Cnidariology (CORAL) Encore with Shayle Matsuda

Oh, hey, it's 2026. This is Ali. I'm in the American Southwest. I'm in New Mexico. This is my 49th out of 50 states I've visited. You're thinking which one's next, which is the final one. West Virginia. I got a crayfish guy that I'm going to go out there to see eventually. Anyway, I'm in New Mexico. I'm interviewing a skunk expert that I have been waiting to meet for over six years. I'm meeting him in about an hour. I'm wearing black and white striped socks. I'm so nervous. My palms are sweating. I knew I was getting married for about six months before I got married, wedding digiters. Now imagine six years of waiting to meet a skunk expert. Can you believe it? Imagine how I'm feeling. Nervous. I'm shaking. I hope I say the right thing. Jared's coming with me. We're going to talk skunks. But because I'm in New Mexico, I'm hopping around. We are giving you this encore episode of one that I love, love, love. This was absolutely a joy to record. It was a beautiful setting. Wonderful stories about fieldwork, personal stories. This one is just an absolute banger. So if we just get into it and enjoy. Okay. So this episode was recorded in beautiful Hawaii. Have you ever heard of it? You're about to just get an earful of coral. But before I recorded it, honestly, I knew neither Jack nor shit about coral. Now all I want to do is stare at videos of coral. Honestly, I used to just consider them to be like the really plucky, kind of quirky settings of a snorkeling john, kind of like a splashy backdrop in a community theater play. Like, oh, that's nice. But you know, what's happening in front of them? What kind of fish do we have? Oh, contrary. After this episode, you'll be like, move out of the way, fish. I'm staring at a polyp. And yeah, it's totally fun if you don't know what a polyp is. We will get to that. But first, thank you to all the folks that support the show at patreon.com/alogies for as little as a dollar a month. You can submit questions. Also, thanks to everyone who buys and wears shirts and hats and such from ologiesmerch.com. We have some new denim dad hats. If you need a new lid, this says, I like weird facts. Good intentions and bad puns. It doesn't literally say that. I'm just saying that it's like people will go, oh, that must be what you're into. Although that's not a bad idea for a hat. Stay tuned. Also, thank you to everyone who tells friends and co-workers about the show and who rates and subscribes and lose reviews, which you know I read. Okay, it's me again, 2026. This is a fresh review from a longtime listener and elementary school teacher Serena G who wrote that every one of your episodes inspires awe. Even when it's a topic, I didn't think I'd be interested in. Serena G, let's get you some coral. Also, if anyone needs kids safe, ologies episodes, no swears, we now have smallages, SMOLO GIS. They're shorter, g-rated edits of classic episodes. They're out weekly for free. They're just in their own feed. So go to your podcast app and search smallages, SMOLO GIS. There you go. Okay, nadaryology. Totally a word. It's a well-documented, legit term. It's a study of animals. There are over 10,000 species who have nitocytes, which are these specialized cells for catching prey. And where does this lovely, silent, consonant weird word come from? It looks like when your mom tries to weasel a fake term into a words with friends play and you're like, no way, Nancy. That's not enough vowels. But it comes from the old Latin, "needay," which means a "nettle," and it might also have ties to old Latvian and Lithuanian words, meaning to itch and to tickle. So corals are niderians. They're underwater animals that poses these kind of beautiful plant, looking things from Mars, and they want to just tickle you to death. I'm already sold. I already love them, but let's hear more. So I was introduced to thisologist by your favorite toothologist, SquidExpert Sarah McInalty, Sarah McAttack on Twitter, follow her, love her. And she invited me to tag along on a squidding trip to Hawaii, a research trip she was doing. A company called Atlas Obscura was facilitating it. They were awesome. They do wonderful science and history trips. It was a joy. Rachel, she let it. I love her. Anyway, one day the group got to take a little boat to Coconut Island, and the very island featured in the opening credits of Gilligan's Island. And this was once a weird getaway for Hollywood types. But now it's a research station where grad students tend to marine life. We spent the day looking at these gurgling outdoor tanks and watching a bay of hammerhead sharks, strolling some beachy trails to stations with urchins and sea cucumbers and kairi snails. They're all being monitored by these wonderful marine biologists there. Thisologist got his bachelor's at UC Santa Cruz, double majoring in environmental studies and feminist studies got his masters in biology and ecology, evolution and conservation biology in San Francisco, and is working toward his PhD right now at this famed Gates Lab at the University of Hawaii, Manoa and the Hawaiian Institute of Marine Biology. The Gates Lab is a coral lab. This dude has his hands full. The coral were in the middle of a spawning event that very weak, but he is amazing and took an hour out of his day to come to my hotel and chat about corals. I was waiting so excitedly in the lobby, and I thought like he was maybe five or ten minutes late, which is fine. But it turns out we were in the same lobby exactly on time, but just perfectly obscured by a pillar. So once we figured that out, it was all smooth, Salon. We talked about what coral even is, why they're important, how he feels about diving, what a dead reef looks like, the state of some reefs around the world, if it's reef or reefs, perhaps the importance of balancing work with being your true self, some advice for aspiring marine biologists, how screwed are coral? What movies get it right? What's up with sunscreens? What is bleaching? And what else can we do to help our hard squishy pals beneath the sea? So anchor down. Get ready for a wave of coral info with the amazing nadaryologist, Shale Matsuda. It's 9.59. Shales do here at 10. I'm sitting by the pool. He has so little time. I'm just just going to throw this microphone in his face and start rolling before we even hit the elevator. 