Juli Berwald ’89 shared how her time at Amherst launched a lifelong love of the oceans and provided reflections, thoughts, and insights from her two recent books, Spineless, about jellyfish, and Life on the Rocks, about corals.
- I'm Wes Drips. I'm the director of sustainability here at the college. Very excited to welcome back Juli Berwald from the class of 1989. She even managed to get a number of her classmates to make the journey to come back, so it's like a mini reunion, which is great to see. I'm gonna make my comments very short and really turn it over to Juli. But just a little bit of background, I'm guessing you probably saw her bio, which is why you came, or saw the title of her talk, but Juli's an ocean scientist and writer. She majored in math while she was here, but really discovered her now lifelong love of the sea from her junior study away program. And she can tell you maybe a little bit more about how she ended up with her love of the ocean. She has a PhD in Ocean Science from the University of Southern California, has written two books. I have copies here if you're ever curious, Spineless, which you'll hear more about, as well as Life on the Rocks. One about jellyfish and the other about corals. And her work has been featured over a large number of different publications, including the New York Times, the National Geographic, Science, Nature, and the Smithsonian, and she recently founded a nonprofit to study an unusually healthy coral reef in Honduras that you'll hear a little bit about at the end of her talk as well. I will keep my comments to that and turn it over to Juli as the star of the show, and say welcome back, we're excited to hear your talk.
- Awesome, thank you to Wes for making my trip here incredible. Thank you guys for all coming out. It's like, it's great to see like such a packed house. I love it. Thank you for all the people who are out there virtually. I'm really grateful you signed up. And thank you to the Shogren Moon Sustainability and Climate Change Initiative, which funded my trip here. So it's just incredible, I feel very privileged to be back on campus and to be able to speak here. Walking around campus today and being in classes with some of you guys has absolutely pulled up my heartstrings, and it feels very full circle. So I wanna start by stepping back in time to the late '80s, crazy late '80s when I was a Missourian who had finally got used to being in New England. And then I decided to like go away my junior year as one does. I went to Israel and I was miserable on my program. I don't wanna say that to any of you who might be juniors going away next year, but I was pretty miserable. I just didn't connect with the people in my program, and I was like eating too much falafel all the time. And so anyway, there was this sign on the side of a building on the campus where I was, and it said like, "Marine ecology course, one week during winter break." And I was like, sign me up because I gotta do something different. Like I was not happy. And I went, they put us on this bus, we drove through the desert, we get out. The world is like no place I had ever seen before. There's like these red mountains, this crazy blue ocean. And the instructors in the class were like, "Here, here's a snorkel, here's a mask, here's some fins." And I was like, "What do I do with those?" I was from Missouri. I had never stuck my head in the water before. They're like, "Go, go, go, go." So I did, and you know, this is what you get face to face with. And I was like, "Wait, what, what is this?" This was in the days before Planet Earth or Blue Planet, all those shows. And I really, I had never seen this before, like this life, this incredible architecture, this diversity of shape and form. And I was like, I live on the same planet with this and I never knew it, and it just blew my, it was like, really blew my mind. So we get out of the water and the professor was like, "Okay, learn these 20 species of corals. We're having a test tomorrow, and I'm gonna tell you something about the lack of Voltaire equations, and we're gonna understand the different life cycles of these corals." And I'm like, "Wait, huh? You can use equations to describe biology." I was like, for some reason all of the math that I had been learning at Amherst was so abstract and theoretical that I didn't realize like, wow, I can use it to understand the world around me. And it was like, click, this is what I wanna do. But you know, I came back to Amherst, and I'm like, "I wanna be a marine biologist!" And Amherst was like, "You're a math major," like, you know? And I was like, oh man. And they're like, "You can stay longer if you wanna change your major." And I was like, I don't think my parents wanna pay that extra tuition. So I was like, well, what else can I do? And there was a professor of evolution who was like, "I'll support you to do a senior project on corals." And what I had decided by this point was I wanted to understand how corals interacted with water and how water flow might affect coral behavior or coral growth. And so first semester I did like a literature review, and then second semester I was like, I wanna do an experiment. And Professor Ewald was like, "Well, I think there might be some flow tanks in the Pratt Geology building, so why don't you go see if you can find them." I was like, okay. So you have to go back in time 'cause at this point in time I didn't have a computer. We did not have computers yet, which is hard to imagine. I did not have my own computer. I definitely did not have a phone that I could walk around with. I didn't have a camera, I didn't even have a camera, so I can't even show you a picture of it. But thank goodness for the Library of Congress, because they have pictures of everything. And this is Pratt Geology building, and this is what it looked like in the '80s. And so now it's been remodeled, I got to see it today. It's like the most beautiful Frenchman dorm ever. It is also the home of the sustainability office, which I think is amazing karma because Charles Pratt was an oil baron. So you know, making up for that. But the Library of Congress also has a picture of what it looked like inside. And I wanna just take a second for this to sink in. So my roommates and I in the '80s, we really thought that we had brought aerobics to campus, and we had Cindy Lauper on a cassette tape, but clearly we were just part of an old tradition of like