“Most people don’t think data management is sexy,” says Jared Auerbach, owner of Red’s Best, a seafood distributor in Boston. Most don’t associate it with fishing, either. But Mr. Auerbach and a few other seafood entrepreneurs are using technology to lift the curtain on the murky details surrounding where and how fish are caught in American waters.

Beyond Maine lobster, Maryland crabs and Gulf shrimp, fish has been largely ignored by foodies obsessing over the provenance of their meals, even though seafood travels a complex path. Until recently, diners weren’t asking many questions about where it came from, which meant restaurants and retailers didn’t feel a need to provide the information.

Much of what’s sold has been seen as “just a packaged, nondescript fish fillet with no skin,” says Beth Lowell, who works in the seafood-fraud prevention department at Oceana, an international ocean conservation advocacy group. “Seafood has been behind the curve on both traceability and transparency.”

What’s worse is that many people have no idea what they’re eating even when they think they do. In a recent Oceana investigation of seafood fraud, the organization bought fish sold at restaurants, seafood markets, sushi places and grocery stores, and ran DNA tests. It discovered that 33 percent of the fish was mislabeled per federal guidelines. Fish labeled snapper and tuna were the least likely to be what their purveyors claimed they were.

Several years ago, Red’s Best developed software to track the fish it procures from small local fishermen along the shores of New England. Sea to Table, a family business founded in the mid-1990s with headquarters in Brooklyn that supplies chefs and universities, has also developed its own seafood-tracking software to let customers follow the path of their purchases. Wood’s Fisheries, in Port St. Joe, Fla., specializes in sustainably harvested shrimp and uses software called Trace Register.

And starting this fall, the public will be able to glimpse the international fishing industry’s practices through a partnership of Oceana, Google and SkyTruth, a nonprofit group that uses aerial and satellite images to study changes in the landscape. The initiative, called Global Fishing Watch, uses satellite data to analyze fishing boat practices — including larger trends and information on individual vessels.

From a young age, Mr. Auerbach had romantic notions about fishing, specifically the idea of catching fish to feed his family and neighbors.

“It’s cool in this day and age that people wake up in the morning and go make a living interacting with nature and feeding their community,” he said. He went into commercial fishing straight out of college, taking a job on an Alaskan salmon boat and later returning to New England to work on lobster boats and learn more about the fishing industry there.

Soon after Mr. Auerbach founded Red’s Best in 2008, he realized that a combination of government regulations and commercial fishing’s embrace of technology were effectively threatening the existence of small fishing boats. Yet smaller boats travel short distances and catch fewer fish, which Mr. Auerbach said improves their quality.

“We try to push people to eat local, traceable fish,” he said.

Like most other seafood distributors, he was relying on an antiquated, four-part carbon copy system that was so cumbersome, he was routinely shuffling paperwork until 2 a.m.

“The boat would get a copy at the point of unloading,” Mr. Auerbach said. “The government would get a copy. I’d file a copy. And then I’d write in the prices.” As for paying the fishermen: “I’d have to get checks and then match the checks to the paperwork and mail them. It was an absolute nightmare that wasn’t scalable.”

Now the Red’s Best software does that work. For instance, a company driver backs a truck down to the long wooden pier in Woods Hole, Mass., each afternoon, so that fishermen can load their bluefish, striped bass, bonito, conch, horseshoe crabs and other seafood. But instead of a thick pad of paper and carbon sheets, the driver wields a waterproof wireless computer tablet with a Bluetooth mobile printer.

“He’s putting their catch data directly onto the internet, and our whole staff all over the country can see in real time as fish is being unloaded onto our truck,” Mr. Auerbach said. When the fish arrives at Red’s Best’s Boston plant, it is instantly received into inventory and reported to the federal government.

The company affixes a traceability label on each box of fish. The label has a two-dimensional bar code that can be scanned by smartphones to reveal who caught the fish, where and how. A unique web page is automatically created for that fish. Buyers, typically high-end wholesalers throughout the country, and their customers can scan the code to learn the story behind the fish.

Jared Auerbach, left, the owner of Red’s Best, at Boston Fish Pier.

KIERAN KESNER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Mr. Auerbach, who has 100 employees, projects the company will sell 20 million pounds of seafood this year, caught almost exclusively by 1,000 small vessels.

Eventually, Red’s Best hopes to sell directly to consumers. “Like, a bluefin tuna is being unloaded right this second in Provincetown, Mass., and you buy a pound of it to be delivered to your home tomorrow,” he said. “I want that tuna sold as deep into the supply chain as possible.”

By that he means ideally the fish will travel from the company’s Boston hub directly to home cooks’ refrigerators. Currently, people can buy Red’s Best fish at its store at the Boston Public Market, at several farmers’ markets, or shipped through AmazonFresh and, starting last week, FedEx.

“I got the data,” he said. “I got the fish. I know people want it.”

Sea to Table hopes to sell fish directly to home chefs starting this year, too.

But local seafood can cost more than many Americans are accustomed to paying, which partly accounts for the rampant seafood fraud in this country.

“U.S. fisheries are very well managed and are actually growing nicely,” said Michael Dimin, the founder of Sea to Table. “But the U.S. consumer’s been trained to buy cheap food, and imported seafood is really cheap because of I.U.U. fishing.” I.U.U. stands for illegal, unreported and unregulated. The result is unsustainably fished, cheap seafood flooding American fish markets and grocery chains.

“To us, the secret is traceability,” Mr. Dimin said. “If you can shine a light on where it came from, you can make informed decisions.”

Mr. Auerbach concedes that some local fish is expensive, but he maintains that many lesser-known varieties are affordable. “Maybe halibut and scallops are for the wealthy,” he says. “But dogfish, skate, porgy and mackerel are all very inexpensive, healthy and great tasting.”