10 minutes. I came in the other side. It was literally like 10 feet away reading about microplastics and coral wanting to cry. But yeah, it's awful. Here's my naces. Okay, and you are a nadaryologist? Do you see it right? Sure, I was thinking about that or our coralologist maybe. Is our corals nadaria? The nadarians. Okay, nadarians. The phylum they're a part of. And what unites all of those animals is their stinging cells, their nitocytes. Oh, that's the common thread. We must be related. Yeah, so like anemones or jellyfish and corals. I'll produce these little stinging cells of the use in defense or precapture. I've already learned so much about corals. I didn't know that. They got little stingies. And so what exactly is a coral? That's a great question that we think about all the time, actually. So corals are animals, first and foremost, but the corals we think of a coral reef corals, they're much more than like the some of their parts. So the coral animal looks white, they've cleared tissues and they secret a white calcium carbonate skeleton. But the reason that when you're snorkeling around a coral reef, they don't appear white to us is because they have a symbiotic algae, which live inside their tissues that provide up to like 95% of their daily nutritional needs. And the algae's color themselves are what we're looking at when we see corals. Oh my god. And just like you and me, corals also have a microbiome. They have bacteria that live inside other tissues that also play a lot of really important roles. Okay, so to recap, corals are animals, and they often have a calcium carbonate white skeletal structure and a squishy skin bag that can be filled with colorful algae and bacteria pals that live under their skin and provide their nutrition. So if you pitch that creature in a sci-fi series, people would be like, "No, that's too weird. What about just like a short skinnier human with bigger eyes?" And everyone would be like, "Yeah, yeah, that's more possible." Now what is with them being a skin bag? This is like the hardest question. I know. It's like, "Oh man, like we have a term for this. It's called the coral holo-biont." And that is like the coral animal itself. It's symbiotic algae. It's bacteria. They're fungi. They're archaea. There are a lot of different obelgette symbions that these corals have that are critical for their life and function. So it's kind of like a skeleton, a super mix of goodness, and then like a little transparent skin over it. And the transparent skin is the animal itself. So if just like trees that are growing for us, if you count their rings, you can idea of how old they are. Corals actually work the same way, where they are constantly secreting this calcium carbonate skeleton and growing. And researchers will actually take a core of that skeleton. And you can actually count the different layers and get an idea of the age of the corals. And also what was going on on the planet at the time. Oh my gosh. Is it similar to trees in there's a ring for every year of growth because of seasons? or is that different? It's kind of like seasons in the ocean. Different corals will grow at different rates, so kind of like different plants as well. In a nutshell, like as the coral begins to grow and keeps putting down these layers of calcium carbonate, we can use things like carbon dating to get an idea of like what was happening in the atmosphere and in the oceans at those times. And so it kind of gives us a geologic history of what was happening in these environments. Wow. When you see, let's say, a coral out of the ocean and it's like a piece on a, I was like, yeah, you know, number one, it's not a happy coral. But when you see like a decorative coral, are you seeing essentially just its skeleton? Yes. When we say coral reef corals, there are a particular type of group of corals that live in the shallow waters, that you know, have these alice in my hands that rely on photosynthesis to get their food. But corals are really large group of organisms and they, we have deep sea corals that don't have these symbiosis that just feed hydratrographically by eating, you know, playing thinner things in the water. And a lot of corals like can have pigments and their skeletons do have pigments of their own. And so like black corals, you know, red corals, those things that you see in the stores, like that's still the skeleton, but those are the organisms themselves, which we shouldn't pull out of the ocean. Which we should leave in the ocean. Leave in the ocean. Are those getting harvested just for decorative purposes? Yeah, very often. There's a lot of protections in different places about corals, but it's not everywhere. Okay, so side note, some figures have estimated upwards of $200 million annually. Worth of coral is poached from the oceans for things like jewelry and decor. And in some places, just taking a coral skeleton bit from the beach is illegal. So if you're going to get arrested on a beach, do something else, have a better story, you know? So maybe don't have coral decorations. Yeah. Okay. But what you can have is that we're, you know, with technology increases where we're doing a lot of work with like 30 imaging, you can like go home or, you know, go to a museum or you know, a tech place and get a coral printed and put that in your house. Yes, you can admire them in a way that's a replica. Yeah, absolutely. That makes sense. Right. You could, I'm sure you could even cast them and you can pour plaster of Paris in there. Exactly. You could fix it. PSDS, I did look it up and there are hollow, coral shaped molds. You can pour plaster of Paris in them and it just, it seems more convenient than getting yourself to an ocean and then out of jail. And now how long have you been studying corals? I've been studying corals formally for four years during this degree, but I've been interested in corals for much longer and have studied corals as a volunteer researcher at the California Academy of Sciences on expeditions and volunteer expeditions, actually kind of like, out of the city. Oh, as a younger person. And were you always maybe drawn to the sea? Were you always like an aquatic person? That's a good question too. So I grew up just outside of Chicago where even though I thought like I was growing up on a body of water like Michigan, you know, it's not a marine environment, fresh water environment. So it looks like I wasn't growing up swimming on coral reefs. But for me, you know, looking back, I, my first like taste of, you know, the ocean was growing up and going to the Shed Aquarium and seeing all these exhibits there. And I think that's a really common thread that you hear for a lot of us who, you know, pursue degrees in marine biology that most of us in the United States aren't lucky enough to grow up on a coral reef. And so a lot of our first exposures to this, you know, especially those of us before like the YouTube era and whatnot was going to our local aquariums and really seeing these organisms that, you know, you don't even read about the ocean. If you're wondering where are corals, I asked corals.work and it said essentially around the equator plus where currents flow out of the tropics like in Florida and southern Japan. It's a little bit warmer. They make up 0.2% of the ocean floor, but they're home to this blue mind, 25% of marine life. What? So if sea animals were like the cool kids, the coral reefs would be like the mall if this were a movie from the 80s. And so was there, was there a moment like at the aquarium where you thought I would love to do that in life? It's interesting. I'm going to give you my journey