[Coral-List] So you think you understand coral bleaching

[sealab at earthlink.net]

While I agree with the sentiment that “There is room for innovative, exciting, even noble research by talented scientists along all the frontiers. It needs to be done”. I’m worried that we are losing sight of that important axiom you raised of the precedence of humility over hubris as we march hurriedly into the uncharted waters of coral reef engineering. It seems to me that the coral science community has all but abandoned the role of documenting “humanity’s many crimes against nature” in return for incentivized opportunities that make all kinds of far reaching claims regarding the ability of corals to prosper even in increasingly warming and polluted seas. In your recent blog “Viral pandemics and climate change” you extoll the virtues of inventiveness, but admit that “none of these plans scale up to real solutions for a world that has already lost 50% of its coral and is getting warmer every year, heading towards a +3.5 to +5.0C increase by the end of this century”. My question for you and Scott is a direct one. Considering what we are up against and where we are headed, is it not fanciful, even arrogant to think that we can genetically engineer corals to withstand all of this? Is it not like promising the moon . . . and the stars? In your recent blog “Viral pandemics and climate change” you conclude by saying that “Perhaps, just perhaps, Covid-19 might help us to understand how to work as a global partnership to manage global crises”. In the end, isn’t global action on climate change, water pollution and other major stressors the only real “cure” and the only true solution? Lastly, out here in the non-scientific world, I fear that all the attention bestowed upon restoration and the development of “super-corals” is (perhaps unintentionally) reinforcing the idea that we are well on the way to the promised land so why bother changing our ways or even mentioning causation.

Regards,

Steve

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On 3/28/20, 5:27 PM, Peter Sale via Coral-List <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> wrote:

Hi coral-listers,

I somehow failed to see the post by Scott Wooldridge when it first came in, and only read it in the trailing flotsam of a post by Denny Hubbard. Scott's post included a number of interesting points that I want to build on here.

Scott's thesis was (with apologies) that there is much more that coral reef scientists should be doing beyond discussing how best to convey information about the deterioration of coral reefs. In particular he pointed to the complexity that is being revealed in the patterns and processes that make up what we call bleaching and argued for a substantial effort by the reef science community to work out the details, and to use that knowledge in developing effective methods for transforming the symbionts and perhaps also the corals so that they cope more effectively with warming without disrupting their symbiosis. His is a plea for fundamental and targeted new science at the molecular and cellular level primarily that will achieve assisted evolution to rescue reefs and make it possible for them to persist despite warming seas.

I particularly liked his "My challenge, especially to all the fresh thinking young scientists out there, is to keep an open mind. Keep striving for the CURE. Never let yourself be convinced that we already know all the necessary science to answer this. WE DON?T and we are so very very far from it?" Where 'cure' means an engineered production of more resilient symbionts and corals.

I agree whole-heartedly, but with two provisos. First, Scott suggests the search for this 'cure' should occupy "99.9% of the thinking time of coral reef scientists", but I suggest there are additional important scientific frontiers and some of us - because of training and experience - will be better suited to toiling on these other frontiers that to retool ourselves as cellular/molecular biologists. Second, while we urge the scientific troops forward in noble efforts to do useful, targeted science to solve the problems posed by the Anthropocene, we must do so with humility rather than with hubris. Scott's post did not ooze hubris, but he did not mention humility.

Frontiers:

If the reef science community becomes a group of jaundiced gloom-mongers who document the decline of coral reefs in exquisite detail, while projecting likely futures, also in great detail, we will have become merely the funeral directors and undertakers watching death take place and making sure it is all documented for future historians. The present decline of coral reefs needs gifted funeral directors and undertakers, and that story deserves to be told effectively - it is one of humanity's many crimes against nature. But if that is all reef science is going to be, I'd advise all those 'fresh thinking young scientists' to skip this field entirely and go do something creative and interesting with their lives.