people doing aerobics to music. And we totally sold ourselves short, 'cause we should have asked for like live accompaniment with a man in tails, but we didn't. But anyway, this is what the building did look like in the '80s too. And what you, what the boys are standing on there is a floor that was a gym floor, but it could also be open. And underneath that floor there was a swimming pool where you could play water polo and have people watch you play water polo, I guess, if you wanted. But the floor, yeah, the floor slid over the top of the swimming pool. By the '80s, the floor was, I think, sealed shut, but underneath the pool was empty, and in that pool were these flow tanks. So like there was like a little like, you could kind of like lower yourself down these stairs and get into the pool, and that's where I did my experiment. And I pulled it out to look back at it for this talk. It was called, you guys, it's like typed, "An experiment on diffusion rates and the boundary layer in corals." And it had really great gems like cartoons that I drew of corals, how corals might eat. It had xerox copies of coral skeletons, 'cause I did not have a camera, and it had a picture. This is what I did for the experiment. I hung the coral colony across the middle of the flow tank, and then I injected dye with the food coloring into each of the holes where a polyp would've lived, and then I timed how long that it took for the dye to diffuse out. And like, my hypothesis or my theory was that, like, well, my question was how does a polyp, corals are made up of polyps, right? How does the polyp know it's on the edge of the coral in order to know that it should grow? And like how does it know it's not in the middle, because the ones in the middle can't grow 'cause they got skeleton around them, but so like, how does it know it's on the edge? And I'm like, well, maybe the diffusion rate on the edges was higher than the middle, and somehow the corals could internalize that and know, oh, I'm on the edge, I should divide. So that was my theory, but my data was a disaster. And so I was like, really, like this didn't work at all. And at the end I wrote, "because my results do not show any relationship between any of the parameters I was testing, I can say nothing." And I was like, oh my god, you know, it's like really sad, it's really sad for me to read this now. But I think I was, you know, it wasn't just the experiment which was largely unsuccessful, but it was also like, you know, this was my senior year, and I think there was some angst and fear about going out into the world and leaving academics behind, leaving this world that, you know, we've all lived in for our whole lives behind. And I did freak out senior year. And what I did was I gave up my hopes of being a marine biologist and I became an accountant, and I was the worst accountant. I moved to Boston with Elizabeth, who's here I think, and I was the worst accountant I think the firm had ever hired. And one day she came home, Elizabeth came, we were roommates, we lived in Boston together. And I was curled up in the fetal position on the floor, like feeling horribly sad, like my soul was draining out of me. And Elizabeth just looked at me, and she's like, "You need to be a marine biologist." And I'm like, "Yeah, I think so." So I picked myself up off the floor, and I started applying to all these graduate programs. I fixed up my resume by doing a bunch of internships, and I finally got into grad school, but not to study coral, although I did get into grad school to study something beautiful and colorful, which was satellite imagery of the ocean. And this was in the '90s, and it was the first time we had satellites up that could look at the color of the ocean. And from that, we could do some algorithms to predict how much photosynthesis was going on in the ocean, and this was really important because prior to this, we sampled the ocean in bottles and we measured how much photosynthesis was going on, and then we extrapolated that to the whole ocean. And this really showed us that there's so much more complexity in the ocean than that. This is a picture of photosynthesis, and my contribution was one teeny little equation. But basically the big gist of this is that the ocean takes up about 30% of the carbon dioxide that we have emitted from burning fossil fuels. And without the ocean doing that job for us, climate change would be a much more serious thing than, I mean, it is very serious, but it's buffering us to some extent. And so we were able to understand that by looking at these satellite images of the ocean. After I finished my PhD, I fell in love and got married and moved to Texas, and I took a postdoc with me to the University of Texas to do more satellite imagery, but I couldn't maintain my enthusiasm for it. And I don't know if it was because I wasn't working on corals or because most of the satellite imagery in Texas had to do with subsidence of land because of fossil fuel extraction. And so I fell off the academic path, and I started writing, and I loved it. It turned out I loved writing about science, I loved telling stories about what scientists were doing. I loved talking to scientists. It just was really incredibly fulfilling to me in a way I didn't expect, and I got to write for so many great magazines through the years, it's been an absolute joy. But I wanna talk about this one article in the upper left hand corner, which is called The Acid Sea. And ocean acidification is another problem we have from emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. When carbon dioxide mixes with water, it forms a weak acid and that has pushed the pH of the ocean down. So it's made it more acidic. And the fear was, this is an old article, I did not write this article, I should say Elizabeth Colbert wrote it, and she's a New Yorker writer who's really, she's won a Pulitzer Prize. And I was fact checking that article for National Geographic. And the issue is that as the seas become more acidic, things with shells find it harder to make shells. And so there was a question like, who's gonna win and lose in a future acidified ocean? And the things that were supposed to be losers, and this is from a pre-print, so you can see the typo on scuttlefish there, but were things with shells. And then the things that were supposed to be winners were things without shells, so kelp, sponges, microalgae, and jellyfish. And something about