story and you can like hack this up. I love a journey story. It's a journey story. Okay. Let's get to no shale science background. Satellite. So I had one of those moments where like I was always drawn to nature and to being outside and playing outside. I was a very like I was not a video game kid. I was a one of getting muddy kid. But when I got to college, I kind of went a different science route. I studied water policy and sustainable organic farming and that was something that I was like really into and really excited about. And I never, I just like marine biology wasn't like something that I thought I could really do. And I ended up actually pursuing a different path. I had a dual degree in environmental science and women studies and I kind of went the second route and just kind of worked with youth in nature and underserved communities. And I got to this point, you know, my little bit later 20s. I decided to, you know, quit my job and move out of my house and sell all my stuff and travel and figure that out. And something that happened for me on that trip was I finally decided to went to Scooby Dive. I'm a really claustrophobic person. So I kind of put that off for a while. And I really explicitly remember, you know, that first time I descended into the water. And this was in Thailand. And I remember like being so overwhelmed with how beautiful all the corals were and how this environment like different than just Northland just like opened up in a really three dimensional dynamic way. And then I also remember seeing a lot of garbage on the reef too. And so I was having a lot of, I was having these like, you know, push pull moments of being like so overwhelmed with the beauty around me. And so curious about, you know, what these animals were, what, what, you know, what is this environment that I'm in? And I want it, like looking at everything, but also being really struck by how polluted it was as well. Yeah. From there basically went, I wanted to make sure that was right choice. And so I applied to sitting in internet cafes, like applying to these like coral reef monitoring, like volunteer ships just to like learn a little bit more, make sure this is the like big life switch that I was ready to make. And I joined one that was in the UK, 10 in Mexico. I went out and lived for three months and learned to identify all the species of coral out there. And we participated in monitoring transects that were then used by local NGOs to compare the protected sites that they had gotten protection for versus the sites that weren't. And so in that experience really kind of solidified that, you know, I moved back to San Francisco. I went to city college to make up on some coursework that I hadn't done the first time. I was volunteering as a diver at Aquarium to get more hands on experience, started volunteering in a research lab at the California Academy of Sciences. And then I was bartending to, you know, pay the bills. And then from there I realized that, you know, being at a museum was such an exciting place because you've got researchers studying everything, right? You've got that. You've got tourists and like community folks from the neighbor who are like, right upstairs that you can just go upstairs and talk to you about like all the really cool things that we're working on. And moving on, you know, from there to my, to my PhD where I am now was, you know, I was, at that point I was like pretty much sold. So I have never been yet snorkeling in a live reef. Oh, you got to do that. I hear. What is that like? I mean, you do that for your job and also as a passion. Like, what is it like to be underwater like that? It's so beautiful. Yeah. It's so beautiful. Corals come in like all shapes and sizes and just like, you know, you have your favorite city or your favorite, you know, nature trail you like to walk on. Every reef is going to be a little bit different. They have huge structures and these corals will have these, you know, these big branching corals, you just look a little closer and you see their homes to all these different kinds of animals. Like the more, you know, the more structure you have in your, in the ecosystem, the more different types of organisms you're going to see when you're down there. And it's just, it's, it's so exciting. Like there's so much to see. And you'll see your turtle and your shark every once in a while, which is really exciting. But for me, it's like kind of just like swimming up to like one kind of coral and just like staring at it for a while. And then things will start to come out. You'll see like crabs that live inside the coral. You'll see, you know, snapping shrimp. Sometimes you'll see eels or octopus and just like you just, it is like, it's like a, you can think of it almost like a metropolis in the ocean. Full of diverse cast of players. When you're doing research, is it ever difficult for you to say, okay, all right, Shale, we're done. We're get out of the water. Are you like one more thing? Oh, yeah, absolutely. You know, and sometimes you forget, like there have been times when I, you know, since I work on corals and I'm working on an experiment right now where I'm focusing on individual coral colonies. I can be like upside down in the reef for like an hour at a time, just staring at this one coral and then we'll come to the surface and people be like, how did you see that? Shark that one by before? And I'll be like, what are you talking about? You know, so it's always still really nice to go out when you're not working and just really appreciate, you know, how lucky we are to be able to see these environments. You know, I've worked with researchers who, you know, I'll go to a coral reef and I'll say, this is beautiful. Look at all the diversity here and they'll be like, you should have seen it 20 years ago. Oh. Because we're seeing these changes at such a rapid pace that we're witnessing them in our lifetimes. And that's, that's my question. - Yeah. - So what is Shale working on in terms of protecting these bony, soupy, squishy, mysterious, gorgeous little critters? - What we're working on, like our lab group is working on is, you know, really a whole wide range of questions, but we're really curious about, you know, what's going to happen to corals under these future climate conditions and what can we do to intervene to give them a better chance of surviving? I'm trying to say if I want to go like broad or like my stuff. - I'm saying let's go broad a little bit just because people don't know a shit about corals. - That's true. - That's true. - But they're the coolest animals. - I don't know. - Yeah, so corals are all, corals species are all really, really different. That's something that makes them super exciting and interesting, but makes it also a lot harder to come up with like strategies to help them survive because they reproduce differently. You know, some will brood, like releasing coral larvae into the water, some will spawn, releasing coral gametes, experiments