Lab, along with the Meyer-Kaiser lab at the Woods Hole Oceanic Institution led by Kirstin Meyer-Kaiser, received grant funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study the properties of these corals and what allows them to stay healthy even as temperatures rise.<\/p>\n

This year, water temperatures in oceans worldwide are projected to be the highest they have ever been by a wide margin, according to Grupstra. This means that corals across the globe are likely to experience greater levels of bleaching than in past years. The question is what this means for lobe corals, which appear to withstand bleaching when exposed to higher temperatures.<\/p>\n

In the lab, researchers conducted an experiment with lobe coral larvae to determine if this thermal tolerance was heritable or if larvae had different survivorship rates at temperatures often stressful for corals.<\/p>\n

\"Carsten
Dr. Carsten Grupstra<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cWe increased the temperature of the water to 39 degrees Celsius from 30 degrees, and they survived for five days, and it\u2019s insane.\u201d Grupstra said. \u201cThat\u2019s really, really hot. The water\u2019s hot to the touch, it\u2019s not even comfortable when you shower in that temperature.\u201d<\/p>\n

Funded by the NSF grant, Grupstra, Davies, Meyer-Kaiser, and other researchers have traveled to Palau to study the corals for several weeks at a time since 2020. During each trip, they would dive for coral, take the corals from the reef and into the lab, observe them for a couple of weeks, gathering data on how they responded to heat, and then put them back on the reef.<\/p>\n

But the process of traveling to and from Palau to study the corals on-site was time-consuming and expensive \u2014 it took a 40-hour flight, plus layovers, to fly from the Logan Airport to the Newark International Airport to Hawaii or Japan, then to Guam, before finally landing in Palau, using up much of the grant\u2019s funds. In addition, the researchers found that they often had additional questions when the corals were already back in the reef and no longer available to study.<\/p>\n

\"Coral\"
\n\u201cIn the field you can do an experiment. We could heat up a bunch of corals up and see how they respond, and then we have those data and then usually we have more questions,\u201d said Grupstra, who has made the trip to Palau and back three times over the past year. \u201cIf we had the corals here, we could walk downstairs and start another experiment, and then we\u2019ll find more data and we\u2019ll have maybe more questions. We can just keep doing experiments in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n

So they decided to bring them back to campus to enhance their studies\u2014which required another complicated process, Grupstra said.<\/p>\n

Over a sixth month period,\u00a0 Grupstra and the rest of his team worked to get research and export permits from the Palauan government as well as a CITES permit, which must be filed to ensure that the international trade of specimens will not threaten the survival of that species and that specimens will not be illegally exported or imported.<\/p>\n

On May 15, once all of the paperwork and permits were accepted, Grupstra packed up 24 lobe corals and took the 40-hour trip from Palau to Boston. Before boarding his flight, he had to call the United States Fish and Wildlife Services, several airports\u2014some airports do not allow you to bring live animals into the country\u2014and to file paperwork for a permit to legally bring the corals into the country.<\/p>\n

There were also ethical concerns that needed to be considered before the corals could be collected and brought to the US. Taking corals from reefs is often unethical, and in many cases illegal, when they are removed for recreational or commercial purposes, according to Grupstra.<\/p>\n

\"coral\"<\/p>\n

The colonies brought back to BU were taken from parts of colonies that researchers knew would be able to fully recover from the loss, according to Grupstra. They were also brought to the university solely for the purpose of studying them in the hopes of answering research questions that may help protect coral reefs.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service approved Grupstra\u2019s request to bring the corals into the country, and he was able to pack them up for the 40-hour journey.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had a big duffle bag in which I had a Styrofoam cooler, and in the Styrofoam cooler I had these little coral colonies that I wrapped in paper towels soaked with sea water, and I stacked them in there,\u201d Grupstra said. \u201cI packed them in a suitcase and just checked it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The corals Grupstra brought back to campus come from three lineages: first, the genetic population that are mostly offshore; second, corals from cooler outer regions as well as warmer lagoons; and third, hyper-specialized corals that are only found in really hot lagoons where many other coral species cannot survive.<\/p>\n

\"Coral\"With the corals now on campus, researchers can run experiments and use equipment that they were unable to use in Palau.<\/p>\n

\"Sarah
Assistant Professor of Biology Sarah Davies<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThe work we can do locally is more mechanistic. We can get more specific questions, control for specific variables that we\u2019re interested in to see what happens,\u201d Davies said. \u201cWe can do more poking and prodding in more of a hospital setting than watching something in their natural environment.\u201d<\/p>\n

To mimic the real-world conditions, the aquarium water is salted and kept at 30 degrees Celsius. The corals are kept in three sets of tanks, separated based on their lineage, and the tanks are lit by a blue light so the corals can photosynthesize with limited stress. Researchers also have control over temperature, lights, and salinity.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can see the coral, touch them. We aren\u2019t limited by scuba diving limitations,\u201d Davies said. \u201cWe can disentangle things slowly and meticulously, which you could never do in the field.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Marine biologists brought 24 corals from the western Pacific waters to Boston for research. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":72769,"template":"","department":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-articles\/72754"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-articles"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/r_cas_magazine"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-articles\/72754\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72842,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-articles\/72754\/revisions\/72842"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/72769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"r_cas_department","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/department?post=72754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}