Cryo-coral babies Successfully Transplanted onto The Great Barrier Reef
The world’s first cryopreserved, lab-grown baby corals have been successfully transported and settled on the Great Barrier Reef.
Reproductive biologists from Taronga Conservation Society Australia used cutting-edge cryopreservation techniques to fertilise freshly collected coral eggs with cryopreserved coral sperm.
They’ve now been transplanted into specially designed ‘coral cradles’ on the Barrier Reef. The design of the cradles allows researchers to track how well the babies grow throughout their first year of life.
Oceanographic Magazine, who broke the story, say that “scientists from both Taronga Conservation Society Australia (TCSA) and the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) suggest that this innovative advance in science will help pave the way to safeguard reefs currently under pressure from climate change, by deploying millions of heat-tolerant corals onto the Reef every year.
“To prepare for increasingly warmer ocean temperatures, researchers at TCSA have been working alongside its partners at the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Programme to develop ways to plant millions of heat tolerant corals onto not only the Great Barrier Reef but coral reefs around the world.”
“The Taronga CryDiversity Bank currently holds the world’s largest frozen bio-repository of living coral cells, with trillions of sperm across 32 coral species, collected annually from the Great Barrier Reef since 2011. It’s intended for these cells to be used in future reproduction efforts to aid restoration and completely revolutionise the approach to it.”
“The storage of cryopreserved living genetic material also supports crucial research into increasing heat-tolerance in coral.”
Main image: Dr Rebecca Hobbs from Taronga Conservation Society Australia cryopreserving coral spawn in the National Sea Simulator, by Dorian Tsai
