Crowdscience

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is one of the richest and most complex natural ecosystems on earth, and it’s home to over 600 species of coral – marine animals that are most closely related to jellyfish. But the coral is under threat, with climate change, ocean acidification and marine heatwaves endangering the reef and the many iconic animals that depend on it. CrowdScience listener Felix, aged 9, wants to know what we’re doing to protect it, and presenter Caroline Steel is on the case. In this special edition of CrowdScience, we follow scientists from Australia’s Institute of Marine Science as they attempt to restore the reef with baby corals that they’ve nurtured in experimental tanks at their Sea Simulator facility on the country’s northeast coast. This experiment kicked off in December, as the researchers recreated the annual mass coral spawning event in controlled conditions, manipulating temperature, pH, light, and nutrients to breed coral baby that they can then use to reseed damaged sections of reef.