into the water, some are large and they grow in these really big shapes. Some are very small, even single polypt corals. And so they have very different life strategies. They're just, they're so different they associate with different types of these symbionts. And so what we're really interested in is doing is seeing if, you know, are there types of interventions that we can kind of scale up that managers and conservationists all around the world who work with these different corals and these different coral reef environments that are all widely different can use or like can use as signals for what might happen in the future or to use to kind of help those corals that are out there survive. Some of the stuff that we're working on in the lab is looking at like, can we expose corals to non-lethal stressors to condition them to them to put out in the reef and if they experience these higher temperatures downstream, will that initial exposure help them survive? What is coral bleaching? You're asking, I get it. We're going to explain that in a second. Don't worry, I got you. And with coral bleaching, what's really hard about that is it's this whole balance of how hot and for how long. So if there's a really short high temperature spike, how does that affect these organisms versus if this is more of a prolonged, only a degree or two above that thermal maximum that they have, how does that affect if they're going to bleach the severity of that bleaching and then also their ability to recover afterwards. So we haven't really talked about what coral bleaching is. Yeah, I know. Next question. I was like, okay, that might make any sense yet. So coral is how these symbiotic algae that are obligated, that means they're required for the coral to live. They provide up to 95% of their daily nutritional needs. And everything when the temperatures are good, everything is happy. You know, the corals get what they need, the symbiotic, what they need. But when the water temperature rises, like I said, just even slightly above that thermal maximum that the corals can handle, the corals are starting to stress out. I'm freaking out. And one of their stress responses is to expel these algae. So kind of how we get sick, we'll get a fever and that's good. It's our body's way of helping protect us. But if that fever gets too high or goes on for too long, I can actually be detrimental to us in the same things true with coral bleaching. So as the corals are purging out these algal symbionts, it's not just all the time. Like you'll see you can watch a coral start to pale, losing its color, right? Because as the symbionts leave, that white skeleton showing through. And then as that's happening, the longer it goes on, the corals aren't getting the energy and they can begin to starve. Okay, so under temperature stressors, corals toss their internal friends and they bleach because they lose that color. So they're not dead, but they're certainly weaker and they're in danger. It is not cute. And what you'll see is if you've got into the coral reef, when this is happening, if you see these corals that are white, you're seeing that skeleton through the tissue, but the tissue is still there, the corals are still alive. And if that stressor leaves, the corals have a chance to recover. Those symbiont communities can proliferate again in the corals, they'll repigment and be okay. But if that stressor goes on too long, the corals can die. We've seen this happen on massive scales on a reef. And once the corals die, you'll start to see macro algae growing on top of them. And that's when the structure of the reef environment will then start to really break down. But also, some corals aren't bleaching some individuals. They can Kanye away bat during the 2014 and 2015 bleaching events that we had. There'd be two corals, the exact same species, right next to each other, like touching on the reef. And one of them would be bleached and one of them would be visibly totally normal. And so we're really trying to understand, like, you know, what is it about that corals, like genetic makeup or symbiont communities that is allowing these corals to perform a lot better. And so when you're looking at, say, two different examples of coral next to each other, are those different individuals genetically or are those different groups of a bunch of individuals? When you're looking at a fan of coral, how many people are you looking at that are coral? Yeah, that's a good question. So a coral colony is a coral, you can think of a coral itself as a coral polyp. What is a polyp? Well, it's a squishy little bugger. With a feathery head and it secretes calcium carbonate and it's base to anchor it on a surface, kind of like a cup holder filled with one of those castation, win-sock dancers only made out of jello salad. Also, as long as this train has to do, made a stop into polypville, it comes from the words poly, many, and p being foot. So polyp. And in old Latin, it meant cuddlefish. I personally tend to associate polyps with bad news about colons. Because polyp is a little intestinal, dinkled angle that can grow. And if not checked, it can turn into a tumor. So get checked. Okay, let's get out of our butts and back into the ocean now. What is a polyp? Inertion. So you look a little mouth, kind of like if you took an eminion, that kind of structure, mouth and middle, tentacles on the outside. And as the coral grows, it buds off and creates a genetically identical polyp. And as those polyps continue to multiply and spread and grow, you've had a coral colony that is made up of polyps that are all one genetic individual. And do you think that that's all the same person or do you think it's a person and a bunch of clones? Yeah, I understand that's a hard question. I understand that a coral is not a person too, but no, yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. And that's a hard question. And actually people in the lab are looking at that too. Like at what life's age, our coral is able to fuse together and share resources or not do some species do this more than others. So there's definitely a really good question. Okay, good. But we don't totally know the answers to that. You can't just look at one, be like, that's three or four genetic, like genetically distinct individuals. Like we're literally the same person. Sometimes when they do grow up next to each other, you can see kind of like a scar between colonies where one individual ends and the next one begins. But we're also seeing evidence of fusion. And how much do you think research has changed in the last five or 10 years with DNA sequencing and how much cheaper and faster that's gotten? So much. Yeah, that's cool. I mean, it's a really exciting time to be a biologist right now and asking questions that we were, you know, couldn't afford to ask before, I didn't have the technology to ask before on these really large scales. And now what about their stinkingness? They're little stingers, stingers, stingers, stingers. How