jellyfish just jumped out at me. I was like, how do we know? Like, has anyone tested this? What is the, have there been experiments on decreasing pH and jellyfish? And so I didn't know the answer to that, so I just googled it, first of all. And what I discovered was that jellyfish were gonna be our overlords, and I didn't know it, I was shocked. And I mean, you know, I wasn't a marine scientist anymore, but I was following stuff in the ocean, and these headlines were really surprising to me. So what I did, I got very obsessed with jellyfish and trying to find the answer. Turns out in the scientific literature, there had been only two studies done on ocean acidification and jellyfish, and they were hardly conclusive. It didn't seem like ocean acidification was really gonna affect jellyfish that much, but it was unclear. So, but what I did find was like a lot of scientists saying, "Yes, the jellyfish are taking over oceans." No they're not, we don't have enough data." And it was kind of exciting, like this fight. So I engineered every family vacation for the next six years for us to go to places where I could talk to jellyfish scientists, and they told me amazing things. One of the things they told me, oh, one of the places we went was Woods, Woods Hole, which is just around the corner. And I was talking to these jellyfish scientists who make robotic jellies, and that may look like something else, but it's a robotic jelly. And so the top one there, it's got actuators. So those are like fake muscles, robotic muscles. And they stuck it in the water and it squeezed shut. And the jellyfish moved like, you know, pushed up and then they released the actuator muscles, and it opened back up and it went back to where it started. And so they did again and went whoop, and then it went back to where it started, boop boop, boop. It was like a yo-yo. And they're like, "Well, jellyfish aren't yo-yos, like what is going on? Like, what's wrong with our robot?" And so this postdoc was like, "Oh, I forgot to glue on the floppy part." And you know how a jellyfish has that like wavy part on the edge of the bell? And also jellyfish have this like, that scalloped edge. So they pulled the jellyfish outta the water, they added this, it's called a passive margin, like in technical biomechanics language, and then they make cut the scallops and they stuck it in the water and it went boop, boop, boop, boop just like a jellyfish. So they discovered that that wavy part, that passive margin is actually what drives a jellyfish through the water. And if you think about the way all animals in the water move, they're always wiggly, right? They're always wiggling. Turns out those wiggles, they create these things called turbulent eddies that go around. They, on a jellyfish, they spin around and they come into the top of the jellyfish and create a low pressure system in front of the animal, and that actually sucks the jellyfish through the water. We on land, we push behind us to move forward. Jellyfish do that, they push against the water, but most of the propulsive force comes from that low pressure on top of the jellyfish. So my first, oh, and it turns out jellyfish are the best at doing this of anything in the world. So this is cost of transport, so how much energy it takes to go move, and this is just size. And you can see the jellyfish here, they use the least energy to move of anything, less than fish or squid or crustaceans. They use less than birds to fly and anything that runs. So they're the most efficient swimmers in the sea. And this leads me to my first lesson, which is that sometimes it may not seem like we're headed in the right direction. We may be flopping around a little bit, but we actually might be doing exactly what we need to do. The other thing, another place that I went on my search for jellyfish was Italy. My husband had a business trip and I accompanied him, and I went there because there were some scientists there working on the immortal jellyfish, which is kind of famous. Some of you guys might have heard of immortal jellyfish. That's it up there on the top, it's called Turritopsis dohrnii. The lifecycle of a jellyfish is really interesting. This is like what we think of, most of us think of as a jellyfish. That's the Medusa. It makes a little larvae called a planula. The planula plants itself and becomes a polyp. So you remember I talked about coral polyps? That's going to come back. So jellyfish and coral are first cousins, so they all have polyps. At some point in its life, and we're not exactly sure why, the jellyfish polyp will slice itself horizontally into like a stack of pancakes, and then each one will pop off one after the other and form these little thyre, which are like snowflakes, but they're actually baby jellyfish. And then they start eating and they become a Medusa. So that's a typical jellyfish's life. The immortal jellyfish, it goes from the Medusa to the polyp without becoming a larvae. So it'd be as if a butterfly became a caterpillar, just backing its life history up. And then it can go back and forth between these two stages forever without going through that reproduction stage. And that's why it's called the immortal jellyfish. And, well, there's really cool stuff, but I'm gonna move on, 'cause anyway, so they told me all about the immortal jellyfish, which was great. But then they said, "We have to tell you something else. We're very concerned. We just published this paper called Double Trouble, because the Suez Canal is being expanded, it's being doubled in size and nobody's paying attention to it. There has been no environmental assessment done on what this might mean for life in the Mediterranean Sea." So here's kind of a cartoon, but here's the Red Sea, this is the Suez Canal, this is the Mediterranean. Because of climate change, the eastern Mediterranean is now warm enough to provide a habitat for Red Sea animals, and the flow is in this direction. It's from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. And there used to be bitter lakes, these hyper-saline, very salty lakes that the Suez Canal is built through that acted as a biological barrier 100 years ago. Those are gone, they're washed out now. So this is already kind of a highway, they said, for animals to move into the Mediterranean. If it's double in size, it'll be a super highway. And I was like, "Well, that's really crazy. Like why has there been no environmental impact assessment