Those of us who are more ecological than cellular-molecular in outlook and training must take on these funeral director/undertaker tasks, but we should also recognize that there remain enormous gaps in our understanding of how ecological systems are organized, and how resilient systems differ from those with less resilience. This is a general truth about ecology, but definitely relevant to reef ecology, because reef ecology deals with one of the most complex, resilient systems on the planet. Concepts like competition, predation, disturbance have been studied to death, and concepts like mutualism somewhat less, but we still know damn all about them. Until we build a more refined understanding of how individuals and populations interact to produce and sustain viable ecological communities we are not going to be in a position to engineer new, more resilient communities able to deal with an Anthropocene which is clearly upon us and changing the world in profound ways. Without this sc

ientific effort to truly understand the nuanced details that make some combinations of actors effective, resilient, productive, perennial, and other combinations not, we won't be able much more than trial and error guesswork when it comes to helping systems through the Anthropocene. There is plenty here to challenge the minds of creative young scientists, and we need to encourage this. Similar arguments could be made for other frontiers in coral reef science - we are very far from understanding what reefs are, how they came to be, why they are degrading now, and how they might persist more effectively. Nor do we really comprehend the extent of their importance for coastal populations of humans, or the complex relationships that exist between people and reefs.

The good news is that, at least with respect to reef ecology, there are signs that the science community is beginning to recognize the need for a reinvigorated investigation of ecological patterns and processes on coral reefs, all targeted to make us better able to anticipate, and perhaps manipulate, future reef status. For evidences I point to the series of papers in Functional Ecology 33, 2019 on the topic of the functions of coral reefs: the editorial by Gareth Williams and Nick Graham starts this series -- Williams GJ, Graham NAJ. Rethinking coral reef functional futures. Functional Ecology 2019;33:942-947. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2435.13374 As well, I point to two papers in Nature by Terry Hughes and others that go well beyond simply documenting what happened to the GBR in 2016-17: Hughes et al 2017 Nature 546: 82-90 doi:10.1038/nature22901 and Hughes et al 2018 Nature 556: 492-496 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0041-2 There is room for innovative, exciting, even no

ble research by talented scientists along all the frontiers. It needs to be done.

Humility rather than hubris:

In the Fall of 1960, I was taught Introductory Biochemistry by an evangelical, almost born-again biochemist who prevailed upon us to understand that biochemistry was shortly going to explain all those things we did not yet understand, solve all those problems we had not yet solved, and generally usher in a world of profound wonderfulness where everyone dies of old age, no disease ever prevails, and the starving masses are all well fed. He believed this to his soul, and yet at that date molecular biologists had only begun to decipher the genetic code - the first three-letter code for an amino acid was not discovered for three more years!

Since that time, I have seen many instances of scientists who reveal immense hubris as they promise the moon, next week, next year or very soon. Frequently, they argue that only their work, or the work of their colleagues or within their field, has the power to reveal the wonders of the universe and move humanity towards a promised land. They do this in their grant proposals. In talking to the press while hyping their latest journal article. I've done it too. It's necessary to feel good about what you are doing and where you think it is going. Scott's post was not filled with hubris - he dipped into that ink only in suggesting that the details of coral/algal symbiosis should occupy the thoughts of all reef scientists 99.9% of the time.

We need to think about our field, where it is going, and where it might be profitable to go next. We need to encourage young, bright scientists to reach for the stars, or in Scott's words, to 'keep striving for the CURE' or "stuff the silver, go for the gold'. Our science is better for such reflection. But it is wise to reflect with a healthy dose of humility. The things we do not yet understand about coral reefs and about what is happening to them as they are drawn into the Anthropocene are vast. We must not promise more than we can reasonably expect to deliver. It may well be, that the Anthropocene demands of humanity a much more conscientious hand on the tiller, steering this planet into favorable waters than has ever been the case before - no organism has ever done this, so even in suggesting it may become necessary, I do so humbly. If that kind of planetary management is what is going to be required in the future in order to sustain human quality of life and much beyond,

we will only be successful if we approach that task humbly, knowing we are rank amateurs in the field of planetary engineering.

Peter Sale

University of Windsor

www.petersalebooks.com

Peter F Sale

68 Sander Drive

Bracebridge ON Canada P1L1K6

1 705 640 0555

1 705 706 3359 (cell)

sale at uwindsor.ca

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