Where corals lie
Where corals lie
Ruth Gates, marine biologist, died on
October 25th, aged 56
A RATHER
LARGE number of people thought that corals were rocks. And certainly, in Ruth
Gates's almost-bare office at the Hawaiian Institute of Marine Biology, where
Kaneohe Bay filled the window, the only object on her desk was a lovely
ivory-pinkish stone coral, branched like a tree. But it would have been much more
beautiful alive, a colony of tiny polyps bustling and busy as a three-dimensional
city. It would have been much more stunning when the algae lodged in every cell
of every polyp were feeding them sugars built from sunlight and coloring them
so crazily that she could only gasp "Wow!", and laugh, when she swam
past them. But then she also said "Wow! That's gorgeous!" when she
saw, under the laser scanning confocal microscope, just one daring individual
flex its muscular mouth or shoot out its sting-tipped tentacles to catch food
from the water. Her single-minded mission was to keep these beauties going.
It was hard work. It got all the harder as the oceans warmed
and acidified and the corals, stressed and angry (for they had feelings), spat
out their algae and began to bleach and die. In 1998, 2010, 2015 and 2016,
increasingly close together, mass bleachings occurred all round the world. She
was the first to show that it happened more in warmer waters. Diving in Kaneohe
Bay, where most healthy corals were an elegant dark brown, she found a muddy
olive mess. Elsewhere she saw reefs she had once loved full of white ghosts,
like a battlefield. Off the north shore of Jamaica, where she had done her doctoral
work in 1985 on a reef with a sudden, sheer wall of massive and beautiful
corals, developers killed it in two weeks. She could never go back to places
that humans-"we", she always said, not exempting herself-had so
recklessly destroyed.
Adent voices were speaking up for the giant panda and the rainforest;
not many spoke for corals. She strode right in. A third degree black belt in
karate and an explosive technique on a boxing punch-bag made her pretty
well-formed to fight. It was horrible, though, to state the facts. Over 90 of
global warming in the past 50 years had occurred in the oceans. About half of
the world's reefs had been lost since 1990. By 2050 they could either all be
gone, or damaged beyond recovery. And a quarter of marine species, the main
food source for half a billion people, depended on them.
She had a plan, however. She laid it out in 2013 in an essay
that won a prize of $10,000 from the Paul G. Allen Foundation and then, with
Madeleine van Oppen, a grant of $4m, after which she was made director of the
institute, among the palms of Coconut Island. That was a joy: a campus big
enough to deploy her battered golf cart, and freedom to pick colleagues
properly mixed by race, gender and sexuality, not tediously white male.
("You rock!" was her cry of encouragement to them.) Out in the bay,
fortified with coffee and sometimes buzzed by turtles, she did her almost daily
diving, feet-first off the boat when she was really eager.
Back in her lab, in a "gym" (or possibly a spa) for
corals, she put the strongest little beasties in vats and doused them with
warming water. Her purpose was not to kill them but to create "super
corals", by giving them an experience of stress they might remember and prepare
for. For corals had good memories. She had found, too, that their algae came in
many varieties, some more helpful against stress than others, so she persuaded
less choosy, "entrepreneurial" corals to host heat-tolerant algae, to
see how they got on. Those that did best would be returned to the reef, and
weaklings rejected. She also played matchmaker, collecting sperm and eggs from healthy
individuals in their weirdly brief breeding season to produce in vitro
offspring that might prove hardy sorts.
This drew plenty of criticism. She was accused of tinkering with
nature, speeding up evolution, narrowing diversity. Besides (said the critics),
the money should be spent on slowing climate change. Though she was
friendliness and niceness itself, still carrying her Englishness in her accent
and in a tendency to go pink in the heat, she sharply rebutted those remarks.
Tinkering with nature was nothing new; dogs had been selectively bred for the
longest time. As for narrowing diversity, climate change was forcing the most obscene
genetic-narrowing experiment that had ever been done. She was doing what she
could to help nature resist. Ideally, she would not have to. But this was a
desperate situation.
What frustrated her most, as a scientist, was that
fellow-scientists stayed in their own silos, producing lengthy papers to be
peer reviewed, arguing endlessly with each other, while corals were dying. She
had the data. Everyone did. She told the public the story in blunt, simple
words. And she had to act now, not wait for permission. Her work might be only
small-bore, not scalable; she accepted that. But if some coral colonies
survived, there was hope, and she lived on that. What idiots they would be if,
after all their talking, there was no coral left for anyone to see, and the
underwater films of Jacques Cousteau which had so amazed her as a child, even in
black and white, turned outto be a record of a lost world.
Co-operation was the key. She wanted scientists and others in
every field to say, "I have this piece of special knowledge; how can I help?"
For planet Earth was like a jigsaw puzzle in which corals and giant pandas,
savannah and rain forest, were all pieces that must fit together. If one piece
was lost, what would be the consequences for the others? What would happen to
human beings? She did not know. But the corals, which in easier times lived in
such happy symbiosis with the algae inside them-maybe the corals knew. _
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