[Editors Note:  Dr. Amanda Vincent was a runner-up in this competition.  Dr. Vincent is a recent recipient of a grant from the Herbert W. Hoover Foundation, focusing on Seahorse Distribution and Marine Conservation in Biscayne National Park.

By Matt Adams, Web Producer

Note:  This article was originally published on cbs4indy.com

INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. – Carl Jones has been selected as the winner of this year’s Indianapolis Prize.

Jones was recognized earlier Wednesday during a ceremony in London. Jones, chief scientist of the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust and scientific director of the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation, will receive $250,000 in cash and the Lilly Medal.

The Indianapolis Prize is the world’s leading award for animal conservation. Jones is lauded for major victories in saving animal species from extinction. He’s credited with bringing back at least nine species from the brink of extinction in his 40 years of work in Mauritius, including the Mauritius kestrel, pink pigeon, echo parakeet, Rodrigues warbler and Rodrigues fody. In addition, his work has helped restore the population of many other species.

“Winning the 2016 Indianapolis Prize is undoubtedly one of the highlights of my career,” Jones said of the award. “It’s a great accolade not just for me, but for Gerry Durrell and the people who have made this work possible over the years. I’m particularly proud of this award because it validates the conservation of animals — like Telfair’s skinks and pink pigeons — that are not megavertebrates, but provide critically important ecosystem services nonetheless.”

Dr. Simon Stuart, chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission, nominated Jones for the Indianapolis Prize.

Born and raised in Wales, Jones received his masters and doctorate from the University of Wales in Swansea. He currently splits his time between Wales and Mauritius.

Jones will be formally honored at the 2016 Indianapolis Prize Gala in Indianapolis Oct. 15, 2016. Five other finalists for the award will receive $10,000 each:

• Joel Berger, Ph.D.: (Wildlife Conservation Society, Colorado State University) Dr. Berger strives to save flagship species like the muskox in the Arctic tundra and the wild yak of the alpine on the Tibetan Plateau. Beyond studying migration paths for large mammals, Berger’s actionable conservation models help researchers understand populations as modern metaphors for climate change. Berger was also a Finalist for the 2014 Indianapolis Prize.
• Dee Boersma, Ph.D.: (Penguin Sentinels, University of Washington Department of Biology) Penguins, as sentinels of our oceans, have no greater champion than Dr. Boersma. For more than four decades she has studied Galapagos penguins, showing how these seabirds are indicators of environmental change. She has followed the lives of Argentina’s Magellanic penguins to help strengthen protections and conservation efforts for colonies, using her science to prevent harvesting, reduce oiling and secure marine protected areas.
• Rodney Jackson, Ph.D.: (Snow Leopard Conservancy) One of the world’s foremost experts on the elusive, endangered snow leopard, Dr. Jackson endures harsh winters and dangerous terrain to track these “ghosts of the mountain” and teach locals how to coexist peacefully with them. Jackson was also a Finalist for the 2008, 2010 and 2012 Indianapolis Prize.
• Carl Safina, Ph.D.: (The Safina Center at Stony Brook University) A crusader for the ocean and its creatures, Dr. Safina works to effectively connect humans with marine species. He has pioneered innovative approaches to studying species ranging from reef coral to whales, and established a sustainable seafood program, bringing science-based criteria to consumers. Safina was also a Finalist for the 2010 and 2014 Indianapolis Prize.
• Amanda Vincent, Ph.D.: (Project Seahorse, University of British Columbia) Among the first to study seahorses underwater, Dr. Vincent helped put the world’s 47 species on the global conservation agenda. Initiating the first seahorse conservation project, her programs have led to 35 no-take marine protected areas, the first global export controls for marine fishes and a bold new citizen science venture, iSeahorse. Vincent was also a Finalist for the 2010 Indianapolis Prize.

By Chelsea Harvey  May 4th, 2016

The long-suffering Florida coral reef tract — the largest reef in the continental U.S. and third-largest barrier reef ecosystem in the world — may have bigger problems than anyone thought, according to new research from the University of Miami and Florida International University. Scientists have discovered that part of the reef is actually dissolving into the water, likely thanks to the effects of human-induced ocean acidification.

The research, published earlier this week in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles, took surveys of coral throughout the Florida Keys from 2009 to 2010, using chemical analyses of water samples to examine the rates at which corals were either calcifying — that is, building new parts of the reef — or disintegrating into the water.

They found that the reef was dissolving, at least during some parts of the year (generally the fall and winter), in various places throughout the Keys. In the spring and summer, some areas to the south were able to make up for these losses — but, worryingly, the researchers found that the part of the reef in the northern Keys, closer to Miami, was already eroding more quickly than the corals were able to rebuild themselves.

The culprit appears to be ocean acidification, a chemical process that happens when carbon dioxide dissolves in the water and undergoes a reaction that lowers the ocean’s pH. When this happens, several consequences can occur, according to the new study’s lead author, Chris Langdon, chair of the University of Miami’s department of marine biology and ecology.

First, when water becomes more acidic, limestone — which is what makes up the hard, rocky skeletons secreted by corals — can start to dissolve, “just like you dropped a sugar cube in water,” Langdon said. Additionally, a lower pH can make it easier for certain types of organisms to burrow into the coral skeletons and make their homes there, further breaking down the reef.

The results are especially worrisome, given that the northern part of the reef appears to have hit a tipping point in which more limestone is being lost than rebuilt. While it’s well established that acidification is bad for coral, previous research had suggested that reefs around the world likely wouldn’t hit this net erosion threshold until closer to mid-century, when carbon dioxide levels were higher.

Most of these previous experiments were either conducted in laboratories or involved very small-scale, controlled studies of the environment, said Langdon, which did not reflect all the complexities of a natural reef. More recently, some field experiments have suggested that the world’s reefs may hit their tipping points sooner than previously predicted — and Langdon’s study represents the most recent of these, as well as “the largest natural experiment that’s been done to date,” he said.