is that helping them survive or thwart predators or are there predators to coral other than just human, human, human, human? Yeah. Our vantles. Yeah. Yeah. So corals don't have a lot of predators. There's a lot of fish that will, like you probably heard a parrotfish that will try to like eat the macro algae around coral. Sometimes they will nibble the coral too, but you know, from the most part, there's not a lot of animals coming towards them to eat them in that sense. They, they use their stinking cells a lot to, to, in prey capture. So if you see, if you like stare at a coral long enough under the scope and, you know, if you've piece of plankton, you know, swims up, you'll, you'll see it almost like kind of, you know, venous slide trap, we'll see the plankton get stuck to the coral tentacles and then the coral tentacles will pull it into its mouth and suck it in and digest it. It's really neat to watch. So, but those, you know, the stinking cells, like if you touch a coral, what you shouldn't do, it will try to sting you too, but our skin is too thick. But you know, other animals like, you know, Portuguese man of war for example, like there are stinking cells that can affect us too, but corals are pretty safe. Don't touch them. But. Sheaal says that one thing that changed in his academic lifetime is that gene sequencing technology has improved vastly. So they're able to get hundreds, thousands of millions of reads getting a much better idea of what bacterial communities associate with corals. Just imagine your haircut six or seven years ago, like yikes, right? Just imagine what gene sequencing thinks of its TBTs, cell and passing. And what this will do is I can go out there and take a really small tissue sample, extract the DNA, sequence the DNA, get back like, you know, 10, 20,000 reads of all these different organisms that we were able to amplify. And from that I can see, you know, who is there? Who is there? Who is it? And the idea of what the functions of these organisms and how important might that be to the health and survival of a coral, a lot of the bacteria, like bacteria of different roles, like in us, your skin bacteria is going to be different than your gut bacteria. You don't want those to mix and like corals have bacteria that, you know, help. in defense and nutrient cycling and things like that. So we're interested in what those are doing there. We can get a way better idea of what's going on now than we could 10, 15 years ago. - Morning, bummer question. Bummer question and-- - And what do you think is the biggest coral bummer for the coral? Would it be a rise in temperature or ocean acidification? Pollution? What's their big, what's their big sad trombone? - So corals are dealing with a lot of threats right now. The biggest one being the impacts of climate change. And we're seeing this unreaf today in the form of sea surface temperature warming and ocean acidification, as you mentioned. And what-- why this is so bad is that we're seeing an increase, even in our lifetimes of these massive coral bleaching events worldwide. And a coral bleaching event can wipe out entire reef ecosystems in one season. We're seeing them not only-- it's not just a one off anymore. And here in Hawaii, we've had the events in 2014, again in 2015. The Great Barrier Reef has also experienced these successive events. And so while we're seeing corals that are able to survive one round of this warming in recover, it's like you keep on hitting them. What is that affecting? We've got research groups at the Hawaiian Institute of Marine Biology who are looking at how does the reproduction affected by these events? Are we going to see more downstream things that are happening? And you add things like the local stressors like overfishing or sedimentation and pollution runoff from a lot of the local environments that are at those are the kind of the added pressures that corals are facing. And it is so good. It is so good and so important to mitigate some of these local stressors. Like diverting pollution and sedimentation. Really important, like a coral can't live if it's covered in sediment. OK, quick aside, what is up with sediments? Well, apparently it's been long known that sediments and coral, they are not happy roommates. Sailors would know that they could enter a freshwater river because that's when the rays would stop because the sediment in their outflows would kill the coral. So why can't coral deal with a little river dust or erosion? Or storms caused by weather events or, say, tsunamis? So in a paper titled Mechanisms of Damage to Corals Exposed to Sedimentation, researchers say that sediment blocks sunlight, which means that their photosynthetic interalgy bodies get blocked. So there goes their nutrient and energy source. Now, if there's also organic material in the sediment, it tends to hog all the nearby oxygen in the water. And then those byproducts lower the pH. And then other organic compounds in the sediment get digested, they release toxic hydrogen sulfide. So the sediment covered coral can die in 24 hours. It can happen really quickly. OK, so even though coral is an animal, just like imagine a favorite house plant. And then imagine coating it in a heavy spray paint and dipping it in an acid bath. And then pumping poison in the room. Your plant would be like, wow, can you not? The most important thing that we need to address if we want corals in the future is climate change. And why are coral reefs important also? Is it reefs or is it reefs? Is it reefs? I always want to say like reefs. Like roofs or like coves? I like that. I haven't heard that actually. I always want to say reefs. And I know that's not-- Reaves. Reaves. OK, like multiple. OK. You can know puts or feet. Ah, fair. I don't know. Reaves. Reaves. OK. I've asked an expert, and it's not reefs. Listen, if elves had hooves, the second halves of their lives, would they be tall enough to reach the shells? When they kept their knives, to cut up lobes of bread or with their wives, have to put down the scarves they're knitting to get them themselves. I believe it's not reefs. So why are reefs important? Why do we want to save the reefs other than their fucking gorgeous and awesome and fish-live there? But clearly, they are important. Yeah. They're-- yes. So all of that. Yeah. They're really important. And they're really important for a lot of different reasons that are really personal to many people, but also that an honor of community and national international scale as well. So having a coral reef environment is-- they're one of the most biodeverse ecosystems in the world. They're a bank for biodiversity. And within that, the coral reefs themselves are the breeding grounds and homes for tons of marine life. They've got animals that will come in from the deeper oceans to breed. It's a really important food resource for a lot of coastal communities. It's their main source of protein. Main source of protein for many people in the world. And the reef