done?" And they're like, "We don't know." And I'm like, "Well, aren't there any policies around this?" And there's like, "There's four treaties that should have jurisdiction over this." And I'm like, "Well, why aren't those treaties being enforced?" And they're like, "Why don't you call around and find out?" And I was like, me? And so, but I did because how do you not? And I spent a couple weeks trying to get someone at any of these treaty organizations to talk to me, and they wouldn't. And they told me to call over here, call over here. "Oh, sorry, I'm on the tarmac, I can't hear you." And so anyway, I was like, this is really unbelievable because there are some mitigation things, tools that could have been put in place. But yeah, no one would talk about it. So I pitched it to the New York Times and they said, "Okay, we'll run this article." And I was like, wow, this is the biggest mouthpiece that I know of. Certainly now there will be an environmental assessment done, and we will like stop the movement of animals between one ocean and another, but that did not happen. So this is lesson two. Sometimes it's really important to say what you have to say, but sometimes you have to say it more than once, and sometimes people won't listen. And that was a hard lesson for me to learn because I really thought, like all you have to do is say it, but it's not true. You have to work harder than that. And it turns out the jellyfish scientists were right. So this jellyfish is an invasive from the Indian ocean, it's called the nomadic jellyfish. It now swarms the Eastern Mediterranean over hundreds of kilometers every summer. It's a very bad stinger, so people can't go to the beaches when it's blooming. It also gets pulled into power plants that use the sea water to cool their equipment, and so it then clogs up power plants. And this was sent to me two days ago. This is another jellyfish. I don't think it's the same species, 'cause look how big it is. Did anyone read Spineless, anyone here? So did you remember Moti Mendelssohn? That's Moti, so Moti sent me that two days ago, and I haven't been able to get back in touch with him to say like, is this another invasive that's come through? But I think it is. So the jellyfish scientists were right, and now there are animals using the Suez Canal as a superhighway. So eventually all of my jellyfish tracking ended up in a book called Spineless. And I was really, really grateful that Spineless found an audience. It wasn't super easy to get a book about jellyfish published, but I did. And, but one thing I realized as I was writing the book was that, as I followed these scientists around, I was actually retracing some of the paths I had walked as a graduate student. And I decided that those stories mattered to this book. So the book became part memoir and part science, and it was called The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone, because I also confronted how I learned to recognize my own voice on the path of the jellyfish, and especially in a world where the oceans are suffering so much. And so my publisher was happy and they wanted me to write another book. And they said, "What do you wanna write about?" And I was like, "Maybe corals." But also I was worried about corals, because as we know, things aren't going great for the corals. And so I wanna just explain what a coral is first. And so this is a coral here, and a coral is a polyp. So you take a jellyfish, flip it upside down, stick it in a skeleton, you've got the coral. But what makes the coral different from the jellyfish, and, well, not all jellyfish, but what makes the coral really special are these beautiful golden orbs, which you can see here. And those golden orbs are actually dyna-flagellates. They're a kind of phytoplankton, which is what I worked on for my PhD, and corals live in the deserts of the ocean. There's not very much nitrogen there, which is a nutrient that phytoplankton need. So what these phytoplankton have done is they've teamed up with the coral, they live in their guts, and the coral feeds them nitrogen and they photosynthesize, and they feed the coral 90% of the sugar that they make from photosynthesis. So it's an incredible partnership. And with that power source, so the coral basically has all these like solar panels. What the coral does is it makes limestone with the energy it gets from the sugar from the algae. And those limestone are the great reefs of our planets that are only in tropical places because the coral have to live there in order to have enough sunlight to feed the algae that live in their tissues. But this incredible partnership has an achilles heel, which is heat, and as we know, we're heating up the oceans. And so when we don't know who throws the switch, we don't know if it's the algae saying, "This home that I've like enjoyed for a long time isn't feeling so great to me right now, I'm gonna reveal myself to the coral's immune system and get kicked out." Or if it's the coral saying, "I'm not feeling good, I'm too hot, I'm gonna ramp up my immune system. This foreign being that I used to let live inside of me, no more, like I'm kicking you out." We don't know who throws the switch. But either way, when the temperature warms up for about two degrees for a month, the algae is kicked out of the coral. And that's called bleaching, that's what bleaching is. And this is what a bleached reef looks like. And we know that it looks like a skeleton because it largely is. You're looking through the coral tissue into the coral skeleton, and if the water stays warm, the coral will starve to death 'cause it doesn't have the algae feeding it sugar. And half the reefs on our planet have already succumbed to bleaching, so it's not a good situation. And when I was considering the next book I wanted to write, I didn't know if I could write an obituary for this world that I loved, that I fell in love with when I was a junior at Cambridge. But I started Googling it 'cause that's what you do. And I found this meeting called Reef Futures in 2018, and it was a global coral restoration and interventions symposium. And I'm like, well, that doesn't sound like an obituary. Like that sounds encouraging. And then I noticed this one talk, which I'm gonna point out 'cause I'm gonna come back to it, which was called Biological and Geoengineering Approaches to Restoration. And crazy enough, it was being given by this guy I knew, Daniel Harrison, who