It’s still unclear why the scientists observed such a gradient in the Keys from north to south, with the northernmost corals getting the worst of the deal. According to Langdon, acidity is known to vary from north to south, since colder water is able to hold more dissolved carbon dioxide. But it’s also possible that the northern part of the reef’s proximity to the heavily populated Miami-Dade County could be having a negative impact because of pollution and other human activities, making the corals more vulnerable to environmental stressors.

Acidification can cause disintegration of reefs even when they’re otherwise healthy — but the new study is all the more concerning because the Florida reef tract has already suffered its share of stress over the past few years. In 2014 and 2015, the reef experienced an unprecedented bleaching event and widespread disease outbreak, likely brought on by both the effects of climate change and 2015’s unusually severe El Nino event.

Local reports have noted that the bleaching and disease remain ongoing in some parts of the reef. Brian Walker, a research scientist at the National Coral Reef Institute at Nova Southeastern University, noted that there was some sign of bleaching recovery back in November on the northern part of the reef tract, where his research is focused — but the disease outbreak did not appear to slow down over the winter.

“This is concerning because the 2016 summer is predicted to be as hot if not hotter on the reefs,” Walker said in an email to The Washington Post.

And, although bleaching and dissolving can happen independently and don’t always occur side by side, both processes weaken coral reefs and can exacerbate one another — meaning the Florida reef tract is in an especially vulnerable state. That’s a problem not only because of its importance to fish and other marine life as a natural ecosystem, but also because of its significance to the local economy. Reef-related tourism brings nearly $3 billion per year to the region, according to Langdon.

He pointed out, though, that the Florida reef tract is unlikely to be the only location in the world suffering from dissolving limestone.

“The right studies haven’t been performed yet to see if this is happening in other places,” Langdon said. But ocean acidification is happening throughout the world, meaning other reefs are likely vulnerable to the same kinds of effects. And investigating the processes affecting corals around the world is increasingly important as reefs become more and more vulnerable to environmental stressors.

At the moment, a global bleaching event — triggered by the 2015 El Nino event, but likely exacerbated by the ongoing warming effects of climate change — has ravaged reefs all over the world. The Great Barrier Reef in Australia, for instance, has experienced bleaching on more than 90 percent of its extent, according to Australia’s National Coral Bleaching Task Force.

As the climate continues to warm, these types of bleaching events are only expected to become more common — and the acidification of the seas will also increase the more greenhouse gases we pour into the air. On that note, the most meaningful action that can be taken to protect the world’s corals is strong mitigation efforts when it comes to our carbon output, according to Langdon.

“The really important point is the cause of both [bleaching and acidification] is carbon dioxide emissions,” he said. “And reducing emissions will reduce the severity of both of them.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/05/04/the-largest-coral-reef-in-the-continental-u-s-is-dissolving-into-the-ocean/

April 26, 2016 – For Immediate Release

From the Desk of University of Miami President Julio Frenk, M.D., Ph.D.:

“Knowing that issues related to the environment are important to you, I wanted to share a new University of Miami Climate Change Special Report. This is an area where the University of Miami is uniquely positioned to make significant contributions in understanding the influences of climate change and investigating solutions for mitigation and adaptation.

This comprehensive, interactive website showcases the work of our scientists, researchers, faculty, students, staff, and alumni from all 11 schools and colleges in the areas of climate change and sustainability. The report can be found here: http://climate.miami.edu.

The University of Miami is deeply committed to serving as a responsible and responsive leader in bridging scholarship to solutions for pressing issues affecting our community and our planet.”

[Editors Note:  this article originally appeared on ohio.com on April 25, 2016]

By Bob Downing
Beacon Journal staff writer

The Cuyahoga Valley National Park is preparing to inventory its flora and fauna on May 20-21, and it needs lots of help.

More than 80 local scientists and 1,200 volunteers are expected to participate in the park’s 24-hour BioBlitz to count plants, aquatic insects, amphibians, bats, birds, fish, fungi, insects, lichens, mollusks, reptiles and spiders.

Scientists will lead groups of community participants on surveys at locations throughout the park to create a snapshot of the park’s plants and animals.

The event officially begins at noon May 20, a Friday, and ends at noon May 21, a Saturday, in the 33,000-acre federal park between Akron and Cleveland.

But 500 school-age children from Northeast Ohio have been invited to join in the count on Friday morning in the park.

In addition, the park will stage a Biodiversity Festival beginning at 11 a.m. May 20 and 9 a.m. May 21 at the park’s Howe Meadow with hands-on science, music, arts and crafts vendors, and food.

On May 20, the festival will run until 6 p.m., with additional night hikes, bat viewing and astronomy sessions. On May 21, it will last until 2 p.m.

Local singer/songwriter Alex Bevan and gospel/jazz/fusion band the Funkyard Experiment will perform from 6 to 8 p.m. May 20 at the meadow off Riverview Road in Cuyahoga Falls.

Volunteers need some expertise to help on surveys but no special experience is needed to help with the two-day festival for families.

The Cuyahoga Valley’s BioBlitz is one of 123 across the country being staged by the National Park Service to mark its 100th anniversary. The initiative will provide a snapshot of the park system’s biodiversity through citizen science.

The national event is being co-hosted by the National Geographic Society, with results being disclosed on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

“Biodiversity refers to the variety of life on our planet,” said Jennie Vasarhelyi, chief of interpretation, education and visitor services for the Cuyahoga Valley park. “The value of biodiversity is fundamental to life as we know it on Earth. Wild species are part of natural systems that regulate climate, air quality, and cycles of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, mineral elements and water.”

Such surveys provide park managers with a key way to understand the health of the natural environment and a way to monitor change, she said.

