The Coral Whisperer and Dying Reefs

 Photo by Jackie Riccardi

In a sanctum that few outsiders glimpse—the laboratory at the New England Aquarium—Liz Burmester pushes through two swinging doors signed The Coral Room (or the Room of Requirement). The parenthetical, a reference to the ever-morphing chamber in the Harry Potter books, attests to the room’s multiple purposes. Mesmerizing blue blubber jellyfish live here, for example, but the room is mainly about coral.

Against one wall, 16 fish tanks, stacked on two parallel shelves, hold trays containing 400 Astrangia poculata (northern star corals) for Burmester’s experiments.

Burmester (GRS’16) dons a white lab coat and protective glasses and takes a small specimen of a coral colony to a work counter. Using a scalpel, she scrapes a tiny bit of tissue from the colony, then cleans the wound with a Waterpik. Depending on this coral’s resilience, it should heal over the next 30 to 60 days.

“I feel a little bad about it,” Burmester, a vegetarian, says of the infliction, even though she knows that the coral’s primitive nervous system almost certainly can’t feel pain, and its cousins in the wild endure all sorts of injuries from predators, storms, and humans. Burmester talks like a loving pet owner about these animals that look like rocks. “We feed them shrimp in a slurry,” she says. “It’s pretty cute. We use a turkey baster.”

Corals are nature’s mishmash: animals with stony skeletons and a plant-like hunger for sun-derived energy, obtained from symbiotic photosynthesizing algae living inside the coral. Dubbed the “rain forests of the sea,” coral reefs house up to 25 percent of marine species—including an estimated one-tenth of the fish eaten worldwide—and that’s just the beginning of their beneficence. They shelter coastline communities against storms and hurricanes; they’re a source of proteins that appear to block HIV infection; and they’re tourism magnets, with the United Nations estimating that a square kilometer of reef powers at least $100,000 of business annually.

Yet around the world, coral reefs are dying. Pollution, coastal development, harmful fishing practices, and warming and acidifying waters from fossil fuel emissions have conspired to threaten 75 percent of reefs worldwide, a percentage expected to swell to almost 100 percent by mid-century, says John Finnerty, a College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of biology. He is a faculty mentor to Burmester, who studies A. poculata in hopes of finding better diagnostic tools for sick reefs. Her work is part of a collaboration, called Coral Whisperer, between BU and the Virginia-based environmental group Conservation International.

Complete story here.