environment is where a lot of those larger game fish reproduce and come back to coral reefs. And a lot of our coastal ecosystems are really important for mitigating coastal damage. So you've got-- they absorb a lot of that wave action, that wave power that's coming in. We've all seen really awful things that have been happening all out of our coastal communities around the world because of flooding and coastline erosion and things like that. Shale stresses that he doesn't like to focus too much on the potential pharmaceutical benefits of nature, because there are other intrinsic reasons for conservation. But a big-- something that we are learning more and more about the ocean in general is that there's a lot of these chemicals out there that can be used to help humans. And so for me, one of the most exciting moments that I had actually during my master's degree, I studied sea slugs and neuter ranks. And during that time, I was in my advisor's office looking through some old papers. And I found this paper where one of-- so the slugs that I study, really cool animals. They will eat things like sponges or different organisms that produce these toxic chemical compounds. And they will slightly alter them when they eat them. And they'll put them in their own tissues and use them to fend off their own predators. Really cool. I did a little digging. And for more information on this, you might want to dip into just a light beach read entitled, quote, "selective toxicity of a Persian Gulf sea cucumber, hallorithia parva on human, chronic lymphocytic leukemia by bylumphysites by direct mitochondrial targeting." OK. Spray alert. I'm going to let Shale tell you the plot of the paper. But these toxins that are antimicrobial, antiviral also can be used in biomedical research that it benefits humans. And so I'm like looking through this box of papers and found this paper. And I'm like, oh my gosh. I like, call my mom, right? And I'm like, on the phone with my mom. And I'm like, mom, like, guess what? There's this new to break that they're studying that-- they're using to see if they can treat the adult form of cancer that I had as a kid, which is mind blowing to me. Wait, what? Like this organism that I didn't think I was going to study. And I don't study pharmaceutical things or anything like that. But just that this kind of a group of animals that I didn't know much about before could actually have such a personal impact on me. And there's tons of things out there that we haven't discovered yet. Oh my god. What kind of cancer was that? Child leukemia. Oh my god. Which is wild, right? So it's like, I was like, it's all came full circle. But it's those kind of moments where the reasons to protect coral reefs, we might not even know all the reasons yet. And are we going to lose these opportunities? Because of like, you know, it's not because we don't know better. But it's because we're not ready. Poputations aren't ready. It's not for a lack of science, I should say, that we're not making these big changes. But I'm hopeful that we're getting there. We're getting in the right direction. Do you think having had that experience with cancer as a kid changed the way you approached what you wanted to do in life and at all or-- Yeah. Not in the way you'd expect. Everyone thought I was going to grow and want to be a doctor. That's a really typical narrative that people describe to childhood cancer survivors. For me, what was hard-- I think the way that it affected me the most in my personality is that I, for a very early age, didn't have this idea of all the time in the world. I was like, if I want to do something, I have to do it now. And so I was from a very early age. I was very-- for better, for worse, everything that I want to happen, I guess to have now. So it resulted in me being a very driven human being, but then at the same time, it also causes a lot of anxiety and pressure. And I think that it got me really curious about science, about answering questions, and about the fact that, like, oh, man, this story, too. So leukemia is a really interesting thing because for centuries of studying this thing, we didn't know what caused it. And there's been a lot of hypotheses out there that have talked about, it's going to be like an environmental thing, whatnot. And it was very recently that a paper came out with this new hypothesis that it's kind of like a combination of things, it's like a genetic thing, a genetic predisposition. And then also, the hypothesis is that babies who were not exposed to the right bacteria in their first year of life were more prone to this. Oh, my god. And so that was super interesting because a lot of-- bacteria is another really big thing my voice. research today, like there's a lot of work going on with like choral probiotics, like chemi, you know, I'm studying like what bacteria is there. Other groups are working on like can we take the bacteria that we know is helping choral survive and like, anoculate them with that at early age and then will that help them down the line. So like this whole idea that you know, maybe we could prevent childhood leukemia by creating a probiotic cocktail for babies and then also like can we solve, you know, or help mitigate, you know, choral diseases by also creating like a probiotic. Like there's the amount of knowledge regaining about bacteria just in general right now. It's just been like a huge, a huge driver for knowledge. Right. And the notion that it's not just one necessarily species you're studying, but it's interaction with several species that almost makes it able to survive and adapt. Shale says that some chorals even need both bacteria and certain viruses present to survive these thermal events. So the symbiotic connections go deep, they get complicated, kind of like a group of adults who've been friends since college, just like a girl's weekend without stuff, things that a choral party just aren't the same without both bacteria and viruses. The ocean is full of different things and you know, we're looking at like a lot of these like interactions, like how many partners need to be in play to get this result or to prevent something from happening. It's just a, it's a really exciting time to be studying like all of this stuff. So home to 25% of the world's marine species potentially home to a cure for cancer, weird interesting alien like live sculptures full of other beings and also also our new friend choral is just plain really pretty and nice to look at. So there's that factor, Shale explains. And they're also you know really important for tourism and economy and that's also a really great way to kind of switch our way that we think about like our economy is you know instead of you know extracting from the reef and damaging the reef, we can actually like do you know eco-friendly tourism, bring people educate people to see the reef and you know it's hard to find an appreciation for something that you've never seen before. Like you know we can all kind of