This year’s survey could show a boost in fish and insects in the now-cleaner Cuyahoga River and it may show a decline in cave-dwelling bats that have been hit by the fatal white-nose syndrome, she said.

It is the first time that such an event has been staged in the Cuyahoga Valley, although Summit Metro Parks has held similar events in the past at the Gorge and Cascade Valley metro parks and Liberty Park. The Western Reserve Land Conservancy also held a similar event in 2015 at Haley’s Run in southeast Akron.

The Gorge event in 2006 recorded 385 species.

“BioBlitz is a fantastic opportunity to develop a better understanding of our park, and we’re collaborating extensively with schools, universities, government agencies and environmental, health and youth organizations in planning and implementing it,” Vasarhelyi said.

Individual surveys will use the app iNaturalist to catalog living organisms.

Interested participants are encouraged to visit the local BioBlitz website at www.nps.gov/cuva/bioblitz.htm to view survey opportunities and sign up.

Participants can follow, share and retweet their experiences using Facebook (www.facebook.com/NatureNPS) and Twitter (@NatureNPS) with the hashtags #BioBlitz2016, #NPS100 and #FindYourPark.

http://www.ohio.com/news/local/cuyahoga-valley-park-seeking-scientists-volunteers-for-may-20-21-bioblitz-1.678558

[Editors Note:  This article originally appreared in The New Yorker for the April 18, 2016 issue]

By Elizabeth Kolbert

Ruth Gates fell in love with the ocean while watching TV. When she was in elementary school, she would sit in front of “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau,” mesmerized. The colors, the shapes, the diversity of survival strategies—life beneath the surface of the water seemed to her more spectacular than life above it. Without knowing much beyond what she’d learned from the series, she decided that she would become a marine biologist.

“Even though Cousteau was coming through the television, he unveiled the oceans in a way that nobody else had been able to,” she told me.

Gates, who is English, ended up studying at Newcastle University, where marine-science classes are taught against the backdrop of the North Sea. She took a course on corals and, once again, was dazzled. Her professor explained that corals, which are tiny animals, had even tinier plants living inside their cells. Gates wondered how such an arrangement was possible. “I couldn’t quite get my head around the idea,” she said. In 1985, she moved to Jamaica to study the relationship between corals and their symbionts.

It was an exciting moment to be doing such work. New techniques in molecular biology were making it possible to look at life at its most intimate level. But it was also a disturbing time. Reefs in the Caribbean were dying. Some were being done in by development, others by overfishing or pollution. Two of the region’s dominant reef builders—staghorn coral and elkhorn coral—were being devastated by an ailment that became known as white-band disease. (Both are now classified as critically endangered.) Over the course of the nineteen-eighties, something like half of the Caribbean’s coral cover disappeared.

Gates continued her research at U.C.L.A. and then at the University of Hawaii. All the while, the outlook for reefs was growing grimmer. Climate change was pushing ocean temperatures beyond many species’ tolerance. In 1998, a so-called “bleaching event,” caused by very warm water, killed more than fifteen per cent of corals worldwide. Compounding the problem of rising temperatures were changes in ocean chemistry. Corals thrive in alkaline waters, but fossil-fuel emissions are making the seas more acidic. One team of researchers calculated that just a few more decades of emissions would lead coral reefs to “stop growing and begin dissolving.” Another group predicted that, by midcentury, visitors to places like the Great Barrier Reef will find nothing more than “rapidly eroding rubble banks.” Gates couldn’t even bring herself to go back to Jamaica; so much of what she loved about the place had been lost.

But Gates, by her own description, is a “glass half full” sort of person. She noticed that some reefs that had been given up for dead were bouncing back. These included reefs she knew intimately, in Hawaii. Even if only a fraction of the coral colonies survived, there seemed to be a chance for recovery.

In 2013, a foundation run by Microsoft’s co-founder Paul Allen announced a contest called the Ocean Challenge. Researchers were asked for plans to counter the effects of rapid change. Gates thought about the corals she’d seen perish and the ones she’d seen pull through. What if the qualities that made some corals hardier than others could be identified? Perhaps this information could be used to produce tougher varieties. Humans might, in this way, design reefs capable of withstanding human influence.

Gates laid out her thoughts in a two-thousand-word essay. The prize for the contest was ten thousand dollars—barely enough to keep a research lab in pipette tips. But after Gates won she was invited to submit a more detailed plan. Last summer, the foundation awarded her and a collaborator in Australia, Madeleine van Oppen, four million dollars to pursue the idea. In news stories about the award, the project was described as an attempt to create a “super coral.” Gates and her graduate students embraced the term; one of the students drew, as a sort of logo for the effort, a coral colony with a red “S” on what might, anthropocentrically, be called its chest. Around the time the award was announced, Gates was named the director of the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology.

“A lot of people want to go back to something,” she told me at one point. “They think, If we just stop doing things, maybe the reef will come back to what it was.”

“Really, what I am is a futurist,” she said at another. “Our project is acknowledging that a future is coming where nature is no longer fully natural.”

The Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology occupies its own tiny island, known as Moku o Lo‘e, or, alternatively, Coconut Island. In the nineteen-thirties, Moku o Lo‘e was bought by an eccentric millionaire who fashioned it into an insular Xanadu. He installed a shark pond, a bowling alley, and a shooting gallery, and threw elaborate parties with guests like Shirley Temple and Amelia Earhart. After falling into decline, Moku o Lo‘e was rediscovered by Hollywood in the nineteen-sixties. TV producers used it in the opening sequence of “Gilligan’s Island.”

