‘Do you like to breathe?’: A group of scientists have figured out a way to regrow coral reefs and it could help save the oceans

• Up to 85% of the oxygen we breathe comes from the ocean, but a healthy ocean depends on healthy reefs.
• Coral reefs are dying: We’ve already lost half the world’s coral because of human activity like dredging the sea floor, pollution, and emitting greenhouse gases that warm ocean waters and make them more acidic.
• Scientists are working on emergency interventions and they’ve been shown to be effective — bringing corals that took hundreds of years to grow back from the brink in just a few years.

Emily Hall had just arrived at the research center on Summerland Key, a tiny barrier island 40 miles off the southern tip of mainland Florida, when she got the bad news. Hurricane Irma had the island in its sights.

“We had two days to gather everything and get the heck out of Dodge,” she said.

Hall’s safety wasn’t her primary concern. The storm threatened to destroy years of work that’s crucial to the future of coral reefs around the world and the health of our oceans.

The Mote Marine Laboratory, where Hall manages ocean-acidification research research, specializes in coral reef restoration. It is home to a gene bank for the coral in the reefs around the Keys and dozens of tanks that grow new baby corals.

The work is part of an effort to bring dying reefs back to life by growing tiny coral fragments in labs or nurseries — between four and 25 times as fast as they’d grow in the wild — and planting those fragments on reefs. It’s an emergency surgical intervention meant to undo damage caused by human activity both in the oceans and on dry land, and it has been shown to work — bringing dead reef sections back from the edge in just a few years.

Repairing reefs matters to our survival on Earth.

If reefs collapse, the rippling effects could leave much of the ocean lifeless. Human and animal populations that depend on fishing would be devastated, as would places that rely on tourism dollars from ocean activities. Beachfront communities that need reefs to protect them from storm surges would be left far more exposed.

We’ve also found new cancer drugs, painkillers, and antiviral therapies from organisms that live in reefs. Without them many potential discoveries could be lost.

Michael Crosby, a marine scientist and the president of Mote Laboratory and Aquarium, is blunt about how the dire situation affects everyone.

“You like to breathe?” he asked. “Estimates are that up to 80% of the oxygen you are breathing in right now comes from the ocean. It doesn’t come from the land.

“In order for you to continue to breathe, you have to have a healthy ocean,” Crosby said.

As Irma headed straight toward Mote’s center for coral reef research, 30,000 coral “seeds,” little individual corals, were growing outside the facility, vulnerable in saltwater tanks. Most were being grown to plant on dying reefs, while some were getting subjected to warmer or more acidic water in the hopes that any survivors would yield clues about how to make the Earth’s coral reefs more resilient to stress.

Hall and her fellow researchers spent the two days before Irma struck finishing essential research and stashing away vulnerable specimens. As the storm got closer, they moved operations (and tiny corals) into Mote’s indoor “wet labs,” which are equipped with saltwater and warm lights.

Mote also has underwater coral nurseries in the ocean, but with the storm approaching, there was no time to protect them. The nurseries, as well as the reefs researchers had been replanting for seven years, would have to fend for themselves.