Scientists Cryo-Freeze Coral Reef 130
An anonymous reader writes "Due to rising ocean temperatures, scientists from the United States and Australia are attempting to freeze coral eggs and sperm in cryogenic suspension so that the endangered species can be preserved. Once frozen, the species may later be grown in a lab and implanted in reefs. This could be the only way to ensure the survival of certain endangered species at The Great Barrier Reef."
Coral sperm? (Score:1, Interesting)
Huh. I always thought coral was more like plants than animals. Anyone here a coral expert or should I check out them wikipedias?
Re:Wow (Score:3, Interesting)
While frozen, the organism is metabolically inactive(by design). Dead, albeit reversibly so. Simply being cryoed would be more or less identical to dying, save that they can wake you up at some future time. And, if they wake you up, you still have whatever issues you had when you went under. If you have sufficiently accommodating family and/or some clever flavor of legally immortal trust supervising your affairs, it might be a decent way of halting fatal diseases until other suckers have finished the clinical R&D and come up with something effective; but even in that best case it would actually be pretty weird:
Just imagine a situation where a serious accident, or the wrong diagnosis would mean going on ice for 20 years, before being revived and repaired. It wouldn't have quite the permanence of death; but it'd be weird if you, or people around you, could just 'get iced', starting a near-death process of absence and loss; and then pop back up in a decade or three with no time having passed for them. Somebody better than me could probably wring a neat sci-fi story out of it, a world where the risk of the separation and loss that accompanies death is still very real; but most 'deaths'(excluding things like explosions or intense fires and the like) are really just freeze periods of unknown duration.
How much would it fuck with your head to have your spouse or child 'die', and then show up again exactly as they were when they died, but with everybody else that much older, and having lived without them? It'd be weird...
Re:whatever (Score:5, Interesting)
Ocean acidification, although a daunting problem, isn't irreversible. The idea of saving just coral sperm and eggs doesn't sound like a well thought out solution, though. A coral reef is more than just bare coral. It is a matrix upon which an entire ecosystem is based. Does't the rest of habitat need saving as well? Imagine saving a place on land from soil erosion, but the hill or valley is completely barren with no plant or animal diversity.
Re:Coral sperm? (Score:5, Interesting)
Coral given ideal (artificial) growth conditions such as those in Marine Aquarists' tanks can actually grow fairly rapidly.
In the Marine Aquarist Community both Soft (LPS) and Hard (SPS) coral is usually traded as "frags" (fragments or cuttings off a mother colony,) and they can
more than quadruple in size over the course of a year given ideal flow, nutrient, light and water chemistry conditions.
Re:Coral sperm? (Score:4, Interesting)
I've wondered this too. The seas tend to change by a foot or more every 200 years, with evidence of massive water level drops happening several times in the past. Either Coral is more resilient than we give it credit for, or this wide variety of coral appeared in just a few hundred years since the last major temperature/water level swing. Either way, there's definitely a major clue missing here. Huge chunks of Florida (Miami in particular) sit on top of ancient coral reefs. I mean, check out Coral Gables' Venetian Pool [wikipedia.org] - where did all this coral come from? What happened to those species? That part of Florida no longer has reefs, nor has it had them for hundreds if not thousands of years. I think the Biologists and the Geologists need to get together and decide what's actually going on.
Re:Too late :( (Score:3, Interesting)