The first time I made the trip, it was a beautiful morning. I found Gates in a lab building that, from the outside, looks like a budget motel. She is fifty-four, with a round face, short brown hair, and a cheerfully blunt manner. Her office is spare and white; the only splash of color comes from a single painting—a seascape done on a piece of corrugated metal—that is the work of her partner, an artist and designer. The office looks out over the bay and, beyond it, to a dusty brown military base—Marine Corps Base Hawaii. (The base was bombed by the Japanese minutes before the attack on Pearl Harbor.)

Gates explained that Kaneohe Bay was the inspiration for the “super coral” project. For much of the twentieth century, it was used as a dump for sewage. By the nineteen-seventies, a majority of its reefs had collapsed. A sewage-diversion program led to a temporary recovery, but then invasive algae took over and the water turned into a murky soup.

In 2005, the state teamed up with the Nature Conservancy and the University of Hawaii to devise a contraption—basically, a barge equipped with giant vacuum hoses—to suck algae off the seabed. Gradually, the reefs revived. There are now more than fifty so-called “patch reefs” in the bay.

“Kaneohe Bay is a great example of a highly disturbed setting where individuals persisted,” Gates said. “If you think about the coral that survived, those are the most robust genotypes. So that means what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

In one set of experiments planned for the super-coral project, corals from Kaneohe Bay will be raised under the sorts of conditions marine creatures can expect to confront later this century. Some colonies will be bathed in warm water, others in water that’s been acidified, and still others in water that’s both warm and acidified. Those which do best will then be bred with one another, to see if the resulting offspring can do even better.

The power of selective breeding is all around us. Dogs, cats, cows, chickens, pigs—these are all the products of generations of careful propagation. But the super-coral project pushes into new territory. Already there’s a term for this sort of effort: assisted evolution.

“In the food supply, in our pets, you name it—everywhere you turn, selectively bred stuff appears,” Gates observed. “For some reason, in the framework of conservation—or an ecosystem that would be preserved by conservation—it seems like a radical idea. But it’s not like we’ve invented something new. It’s hilarious, really, when you think about it.”

Coral reefs are found in a band that circles the globe like a cummerbund. The band stretches from the Tropic of Cancer to the Tropic of Capricorn, though there are occasional reefs at higher latitudes—near Bermuda, for instance. The world’s largest reef, or really reef system, is the Great Barrier Reef, along the east coast of Australia. Reefs can be hundreds of feet tall and thousands of acres in area. Unlike the Great Wall of China, the Great Barrier Reef, which extends more than fourteen hundred miles, actually is visible from space.

The architects of these vast structures are difficult to see with the naked eye. Known infelicitously as polyps, individual corals are generally no more than a tenth of an inch or so across. They consist of a set of tentacles—either six or a multiple of six—arrayed around a central mouth. Corals can, in effect, clone themselves, so a typical polyp is surrounded by—and also attached to—thousands of other polyps that are genetically identical to it. Many are also hermaphrodites; they produce both eggs and sperm, which they release once a year, in the summertime after a full moon. The polyps live in a thin layer at the surface of a reef; the rest of the structure is essentially a boneyard, composed of the exoskeletons of countless coral generations.

One day, when I was hanging around Moku o Lo‘e, Gates offered to show me some polyps close up, through a state-of-the-art machine known as a laser scanning confocal microscope. The confocal is so elaborate that its many lenses and screens and beam splitters take up an entire room, and it’s so complicated that Gates had to call in a colleague—a molecular biologist named Amy Eggers—to run the thing.

“It’s a very dynamic little world,” Eggers observed. She upped the magnification, and I could make out the nematocysts, or stinging cells, at the tip of each tentacle. I could also see the corals’ minute plant symbionts. Under the laser, these showed up as bright-red dots, so that the polyps seemed to be glowing from within. As the polyps grew more active, I found myself investing them with little gelatinous personalities. One was waving particularly vigorously, as if trying to attract attention.

“You can imagine what happens when people step on them,” Eggers said. “I try not to think about that.”

Although corals can’t travel, they practice a highly effective version of hunting and gathering. Their nematocysts contain minute poisonous barbs; these they use to spear tiny planktonic prey, which they then stuff into their mouths. (Some corals also deploy nets made of mucus to nab their victims.) Meanwhile, their symbionts are producing sugars, via photosynthesis. The symbionts allow the bulk of these sugars to leak into the corals, an arrangement that, in human hunter-gatherer terms, might be compared to finding a tree that harvests and delivers its own fruit.

The efficiency of the symbiotic relationship is what makes reefs possible: the sugars released by their symbionts power the corals’ massive building projects. These projects, in turn, foster many other relationships—far more than marine biologists have been able to understand, or even catalogue.

Owing to Gates’s many administrative duties—in addition to running the marine-biology institute and her own lab, she’s the president of the International Society for Reef Studies—she spends a lot of her time in meetings. Whenever she has a chance, though, she jumps into the water. Another day when I was hanging around the island, Gates offered to take me with her.

It was a beautiful Hawaiian morning, but the bay, in midwinter, was cool enough that Gates recommended borrowing a wetsuit. The only suit in my size was an extra-thick one; getting into it made me empathize with any animal that’s ever been eaten alive by a boa. I finally managed to zip it, and Gates and I and two of her students set off in a fibreglass boat.

Our first stop was a reef nicknamed the Fringe. “Wow, there’s a lot of mortality,” Gates said as we anchored nearby. We put on masks and plopped into the water. When she got right up to the reef, Gates brightened.

“Wherever it’s still brown, it’s living tissue,” she told me. She pointed to a large colony of Montipora capitata, or rice coral, that was sporting a plastic tag. Much of it was covered with olive-colored algae, which looked like ratty shag carpet. But there were also lots of clumps of beige.

“It’s really heartening to see these reefs be so resilient,” Gates said.