had worked in my lab when I was a graduate student. And I was like, okay, there's coral, there's this guy Daniel who I used to know, and he's talking about something, geoengineering, which I'm very curious about, so I'm gonna go to this meeting. And I'm really glad I went because what I discovered there were all kinds of people who were not willing to give up yet, who are trying to say, what can we do to support the health of coral reefs? And one of those people were really surprising to me, but it was the Mars Candy Bar Company, and they have a project in Sulawesi. So up at the top you can see the globe. I wish, I wonder if, well, okay, so there's the Philippines, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea right in the middle of where that red dot is. That's called the Coral Triangle, and it's the part of our planet where coral are the most diverse. There's probably somewhere around 600 to 800 species of coral there. It's also not being terribly affected by climate change yet so it's a really great place to work on coral, like corals are doing decently there. The Mars Candy Bar Company has a chocolate factory where that dot is, which is the island of Sulawesi. And what they were noticing is that the people who worked in their factory who usually get added income from fishing the reefs or added protein from fishing the reefs were not able to do that as well as they had been in the past. I should say coral reefs support a quarter of all marine species. So even though they take up less than 1% of the ocean, about 860,000 species depend on coral reef. They also feed about a billion people with their primary source of protein, and they also deflect about 97% of storm energy, a healthy reef. So coral reefs are crazy important, but they were starting to fail in Indonesia, and the Mars, and it wasn't because of climate change, it was because of this. So this is the result of something known as blast fishing. And because of poverty, some artisanal fishermen have learned to use bombs, and they might have learned it from US military operations. And they throw those bombs on the reef, it bangs against the fish's swim bladders, and they float to the surface, and it's easy to collect fish. It is illegal, everyone knows it's illegal, but it's very difficult to police. And so these bombs go off a lot. And every time I dove in Indonesia, I would hear one or two bombs exploding somewhere within earshot. Sound travels very far in water, so I don't know how close or far they were, but I would hear them. And when one of these bombs exploded, it leaves a scar on the reef. And this reef is, this scar is 30 years old, so the reef can't recover. And so Mars thought, well, this would be a good place for us to start trying to build restorations. And so they came up with this idea, which are called, they're called reef stars. It seems pretty simple, but it took a lot of time to get it exactly right. They're just rebar. They put local sand on them, they pay local fishermen to tie corals that have broken from the reef during surge and wind, and I mean, sorry, current from currents. And they tie them on, you take them as fast as you can to the bomb site, spraying them with sea water the whole time, and then you put 'em in the water. And then they are networked together into kind of a galaxy of reef stars. And then you wait, and 18 months later the reef starts to come back, and you can only see sort of the center of the stars. And then three years later, the reef looks restored. So this is like an incredible, it's amazing to see it. It feels like, you know, there is resiliency out there. We can support the health of reefs. And the Mars Company has restored probably about 50 acres of reefs at this point. The other thing that I saw, but I should say this. 50 acres is a lot, but it's not, you know, it's not compared to how much reef we've lost, there's an issue of scale. And in Australia, they're very aware of that issue of scale. So this is, what you're looking at is the northeast coast of Australia, and this is where the Great Barrier Reef exists. And the Great Barrier Reef is the biggest coral reef on our planet. It stretches about 1,400 miles if you picked it up. All these dots are the Great Barrier Reef. If you picked it up and laid it over the west coast of the United States, it would stretch from Vancouver to Tijuana. It's massive, it is made up of like 3,000 smaller islands. The Great Barrier Reef had never had a severe bleaching until 2016, and then it got hit massively in the north. If you guys saw the movie Chasing Coral, this was the same bleaching event. Then in 2017, that same heat wave swung back around the planet again, and it took out, it bleached like crazy the middle of the reef. And so the Australians were suddenly faced with this like question of, "What do we do? We are responsible for this treasure here on this planet. It is our responsibility to take care of it. We better do something." So they launched the biggest initiative to support coral health ever. They put $44 million into research and development, mostly research, like what is every idea we can come up with to protect corals? And they are going at it from many different angles, but the one I was really interested in is the one that speaks to scale, because how do you protect a huge swath like that? And you have to think up in the sky basically. So the idea is this thing called cloud brightening, and it falls within the category known as geoengineering. And within that category, which it means engineering our planet to protect it from climate change. And within that category there are many, many ideas, but one of them is called solar shading, which means blocking the sun from hitting our planet and reflecting that sunlight, that energy back out into outer space. There's many different ways you can do this, but the one that they chose was this one here, marine cloud brightening, marine clouds are dimmer than the clouds on land because there's fewer particles for water droplets to coalesce around, you know, clouds are just water. And I think there's a really nice way to picture it is to think about a glass of skim milk. It has less fat globules in it, and so it kind of looks gray, that's a marine cloud. If you add more fat globules to the milk, like whole milk, it looks white. That's not 'cause there's white pigment in there, it's because it's scattering the light, it's scattering white light back into