00:00It's one of nature's most amazing events. It happens just a few nights of the year after the
00:08full moon and the corals all release their eggs and sperm into the water. It looks like it's snowing
00:14upside down. It's quite spectacular. And then the eggs and sperm float to the surface where
00:19they fertilise and then over the next few days create little coral larvae which then swim down,
00:25find a nice new place to live and cool home and create a new coral. And so without this our reefs
00:31would not exist? That's absolutely right. This is a really critical thing for coral reefs to
00:36both rebuild degraded reefs, expand their reef structures and even establish new reefs in new
00:43areas. Without your help, what is the chance of all of the corals surviving during this mass spawning
00:50event? That's a great question. So corals release millions of eggs but actually typically less than
00:56one percent survive which is a really big bottleneck when we're considering the rate of coral loss on
01:02our reefs. And so to help facilitate that we've created this kind of nutritional supplement or
01:07a coral baby food if you would to help boost their life and fitness during those vulnerable early life
01:14stages. So we tried it in the lab and we found it doubled their survival and now we're taking it to
01:20the reef to see if it does the same thing. And how does it work? Is it much like you know if you have a
01:25pet fish and you feed that in the morning and in the afternoon you sprinkle a little bit of food on
01:30top? How does it work for you? Yeah unfortunately they don't make baby bottles quite small enough to
01:35coral larvae. So what we do we actually fill them with something called a lipid nanoparticle. It's
01:40tiny little balls of fats and the larvae have a small paw a small mouth that they can eat
01:47particulate matter from the water and so they take in these little nanoparticles and that's how we
01:53deliver the food. Yeah right how do you deal with though you know tides and waves and being washed away
02:00and then being only a very small part in a very large ocean? That's a really good question like the
02:06larvae are used to or I guess the corals are used to reproducing in the turbulent waters of the ocean
02:11and so they have built mechanisms to do that. As they say they float over the next couple of days that
02:17helps to avoid any of the banging into the reef structures but it is a really vulnerable life stage
02:24they're just essentially balls of dividing cells so they're really fragile at this point. I read that
02:30you refer to your fantastic team of coral midwives. Is that what you basically are in the marine world?
02:38That's essentially that's right we are the coral midwives for the next week in our little coral
02:42NICU lab looking up at millions of corals. Yeah that's right. So we hear so often Jen about high
02:50sea temperatures coming our way, clot coral bleaching coming our way. Just how important is it that we
02:57understand, nurture and protect these spawning events? That's absolutely right. They're facing so
03:03many different pressures both local and global so they've really got kind of the world against them
03:08at the moment. Our reefs when they're reproducing that's a really great sign that they're healthy
03:13enough to reproduce and they're cycling but it is one of those points where the water at the moment is
03:20a few degrees warmer than it normally is this time of year which is a positive sign. We may experience
03:25another mass bleaching as we get into summer and so having these new baby corals is really important
03:31because it allows for evolution to do its thing and hopefully some of these ones that we're giving
03:37a kickstart to life will survive into the future and be more resilient and provide a more resilient
03:43reef. And Jen given that you're up there and you're spending a lot of time there on the reef
03:47how would you characterise the state of the reef? It's looking absolutely beautiful at the moment but you
03:53can see a number of dead skeletons on the reef that have died recently and as well over the last
03:58couple of years so there's really quite a few evidence of stresses on the reef.
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