The Problem: Corals face multifaceted stresses that prevent them from finding, attaching to, surviving on, and growing coral reefs. In coral restoration, current methods for fragmentation and larval settlement are successful at small scales but they are struggling mightily to scale up. New tools are needed to create order-of-magnitude boosts in restoration efficiency. By harnessing, concentrating, and applying naturally-occuring bacteria, we can hack coral reef signals and interactions, giving the competitive advantage back to corals. Our lab has already developed these hacks - we produced probiotic bacterial tools that can boost larval settlement and survivorship of corals by orders of magnitude. Now we're ready to build the delivery system.
Our Solution: We can boost coral stress resistance and growth rates by treating corals and their juvenile habitats with beneficial bacteria, often called probiotic bacteria. Already, our lab has successfully isolated a library of cultured bacteria that increase the settlement and survival rates of juvenile corals. Some of these bacteria even stop the growth of known coral pathogens. Next, we will incorporate these beneficial bacteria into new biomaterials and applications to multiply the efficiency of current coral restoration methods. Specifically we will:
Produce custom-fabricated coral settlement surfaces embedded with beneficial bacteria, which can be used to foster larval settlement and boost growth of coral juveniles and coral fragments.
Develop ready-to-use freeze-dried powders from coral beneficial bacteria, which can be added to closed-system aquaria and restoration raceways to boost larval settlement and coral growth.
Develop flexible biopolymers and gels embedded with beneficial coral bacteria, which can be applied to diseased and damaged coral tissue to stop disease and reverse tissue loss.
Develop probiotic bacteria for understudied, neglected, and hard-to-grow coral species including those on the U.S. Endangered Species List.
How We'll Change The World: Our probiotic bacterial tools for corals can be used separately and in combination to increase coral growth in restoration, fragmentation, settlement, out-planting, research, and education. When coral restoration costs are no longer prohibitively expensive per coral (in terms of both dollars per coral and person hours per coral), every existing and novel approach in restoration can be further iterated, accelerated, and optimized.
In other words, by breaking open an early, narrow, stubborn bottleneck in coral propagation using our beneficial bacteria 'hacks', new ideas, methods, and successes can flow forth for every coral reef and for everyone working to help corals regrow.