our eye, and there's more scattering going on. So that's the idea is you wanna add some particles to these marine clouds. A really easy way to do that is to use sea salt. And so what the idea behind marine cloud brightening is to take sea water, aerosolize it, and send it up into the clouds where it makes the clouds brighter. And if you make the clouds 1 to 2% brighter, you can have a local cooling underneath those clouds of about two degrees, which is what the corals need to not bleach. So that was the idea. I'm gonna go back to this slide for a second. So 2020 is when, what happened in 2020 was Australia was gonna do, it was lining up to be a pretty big bleaching year. Australia was getting ready to do their first marine cloud brightening experiment. Dan Harrison, who was my friend from grad school, invited me to be part of this experiment. And I was gonna go to Australia, get on the boat, go out and do this experiment. And I couldn't believe I'd gotten invited. But even as I was super excited, I was also incredibly nervous. And that's not just because COVID was looming, which it was, but alongside everything I was learning about coral, I was also struggling to learn what was going on in my own home. Because my daughter, who had been a really engaged 14-year-old, happy child, suddenly changed. And even when I went to that Reef Futures meeting in Florida that got me off on the coral positivity train, I was on the phone with her school trying to figure out if she could stay in school. And by the time I was planning this trip to Australia, my daughter had stopped going to school. She had almost stopped leaving the house. And so just as COVID was becoming a threat, we were notified, my husband and I were notified that there was a spot for my daughter in a residential behavioral health facility in Wisconsin, and her admission date was gonna be two days before I was supposed to leave for Australia. But I was like, okay, we can make this work. Like we have to get my daughter help, and I really have to go to Australia. And especially given that there's only 36 beds for adolescent severe OCD in this country, there was no way we were gonna not get her into this hospital. But then COVID kept coming, and Dan called me and he said, "I don't know if you're gonna be able to come into Australia. The government's starting to shut down." And my husband and I were like, "We don't know if the people at the hospital are gonna let our daughter in if we fly on a plane." So we got on a car and we drove from Austin to Wisconsin. Dan called me and said he and his team were gonna drive from South Cross University near Sydney to Townsville where the boat was. And we were both driving, hoping we could get this thing done before COVID hit. On the way to Wisconsin, Dan called and said I couldn't come to Australia, but we did get my daughter into the hospital. And it turns out, Dan did get out on the ship. And their experiment was even more successful than they thought. They made the right size particles. They went up into the clouds. They weren't testing to actually cool at this point 'cause this was a pilot project, but the government was happy enough with this project that they've continued to fund it and expand this idea. My daughter spent 100 days in the hospital in Wisconsin, and the tools she learned there saved her life. She's now a freshman in college at College of Charleston. But this collision of events as I was working on this book brought me to the fourth lesson. It turns out that both the coral reefs and our mental health are extremely foundational. The coral reefs support all this life in the ocean. They protect us from waves, they support people's nutrition. Mental health, if you don't have that, I saw how my daughter's life fell away. Her ability to get an education, her friendships, her ability to live her life, like both of these things are incredibly foundational, and yet they're both so invisible. We often don't think about the oceans. They're beneath the waves, they're out of sight. Similarly, if you would've looked at my daughter when she was so sick, you wouldn't have seen the suffering that was going on underneath. But the last part of the lesson is that there are solutions to these problems. There are no silver bullets, they're not easy. They require constant vigilance. They require a lot of funding, and they require us to really have intention. But we can find the solutions. And when it comes to coral, the solutions really depend on us doing something about our carbon emissions. And we have started to walk down that path, but I don't think we've taken it seriously enough. And so we really need to be working to get there. I haven't shown you any pictures of the Caribbean Ocean yet because the Caribbean is in kind of much sadder shape than the Pacific Ocean is. And so after my book was published, somebody from Honduras reached out to me and he said, "Hey, I read your book, I really loved it, and you have to come see my coral reef because it's really healthy." And I was like, "But wait, you're in Honduras. Like that's in the Caribbean, like really?" And he is like, "Really, just come see it." And so I did, and he was right, and it was like incredible. So this place is really where the Banana Republic started. It's a place that has been polluted for a century. It is a place that receives river runoff, it is a hot place. These corals are incredibly vibrant. This coral up here is nearly extinct in the Florida Keys. And it is, there are jungles of it. It's called apropa palmada. It's also known as the Staghorn Coral. Wait, Elkhorn Coral, sorry. And this coral here is orbidsel fabailada. It is as big, it reaches up to the ceiling. It's 80 feet across, and it's also critically endangered, and it is vibrant in this place. And so the fifth lesson is that there's still hope in the world. You know, there are still these places of resilience, of surprises. We're discovering new things about the ocean. We just might need to look where we don't expect them to be. And then the last lesson I wanna tell you, oh, so I started this nonprofit to study this place. This reef has only been discovered about 10 years ago. There's been very little scientific work there, and there are more questions than I could spend the next hour telling you all of the questions I have about this reef. But it's very possible that this reef represents the future of coral reefs. If it's already living in this