Archived on 6/5/2022

Growing baby corals in a broom cupboard

SE23.life

25 Feb '20

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00512-8

Marine biologist Jamie Craggs studies coral reproduction in a tight, dark space as he prepares to reseed reefs damaged by climate change.

_{Jamie Craggs is a marine biologist and the aquarium curator at the Horniman Museum and Gardens in London, UK. Credit: Phil Barthropp for Nature}

You wouldn’t expect coral-reef research to be taking place in a broom cupboard. But that’s what we’re doing at the Horniman Museum and Gardens in London. The museum was built in 1901 and has botanical gardens, collections devoted to natural history, anthropology, music — and a tiny aquarium space that I can sprint around in 12 seconds.

Our research space is even smaller: just a cupboard room under a staircase, and the cramped corridor shown here. We almost have to think like yacht builders to maximize it, and we wear red headlamps to work in this tight, dark area.

My main research interest is the reproductive biology of reef-building corals, which reproduce only a couple of times a year. Before 2010, no one knew how best to replicate in an aquarium what triggers corals to spawn in the wild. Because we’re losing coral reefs through climate change, we wanted to know whether we could collect eggs and sperm in the wild, produce test-tube-baby corals and then put them back onto reefs that have been damaged.

I went to Singapore in 2010, and to Guam in 2013 and 2014, to witness mass spawning events and collect samples. You have just 15 minutes once a year, after a particular full moon, to capture such events. The team I was with worked at night, battered by waves and surrounded by jellyfish.

Our task has been to work out how to simulate these conditions in the aquarium. We use global data sets of temperature cycles, daylight hours and lunar cycles to give the corals the environment they would experience in the wild. Baby corals are very vulnerable because they are just a few millimetres in size and have weak defences. We want to scale up the endeavour, so that reseeded corals will survive in wild reefs.

We are losing coral reefs so fast, and one-third of all ocean species reside in these habitats. Working in the reefs is depressing. But working in restoration is heartening.

Billie

25 Feb '20

This is a great piece of work by the Horniman and well worth a visit if ever you get chance for a behind the scenes visit.

blushingsnail

28 Feb '20

I want to know about ‘tadpole husbandry’! It’s mentioned on one of the display panels in the aquarium. They have frogs so it makes sense that they breed them too, but it’s amusing to imagine someone ernestly rearing tadpoles.

Crudgie_Crudgie

3 Mar '20

Good work

marymck

3 Mar '20

“Tadpole husbandry” makes me think of what we used to do in primary school when the whole class would collect jam jars of frog spawn and take back to the classroom to watch the development of the tadpoles. I remember the competitive excitement to see whose tadpokes were the first to grow legs but don’t recall any turning into frogs. I think mine ate one another. All pretty gross and rather sad. I expect it’s a lot more sophisticated and humane nowadays.

I do have some photos of our class on our rather mucky (and murderous) school nature ramble.

anon5422159

29 Apr '20

It’s great to see @HornimanMuseum get the media coverage it deserves:

https://www.museumsassociation.org/news/29042020--museum-from-home-day

Google_News

16 Jun '20