relate to that and we all of those moments where like you know you saw something for the first time even you know any any place in nature who like you we can have those kind of moments but I think that's really important also and especially like here in Hawaii the choral reef ecosystems are incredibly important culturally and there's a lot of history, there's a lot of stories a lot of history wrapped up in these ecosystems and it's you know there's a lot of reasons to protect them. And with 85% of the US choral reefs surrounding Hawaii there's also really big cultural necessity of protecting and preserving those ecosystems and there's a piece called "Pukamai Heikoa" the significance of corals in Hawaiian culture and it's featured in the book Ethno Biology of Corals and Coral Reefs with enough reefs fine and the lead author of it Tony McConigrag writes quote "Hawaiian people consider choral to be an acua, something that provides birth and death to both the people and the islands and possesses much mana which is the essence of spirituality. Corals are considered the beginning of life and are thus the most ancient ancestors all living things in Hawaii and that's something that shale seems to approach with a lot of reverence. He seems to have a lot of empathy which may be from feeling conscious of ping-ponging between a few science subjects before he landed on reefs but also he plays through grad school with challenges that most of us don't face. Not only did I not have a you know a direct like go to undergrad, go to your masters or go straight to your PhD kind of experience but I'd experienced also a lot of the obstacles and challenges that you know folks who don't typically see those themselves in science face as well and that's not something that you would necessarily get from looking at me today and for me I experienced a lot of sexism when I was younger so I didn't transition until I was just until I was in my master's program and so I had the experience of being a woman in science for my entire coming into science and I you know in high school I was put on like the not the honor science track and took me while to realize that this is something that happened. Those experiences in particular like really came to head for me when I showed up at my PhD program like well into my medical transition and all of a sudden had access to like conversations in space where people really kind of let you know what they really think in ways that I didn't before and those you know it's it has been a very interesting experience to see on the other side you know really a lot of the things that I thought were happening. The old ways of thinking and kind of the gatekeepers for a lot of opportunities in STEM from from this point of view and so I think that like the taking a longer time in your journey is something that's very typical for folks you know from many underrepresented backgrounds in the sciences especially after decades centuries of you know being excluded not only from science careers but also like you know science research. Yeah. Because the medical industry is a great example of that. Yes. PS side note I had heard that women weren't included in some medical research trials but I didn't know how big a deal or how recent this was like cell phones existed by the time a law called the National Institutes of Health Revitalization Act of 1993 passed stating that the director of NIH shall ensure that a women are included as subjects in each project of such research and that be members of minority groups are included in such research. A 2016 article in pharmacy practice said that when studying diseases prevalent in both sexes males frequently of the Caucasian race were considered to be the norm study population and that was a direct quote from a journal article there but PS has up I didn't know this until this past year but the word Caucasian has super racist origins it's no longer widely used so scrap that white works and nearly 20 years ago the Institute of Medicine clarified and made a really important distinction between sex and gender gender being the self-representation social and cultural views of sex so if anyone ever tells you that they know your gender based on your body tell them that science says that is hogwash thank you very much also shale says that having a mentor you trust and respect is so important he had situations that called for allies like like preparing for field work in countries where certain identities could put you at risk or navigating passport issues just things that some of us might really take for granted because it's really hard to be alone and struggling you know I'd say like for me like the hardest things have been you know personal in this journey as opposed to like the science is hard yeah but I have lots of people talk to you about my experiments and so like I think that like you know besides all the like systemic things that we do to help make STEM actually more inclusive we need to find our communities and like lift each other up in that sense do you find that maybe underrepresented folks tend to have a little bit more imposter syndrome oh yeah yeah oh imposter syndrome yeah um yes definitely um and then sometimes you you you see it like it's very obvious you're like oh I know like you walk into a room and like I feel like every person of color I probably every woman probably you know every LGBTQ person when you walk into a room whether it's like a new class or a conference like you kind of look around the room and you look for your allies and I've got my back here and I think that you know so like there's these imposter syndrome is never like it's a standalone feeling you know it's it's built up over you know um over so much that's going on in in the world like do you are there people like you that you have as role models do you see people are your are the interests of your communities being addressed in like societal science did you end up at a lab that you felt you had a little bit more community and also you work on Cogan and Island which is a beautiful place in Hawaii I mean it's also this little isolated pocket of marine science how did you how did you end up there and what was your feeling when you when you found out you'd be researching there it's a good question so I only actually applied to one program you did my PhD um that's great and 100 percent I applied because I wanted to work with Dr. Ruth Gates who's a excellent choral biologist and also someone who really valued science communication and connecting to communities in the public and inspiring like people to care so deeply about reefs and those are two things that were very very important to me I also really want to it was very important to me to work in a large collaborative lab where there's a lot of yeah collaborative work and a lot of sharing of ideas and support and also in a place where I would feel safe and safe means you know access to safe healthcare um finding community on the islands, a university, or a place that