place that is more like the ocean, what the ocean is turning into that is more polluted, warmer, and perhaps less clear. But I don't know, that's just a hypothesis. And so there's so many questions to ask about this place. And if you're interested, telecoral.org is where the nonprofit is. And please follow along, because I think it's gonna be exciting what comes next. I wanna end up with my final lesson back where I started. I couldn't resist. I took all the data from that failed whatever experiment, and I plotted it again, and yeah, I was right. It's still messy, it's still messy. But I think that the bereftness of my initial conclusion, "There's nothing here," I don't exactly see that anymore. In my years of looking at data, you know, I've seen worse, I've seen worse. So I said I didn't have a computer back then so I did all my statistics literally on pen and paper, but now I have a computer, and lo and behold, there is a little bit of a trend. It's not a good trend, it's not a strong trend, but I do think it is a trend. And so maybe how close a polyp is to the edge of the coral, you know, maybe that's not the whole answer about how it knows it should grow, but maybe it's part of the answer. And I think I didn't give myself enough grace back when I was here and nervous about what was coming after senior year to have a partial answer, because I think I was looking for, you know, answer with a capital A. So staring at this graph, I feel like it's the right metaphor to end this talk with. Life is messy and answers don't always come easily, and often answers are more often partial than they are complete. But if you can stand back from it and look for the trends and see the values and the passions that maybe weren't always apparent, that continue to drive you forward, then I think this experiment we call life might be a success. So thank you guys very much for listening, and I'm happy to-
- [Wes] We have time for a few questions. I'll be sensitive to the time to make sure we don't doddle beyond the hour, but I know Juli will stick around as well a little after. But are there any questions? What do you want to hear more about or curious or other things about jellyfish?
- All right, so I was in the earlier lecture you gave to a science class, and so I got much more of like a better rundown of the Tele coral reef. Is there any potential that the runoff is actually was helping it be resilient in the fact that it was much more nitrogen being pumped in so it's not as reliant on that naturally?
- It could be, yeah, there's something, and coral get most of their energy from the algae, but they can eat. And there are some people who really believe that the more a coral eats, the more it maybe withstand able to withstand bleaching or recover from bleaching. And so yeah, it seems like there is something about the water. No one's done the genetics there, so we don't know. But it seems like there's something about the water that may be making the difference. And it could be that there is more nutrients there, and these corals have had 100 years since that pollution started coming in, since those banana plantations were built to adjust to it. And maybe it is part of their secret sauce. Yeah, that's a great question.
- [Student 1] Thank you.
- Yeah.
- [Student 2] Is there an update on how the progress with solving issues in the Suez Canal?
- It just happened. There's no update. They widened the canal. Oh, did I not say that? Did I omit saying that?
- You said it.
- Okay, but yeah, they did widen the canal. There was never any environmental impact assessment done. It just happened.
- [Student 3] What year was it?
- It was in 2016.
- [Student 3] It's still new, it's still happening now?
- No, it's widened, it's done.
- [Student 3] No, I'm saying it-
- The super highway is is happening now, yeah, yeah for sure. Yeah it's called the Lessepsian Migration if you want to Google that and see all the invasive species, I think like 400 some species have come through, not all jellyfish, yeah.
- [Student 4] I guess one question that I have is just going back to the village in, was it in in Indonesia? I guess, what caused like that area to not be not as affected by I guess climate change or global warming compared to other areas, 'cause it's like so close to the equator. So I just wanted to know, like what is the science behind it?
- There is this thing called the Indonesian flow-through current, I think, and it washes that area. This may or may not, I think I looked this up a long time ago, and I feel like this is part of the answer, and I'm not gonna be able to give you a great answer, but the currents in that region have kept the bleaching from being super, super strong. And if you wanna look more into it, look up the Indonesian through-flow, flow-through, one of those two and you'll be able to find more information about that. But I can't remember that detail right now.
- [Student 4] Alright, thank you.
- Sure, yeah.
- [Student 5] Know if there's been any updates on the cloud brightening and its like progress and success?
- Yeah, so like the governments behind it, they've increased their funding of its sevenfold. They have done, that was the second experiment that they've done. Now they're doing a ton of modeling around whether or not how or if it will change precipitation patterns around the reef. And they have a series of checkpoints they're following before they scale it up to regional scale. But you know, with the key, and this year's a big El Nino year, so like this year the bleaching on that reef is intense actually right now. So I think they may try to accelerate the rate because it is, you know, it's kind of crisis mode. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [Student 6] Do you think that the marine cloud brightening, even if it works, is financially scalable?
- Yeah, I don't think it's terribly expensive. I would have to ask Dan, he's never given me any numbers on that, but they've never indicated that it would be, that would cost too much to do. It's more about how would it affect other parts of the ecosystem, how it affect their patterns, those kind of questions that have been the ones that they've been focusing on. You know, the reefs around the world, reefs bring in something like $2.7 trillion in income through tourism. So I think if it costs less than that, you know, you would wanna do it. But yeah, that's it. I haven't asked him, but that's a great question.