We swam along. It was hard for me to tell what represented a sign of resilience and what didn’t, since I wasn’t entirely sure what I was looking at. Ribbons of bright orange, which I took to be a show of health, turned out to be the opposite—a species of invasive sponge, introduced from Australia. What struck me most about the reef was what was absent. Aside from an occasional—and spectacular—yellow tang, there were almost no fish. When I asked Gates about this, she said that it was the legacy of decades of overfishing. This was yet another problem for the corals, which depend on herbivores to keep down the algae that compete with them for space.

We pulled ourselves back onto the boat and motored on. We were in the flight path of the Marine base, and every few minutes a plane either landing or taking off screamed above us, trailing a cloud of black smoke.

The colors of a healthy reef are a sign of harmony. Polyps are transparent; it’s the microscopic plants living inside them that give them their ruddy hue. In very warm water, these tiny plants, which belong to the genus Symbiodinium, go into what might be described as photosynthetic overdrive. At a certain point, they produce so much oxygen that they threaten their hosts. To defend themselves, the polyps spit out (or slough off) their symbionts and turn white—hence the term bleaching.

In the summer of 2014, unusually high water temperatures in the Pacific caused widespread bleaching around Oahu. Reefs in Kaneohe Bay were particularly hard hit; an underwater video shot in the bay in October, 2014, shows colony after colony of stark white coral.

In the summer of 2015, water temperatures in Kaneohe Bay spiked again, by almost four degrees Fahrenheit. This time, the event was linked to a huge shape-shifting pool of warm water that became known as the Blob. Some of the bay’s corals hadn’t recovered from the first bleaching; many of those which had been rallying were once again laid low.

“At the height of the bleaching events in 2014 and 2015, we all went into the water and said, ‘Shit!’ ” Gates told me. “Two bleaching events in a row—that’s outrageous.”

Though Gates certainly hadn’t planned on back-to-back bleaching episodes when she proposed the super-coral project, in a perverse sort of way they turned out to be godsends. She wouldn’t have to design a test to find the toughest corals; the bay had performed that task for her, separating colonies that could withstand repeated bleaching from those which couldn’t.

In the bit of reef we were looking at in the Keyhole, this sorting process had played out with peculiar vividness. The three colonies, right next to one another, had been subject to the same water temperatures. What had distinguished the quick from the dead? Perhaps the colonies were, in some small but critical way, genetically distinct. Or perhaps the difference was epigenetic. Epigenetics is to genes what punctuation is to prose; epigenetic changes alter the way genes are expressed but leave the underlying code unaffected. Or the fault may lie not in the corals themselves but in their symbionts. There are dozens of strains of Symbiodinium, and different ones seem to be associated with different levels of heat tolerance.

Gates is hoping to explore all these possibilities. The aim of her project is not just to create a super coral but also to investigate whether corals that aren’t super can be trained, as it were, to do better. She believes that it may be possible to coax young corals to take up new symbionts, not unlike the way parents encourage children to make new friends. She also believes that exposure to moderately high temperatures induces epigenetic changes that can help corals withstand very high temperatures. If so, then she thinks it might be possible to “condition” reefs by dousing them with hot water. “Yes, it might be logistically quite difficult to do,” she told me. “But an engineer would be able to solve that problem in a heartbeat.

Coral reefs are often compared to cities, an analogy that captures both the variety and the density of life they support. The number of species that can be found on a small patch of healthy reef is probably greater than can be encountered in a similar amount of space anywhere else on Earth, including the Amazon rain forest. Researchers who once picked apart a single coral colony counted more than eight thousand burrowing creatures belonging to more than two hundred species. Using more sophisticated genetic-sequencing techniques, scientists recently looked to see how many species of crustaceans alone they could find. In one square metre at the northern end of the Great Barrier Reef, they came up with more than two hundred species—mostly crabs and shrimp—and in a similar-size stretch, at the southern end, they identified almost two hundred and thirty species. Extrapolating beyond crustaceans to fish and snails and sponges and octopuses and squid and sea squirts and on through the phyla, scientists estimate that reefs are home to at least a million and possibly as many as nine million species.

This diversity is even more remarkable in light of what might, to extend the urban metaphor, be called reefs’ environs. Tropical seas tend to be low in nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus. Since most forms of life require nitrogen and phosphorus, tropical seas also tend to be barren; this explains why they’re often so marvellously clear. Ever since Darwin, scientists have been puzzled by how reefs support such richness under nutrient-poor conditions. The best explanation anyone has come up with is that on reefs—and here the metropolitan analogy starts to break down—all the residents enthusiastically recycle.

Because so much is at stake, Gates argues, the super-coral project is imperative. “I don’t really care about the ‘me’ in this,” she said one day over lunch in a strip mall in Kaneohe, the town closest to Moku o Lo‘e. “I care about what happens to corals. If I can do something that will help preserve them and perpetuate them into the future, I’m going to do everything I can.”

But scale is also what makes many other researchers leery of the project. Terry Hughes, the director of the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, once did a study of conventional coral-restoration projects, which involve raising coral colonies in tanks and transplanting them onto damaged reefs.

“I scoured the literature for any examples I could find,” he told me. He found some two hundred and fifty projects, which collectively cost a quarter of a billion dollars. The total area that was covered by the projects was just two and a half acres, or roughly two football fields.

“So we can call that the ‘restored area,’ though there are issues around that, because often the corals in these projects die,” Hughes went on. “When you consider just the Great Barrier Reef, which is a tiny fraction of the world’s reefs, it has the area of Finland. So going from a test tube or an aquarium to millions of football fields is hugely expensive, obviously.” The sort of scaling up that would be required would mean corals could no longer be transplanted; they’d have to be dispersed in another way, perhaps as embryos. (Coral embryos form larvae that drift around for a while before settling.)

