Saving Ocean Biodiversity: Coral Restoration | Explorers in the Field
[Music] First of all, to die just to die for me. Since the beginning, it was the best. I say, yeah, I have to find a way to be more often sooner. It's like to go and to see an action movie; you see the fishes, a big school of fishes moving, and then to see the corals drop in the river and your breathing, and you can witness it.
My name is Paul Rodriguez. I'm a professor and researcher at the University of Guadalajara and a National Geographic Explorer. My field of study are the coral reefs. All the reefs that we are studying belong to the central Mexican Pacific. What are corals? Plants, animals, or rocks? It's like it's a two-for-one. It's an animal because it belongs to the animal kingdom, but this relation is symbiotic with a microalgae. They provide them food for each other. The microalgae gives them the color, so when you see a coral that's brown, it's because the microalgae is brown. And if you see a pink coral, it's because the microalgae is pink.
To study any coral reefs is interesting because they are like sensors for everything. As you may know, the reefs are declining. That's because of climate change. You may know about the bleaching; that's what happened on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. The bleaching happens when they lose that microalgae, and that bleaching may cause the death of the corals. If they are bleaching, that’s a sign that something is happening in the sea, and it's something happening with the climate. It's not the normal temperature that they are used to; that's a stress condition. If the conditions don't get better, they will lose all the microalgae, and they will die eventually.
The ocean acidification is the change of the water chemistry. Today, the water becomes more acidic, and that causes a change in the pH, which leads to stress for the corals. They will make thinner skeletons, more fragile skeletons. So, the Europeans under storms, when they are more intense, can take out the entire ecosystem. Okay, this is rare, but it does happen with climate change. The problem is that the stress events are becoming more intense and more frequent. We are trying to figure out if the corals will make it or not.
[Music] These trips to New Mexico are very interesting because they are more silent and resistant than some other areas we have witnessed. So we can see here the blue team, but also we have seen them recover. Some of them died, but most of them survived. And for the next stress event, they resist more, and if they bleach, they die less. So we are trying to understand why they have this resistance.
Most corals live in crystal waters with temperatures always stable, and here in the central region of the Pacific in Mexico, the temperatures can go up and down four degrees in one day Celsius. So that’s not supposed to be optimal for corals, and here they live that every day. So they are already stressed; they live all the time in stress. So when another stressful condition comes, they say, “Well, yeah, it’s bad; we are going to bleach,” but they can cope.
We do coral restoration. The restoration technique is actually so basic at the sites where the corals are more resistant and resilient, and we're taking those fragments, natural fragments, to sites nearby the corals. The branching corals reproduce by fragmentation. We look for the healthy fragments, and then we look for a surface to put it with cable ties. We say that there are fragments of opportunity; if they find somewhere to attach, they will grow there. What we're giving them is like an extra shot.
We monitor the healthy reefs, and we are also monitoring the reefs that we are restoring. It’s very important for that reason to go and to visit the reefs. That's an important income. If you are not careful, that can damage the corals and the rest of the organisms too. Too many people make a huge damage. The information that we are generating around all these trips helps pay for them. Local managers make actions, so the local people, the government, and us, as a scientific approach, work together to find a solution.
How can I still get people there to enjoy the place but without losing it? So we apply what’s called carrying capacity; that is, how many people can get there without damaging the site. [Music] First, some people were angry, like, “Why are you closing the area? We want to go there!” But if you want to really enjoy the natural resources, you have to wait a little bit for the system to rest.
It wasn’t too late. We are going to do something to make this better and to make it last for you, your sons, your grandsons. So we are trying to go one step at a time. So I think that's the best advice: don't look at the disaster; look at what mitigates the disaster. These animals, these ecosystems, don't think about a hurricane; think about the beautiful coral reefs. I try not to lose the ability to get amazed. [Music]