- [Student 7] In the marina, is the cloud writing localized?
- Yeah, it would be, you know, over a region. So I'm not exactly sure of the dimensions of that, but it would be able to be deployed regionally. And so if the, you know, like if the top, the northern part of the reef was getting hit, you could deploy there, and they would deploy off of ships so they could move them, yeah, yeah.
- [Student 8] Hi, I was wondering if we are currently seeing, or if you think it's possible that in the future that we'll see corals surviving at slightly deeper depths in the ocean due to increased ocean temperatures? And despite the lessened sunlight, if you think that is a possibility or differences in the microbiology.
- Yeah, what we'll probably see, so they really can't go that deep because of the algae. So, and if they don't have the algae, they can't make their skeletons, they don't have enough energy. So they're sort of stuck near the surface. But what we are starting to see, and there's a little bit of data on this like from Japan, is that they're moving into more temperate waters. So they're sort of trying to, you know, scoot north and southward to get out of the hottest parts of the planet. But corals grow pretty slow, so you know, you may see a few colonies being able to migrate north just like you're seeing trees and things migrate up mountains. But can they create a reef fast enough to be a full ecosystem before they're wiped out? Yeah.
- I was wondering if you were ever like nervous writing about your family and like trying to interweave that like story along with that of the coral especially.
- Yeah, for sure, and what I did was I told that story from a mother's point of view, and I never tried to say what my daughter was feeling or what was going on from her perspective. And I was super careful to say this is how I feel as a mother of someone who's suffering from OCD. And then my publishers required that she read it, and part of her OCD was around plagiarism, and she even got to the point where she stopped reading because she felt like if she said anything she'd read, that would be plagiarism. So that book was like one of the first things she read, and because my publisher asked her to, and she was good with it, and in fact, she has become an advocate for mental health awareness and taking the stigma away from it. And so she has graciously allowed me to write the story. Yeah, that's a great question, thank you, yeah.
- [Student 9] You mentioned that David Hunter is someone who called you and like, "Hey, come check out my coral reef."
- Well, yeah, actually he emailed me. I'm sorry, I should, yeah.
- [Student 9] Who was that? Was it like his coral reef in any perspective?
- Yeah, so he is the guy who, he really, he basically discovered the coral there and discovered how healthy they were. And then he has a dive shop, and he moved it to Tele, it's called Tele in Honduras, because of this healthy coral. And then he worked to make it a marine-protected area in Honduras. So he's a co-manager of the marine protected area. So, no, it's not, it's no one's coral, but like, but he is the co-manager of the marine protected area. And like, it's actually very cool also, and I told this in an earlier class, but right after they established the marine protected area, this Chinese operation came in and wanted to mine the river that's nearby for iron. And if they would've done that, it would've destroyed the reef. So his name's Antal Borksaw, he realized that even the marine protected area status really didn't give it protections. And as I told you about the Suez Canal story, like, you know, policies don't always give us the protections we think they do when it comes to the environment. So what he did was decided, he decided that if no one knows about this really healthy reef, it's definitely not protected. So he built the first aquarium, public aquarium in central America in this town to showcase this healthy reef, and it's free to the public except for you have to listen to like an eight minute video on how cool coral reefs are. And it is one of the biggest tourist attractions, I think the biggest tourist detraction in Honduras. It's only been open a year, but basically everyone, one of the amazing things it does is, like a lot of Hondurans who go through are like, "What, we are home to the healthiest coral reef around? Like, we did not know that." And it's a real sense of pride, and also just this awareness around this healthy coral reef is really, really important.
- [Student 10] How much is ocean acidification a problem, like kind of relative to concerns about the community?
- So it's a really interesting because it's turned out ocean acidification is not as big a deal as we thought it was. Coral reefs, corals, if they're alive they can handle it. Everyone thought the corals were gonna be like, yeah, you know, like casualty one for ocean acidification. Turns out they've seen this before. They've seen high acidity, they know how to handle it, they're really good at modifying, controlling the pH around their bodies and using it to their advantage. So it's not turning out to be as bad for living coral reefs. Now dead coral reefs is another issue because they don't have the live animal to protect it, and those reefs are degrading faster because of the increased acidity or the lower pH. Other things like the conch fish that was in that picture, it was thought that they were gonna have trouble smelling, that would mess with the olfaction. That hasn't really panned out either. So a lot of the issues we thought were gonna be really big deals around ocean certification are turning out to not be as severe as we thought yet, and so that's good news. I mean it turns out animals, marine animals are, they can handle more variation than we thought. And so it's still an issue and there are still people studying it and there are some things like sea butterflies you might have heard about are suffering from it. Some oysters are, especially the young ones, but in general it has kind of, the alarm around that has softened in recent years.
- I look at the clock, it's eight o'clock and so I wanna be sensitive to everyone's time, but I'm sure Juli, I saw there were a couple other hands, would willingly stand around if folks want to come and get your last questions answered. But let's give her another round of applause.