“If you put corals—super corals—out in Kaneohe Bay, it would take probably thousands of years for them to spread naturally from Hawaii, which is an isolated archipelago,” Hughes said. “So you’d have to have some mechanism—aerial spraying from helicopters or something—to spread them around the Pacific. I don’t know how you would get to that next step.” At the time I spoke to Hughes, it was late summer in Australia, and the northern part of the Great Barrier Reef was suffering from the worst bleaching that observers had ever seen.

Ken Caldeira is a researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science, at Stanford University, who studies ocean acidification. He noted that reef-building corals, from the order Scleractinia, have been around at least since the mid-Triassic. Yet reefs remain confined to those relatively few spots on the planet where conditions suit them just right.

“I find it implausible that we’re going to succeed in doing in a couple of years what evolution hasn’t succeeded at over the past few hundred million years,” Caldeira observed. “There’s this idea that there should be some easy techno-fix, if only we could be creative enough to find it. I guess I just don’t think that’s true.”

Half a hemisphere away from Moku o Lo‘e, the American Chestnut Research and Restoration Project operates out of several labs and a greenhouse in Syracuse, New York. It, too, might be described as an effort at assisted evolution, only with a much more radical assist. The project’s aim is not to breed up a tougher tree but to create one through genetic engineering.

William Powell, a professor at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry, founded the chestnut project with a colleague, Charles Maynard, and now they co-direct it. Powell is fifty-nine, with gray hair, dark eyebrows, and a boyish earnestness.

“Not only was baby’s crib likely made of chestnut, but chances were, so was the old man’s coffin,” a plant pathologist named George Hepting wrote.

Then, in 1904, the chief forester at the New York Zoological Park—now the Bronx Zoo—noticed that some of the chestnut trees in the park were ailing. The following year, so many trees were turning brown that the forester appealed for help to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the New York Botanical Garden. Within five years, chestnut trees from Maryland to Connecticut were dying. The culprit was identified as a fungus, which had been imported from Asia, probably on Japanese chestnut trees, Castanea crenata. (Japanese chestnuts, which co-evolved with the fungus, find it only a minor irritant.) By the nineteen-forties, some four billion American chestnut trees had been wiped out. American chestnuts can resprout from the root collar; today, pretty much the only examples that still exist in the woods are small, spindly trees that have sprung up in this way.

“They will grow for a while and then get killed down to the ground again,” Powell told me. “So they’re kind of in what I call a Sisyphean cycle.” (The trees known as horse chestnuts, which can be found in many parks and gardens, are not, technically, chestnuts at all; they are members of a different family.)

Efforts to save Castanea dentata began almost as soon as the blight swept through. The first attempts involved hybridizing American chestnuts with other chestnut species. Then came zapping chestnuts with gamma radiation, in the hopes of producing a beneficial mutation. Next was a scheme to weaken the fungus by using a virus. These efforts produced thousands upon thousands of trees, all of which either succumbed to the blight or were so different from the American chestnut that they could hardly be said to be reviving it.

Powell attended graduate school in the nineteen-eighties, around the same time as Gates, and, like her, he was fascinated by molecular biology. When he got a job at the forestry school, in 1990, he started thinking about how new molecular techniques could be used to help the chestnut. Powell had studied how the fungus attacked the tree, and he knew that its key weapon was oxalic acid. (Many foods contain oxalic acid—it’s what gives spinach its bitter taste—but in high doses it’s also fatal to humans.) One day, he was leafing through abstracts of recent scientific papers when a finding popped out at him. Someone had inserted into a tomato plant a gene that produces oxalate oxidase, or OxO, an enzyme that breaks down oxalic acid.

“I thought, Wow, that would disarm the fungus,” he recalled.

Years of experimentation ensued. The gene can be found in many grain crops; Powell and his research team chose a version from wheat. First they inserted the wheat gene into poplar trees, because poplars are easy to work with. Then they had to figure out how to work with chestnut tissue, because no one had really done that before. Meanwhile, the gene couldn’t just be inserted on its own; it needed a “promoter,” which is a sort of genetic on-off switch. The first promoter Powell tried didn’t work. The trees—really tiny seedlings—didn’t produce enough OxO to fight off the fungus. “They just died more slowly,” Powell told me. The second promoter was also a dud. Finally, after two and a half decades, Powell succeeded in getting all the pieces in place. The result is a chestnut that is blight-resistant and—except for the presence of one wheat gene and one so-called “marker gene”—identical to the original Castanea dentata.

“I always say that it’s 99.9997-per-cent American chestnut,” he said.

In another plot, surrounded by an eight-foot fence, were a few dozen transgenic trees. These had smooth, unblemished bark, which reminded me of snakeskin. The tallest was about ten feet high and about six inches in diameter. It was a chilly day in March, and all the branches were bare. Powell explained that the fence was mostly to keep out deer, but also to discourage anti-G.M.O. protesters. He told me that I ought to come back in late spring, when the trees would be in bloom. Chestnuts produce streamer-like catkins, covered in tiny white flowers. “People used to say it was like snow in June,” he said.

Before any transgenic trees can be planted outside an experimental plot, they have to be approved by three federal agencies: the Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency. Powell is planning to request approval later this year. This will initiate a review process that could take up to five years. Once approval is granted—assuming that it is—Powell wants to produce ten thousand trees that can be made available to the public. If all these trees get planted and survive, they will represent .00025 per cent of the chestnuts that grew in America before the blight.

“This is a century-long project,” Powell said. “That’s why I tell people, ‘You’ve got to get your children, you’ve got to get your grandchildren involved in this.’ ”

As the world warms, and the oceans acidify, and species are reshuffled from one continent to another, it’s increasingly difficult to say what would count as conservation. In his most recent book, “Half-Earth,” the biologist E. O. Wilson argues that the best hope for the planet’s remaining species lies in leaving them alone. Even today, there are vast regions where, Wilson writes, “natural processes unfold in the absence of deliberate human intervention.” (The Amazon Basin is one such region; the Serengeti is another.) We ought to allow these processes to continue, Wilson argues. To this end, he recommends setting aside fifty per cent of the planet’s surface as reserves.

“Give the rest of Earth’s life a chance,” he pleads.

Those scientists who recommend this sort of hands-off approach—and there are many of them—stress the limits of what science can accomplish. Just because you can break an egg doesn’t mean you can put it back together. They argue that even the best-intentioned intervention can do more harm than good. People may read about a project like Gates’s or Powell’s and take exactly the wrong lesson from it.

“There’s a lot of psychology here,” Terry Hughes told me. “There is a danger of thinking we’ve found the technological solution, so therefore we can keep damaging reefs, because we can always fix them in the future.

“In terms of protecting ecosystems like coral reefs or rain forests, prevention is always better than cure,” he added.

Advocates for techniques like assisted evolution and genetic engineering argue that the moment for being hands off has passed. Humans have already so violently altered the world that without “deliberate intervention” the future holds only loss and more loss.

“There’s just too many people right now,” Powell told me. “I always say, ‘We need a full toolbox of methods to keep our forests healthy.’ And we shouldn’t limit it by saying, ‘Well, you can do this method but you can’t do that method.’

“You have emerald ash borer going through right now,” he went on. (The borer, another import from Asia, is killing ash trees from Colorado to New Hampshire.) “Should we just leave the ash trees and say, O.K., they’re gone? Woolly adelgid is killing the hemlocks. If we lose all the hemlocks, do we just say, O.K., that’s gone? There’s what’s called thousand-cankers disease that’s spreading on walnuts right now. Is that the kind of attitude we should have? We have all these challenges out there, and the question is: Should we just let the trees die out? And to me that’s not an option.”

When I was in Hawaii, I found myself wavering. I would listen to Gates and agree with her: there’s no going back. Then I would get on the little ferry and try to picture the super-coral project moving forward. My head would start to ache. Corals are slow to reach sexual maturity, and, when they do, most spawn only once a year. Crossbreeding requires many generations, and in that time—however long it may be—the seas will have grown that much warmer and more acidified. Well over a thousand species of Scleractinia have been identified, and probably lots more await discovery. To save reefs is a project akin to saving forests; one species of super coral wouldn’t be enough. You’d need to breed hundreds of them. And, even if this could be accomplished, how would you get billions and billions of polyps settled in the ocean?

“There are many, many unknowns,” she went on. “And people are very quick to criticize based on ‘But what happens if this doesn’t work and what happens if this doesn’t work?’ And I say, ‘Well, I don’t know now, but I know I’ll know more when I get there.’ And I feel that we’re at this point where we need to throw caution to the wind and just try.” ♦

Big things are happening behind the doors of an unremarkable white garage on the Walsh University campus.

A group of students launched the Garage — officially the Walsh University Innovation Center — this week. Housed in the back of the Katherine Drexel House, the innovation center gives students the space to turn their ideas into something tangible.

“We always said that ideas will die on paper. We really wanted to have a space where students can come together” and work on projects, said Matt Strobelt, a Walsh junior.

Strobelt, alongside fellow students Andrew Chwalik, Josh Ippolitio and Iagos Lucca, came up with the idea last fall. They pitched the idea to Walsh President Richard Jusseaume, who jumped on board. The project was funded by donors.

Before the Garage, there really wasn’t a space where students could get together and share creative ideas and problem solve, or even create new businesses, said Phil Kim, an assistant professor of business and the Garage’s faculty adviser.

Before it was transformed, the structure was filled with boxes, furniture and other odds and ends, said Chwalik, a senior.

Now the room, completely designed by students, exudes innovation: Three of the four walls are covered in dry-erase paint, power strips can be pulled down from the ceiling, and an electronic whiteboard and monitors allows for collaboration.

The name obviously comes from it being located in a physical garage, but also reflects a trait of business like Apple and Microsoft.

“Who doesn’t know a big name company that started in a garage?” Ippolitio said.

COMMUNITY

The Garage is more than just a gathering space; it also offers mentoring, networking and education opportunities.

They have a list of mentors, both Walsh alumni and members of the public, that can help students unsure of how to proceed with their project, Strobelt said.

They also hope to partner with local businesses on innovation challenges and host events such as Shark Tank watch parties, Ippolitio said.

On Thursday, the Garage hosted its first Blueprint Speaker Series presenter: Jim Cossler, CEO of the Youngstown Business Incubator.

The ongoing lecture series is another way to engage the community, inside and outside of the university, Chwalik said.

EXCITEMENT

Though its founders are business students, the Garage is open to everyone on campus.

Entrepreneurship isn’t limited to one school or major. Students from all backgrounds are valuable to the creative process and can foster collaboration, Kim said.

“We want all those students because that’s where rich ideas get even better. There’s a depth to it. They have perspectives that (business students) wouldn’t,” he said.

The Garage plans to develop online educational tools so those who haven’t taken certain classes can learn about marketing and business topics, Strobelt said.

“As much as we want this to be about the creating a business process, it’s also … going to be a learning process, so students can learn about general business sense,” he said.

On campus, excitement has been building about the project. The founders are often stopped by students who want to pitch ideas or ask questions.

“As we progressed into this project, it’s amazing to see that many of students actually had ideas, tons of ideas, and they’re ready to start putting the work in,” Lucca said.

They thought that finding interested students would be a challenge, and it has been, “but there’s a lot of people out there who have wonderful ideas who are ready to use the space. We’re very happy to see that,” he added.

The Garage has already seen its first business venture.

Last week, Chwalik officially launched ReTie (retiellc.com), an online shop for gently-used name brand ties.

“I’ve used the Garage already and it’s been a blessing so far,” he said. “I’ve had the resources and the space to make this dream a reality.”

By Lori Cuthbert