actually has anti-discrimination policies in place. There's a lot of places that don't have a lot of friends who are part of universities that are in places that you can be thrown in jail for using the wrong restroom, wrong, right? Quotes. And then we've seen a lot of actually some really great response from that from the scientific community, canceling conferences in areas that are putting up these really discriminatory policies and things like that. And that's wonderful. Like the UC system has done a lot of actually great work in that sense by saying you're not funding travel to these places. One professional mentor who meant so much to Shale was Dr. Ruth Gates of the Gates Coral Lab. He's at now. And she was a veteran choral biologist. She apparently had such a zeal for her work. She passed away just this past October at age 56 of cancer. And when we went in towards labs in Hawaii, Ruth's name was brought up a lot. And you can tell that she's dearly, dearly missed. But it seems like he ended up in the right place. Oh, and also before Patreon questions, it's a big day for you because they started spawning last night. What kind of thing? I was like, 'cause it's pride. Oh, yeah, happy pride. Yeah, they did. But spawn, it's spawn a paulusa right now. It is. It is something really amazing about chorals. There's not enough amazing stuff is choral spawning events. And so chorals, right, you're sedentary animal. You're not moving around to find your mates. How early in the ocean? How are you going to reproduce? You know, besides fragmenting off. And so the way it works is it's this combination of cues. It's the moon cycle. From the moon, looking back at the planet. From the planet. From the planet. It's the moon. It's the star. It's the temperature. It's like the pressure in the environment that will all come together and cue the chorals to release their gametes into the water column. And for the choral species that we study, the rice choral, montepura capatata out here in the lab, they spawn two to three months during the summer on the night of the moon and a few nights after. Oh, looks good. And if you're lucky enough to be out in the bay, you kind of peer over at around 8.45 pm. And you'll start to see these little cream colored bundles slowly floating to the surface of the water with the size of a pinhead. It was so little. And on a really big night, like the entire surface will be just like covered in these little white dots. After about like half an hour, the wave action will cause them to burst. Their little tiny eggs inside will float and sperm will start to sink. And you know, in the next day or so, there will be swimming choral larvae, these little eddy-bid-jelly beans. And then those larvae will then, you know, swim around and look for some suitable substrate to many more photos into the first polyp, which will hopefully grow into many of to form the next colony. We didn't get a lot of spawning in June. Usually we see it like June, July, August. And since we didn't see a lot in June, we thought, you know, maybe this will be our big month. And so going out of last night, we decided to just like take a quick look on the bay, see what we saw. And there was a pretty big event. So that kind of, you know, being a choral biologist, you have to be kind of ready to respond to whatever is going to happen. So we've kind of changed our plans and we'll go out and, you know, see what we can do. And this is a great time for us because a lot of the questions we have about early life stages, we can only ask during the summer months. And so right now, this is a really exciting way for us to get a lot of genetic diversity and to run some of these pre-conditioning tests to see, you know, if you, you know, cool them down, if you heat them up, what it's like to do to their settlement or survivorship. So you can kind of scoop up and run them in tubs in the lab and see how they respond best. Yeah, yeah. The technology that we use, you know, for like DNA sequencing is like one end of the spectrum. And then on the ground in the lab, okay, is, is very like DIY, you know, grab some buckets. We make these big scoops out of like these plastic shoe boxes where we cut like windows and hot glue on mesh. Kind of use those to scoop out the bundles. Carefully, care put them into like little containers where they do their fertilization. And then oftentimes we'll even just leave them to sit overnight and buckets and see, you know, and then carefully clean them out the next morning. But a lot of our tools are stuff that we have to kind of just come up with on the fly to use. They don't sell coral sponning supply kits. Yeah. I know. There's a lot of Home Depot five gallon buckets. Yeah. Lots of buckets everywhere in any lab. Yeah. Absolutely. Oh my God. Shail wrote a blog post last June about coral sponning. And in it, he described setting out on the night of the new moon with life jackets and a first state kit and headlamps. They use red lights so they don't interfere with any lunar cues for the coral. And they have as many two and a half gallon buckets as we'll fit on the floor of a small wheeler boat. And he says in it, our tools are not glamorous, but they get the job done. And there are photos of these milky trails of coral bundles popping to release eggs into the water and a glimpse of what field research looks like. So for more of that, I'm going to link the post in the show notes and on my website. Now we're about to ask your Patreon questions, but before we do a few words from sponsors of the show, these sponsors make it possible for allergies to donate to a charity of each ologist choosing. And this week, Shell picked two. The first one is Pepe O'Hei. It's a private nonprofit organization caring for an ancient Hawaiian fish pond located on Oahu. And its vision is to perpetuate a foundation of cultural sustainability and to provide intellectual and physical and spiritual sustenance for their community. This fish pond serves as a place of learning to weave ancestral knowledge together with western ways of knowing to achieve their goals. And a second donation went to Point Foundation and Point Foundation.org is the nation's largest scholarship granting organization for LGBTQ plus students of merit and point promotes change through scholarship funding, mentorship, leadership development, and community service training. Links to both those charities and to our sponsors who make that possible will be in the show notes. Okay, some things I'm liking this week. Okay, your questions. Now first question we got from Laura Kruppens and a bunch of other folks including Jessica F. Fritz, Jennifer Alvarez, Caitlin Fitzgerald, Jenna Martin, Ira Gray, Jessica Zarninsky, Dakota Hariman, Crystal Mendoza, Tofer Henness, Casey Kaiser, Lauren Kruppens, and Jesse Scott asked how harmful is sunscreen to coral? This is a big question. How harmful or what does it do? It's oxybenzinate, certain non-mineral sunscreens. It's a tough question. So like people definitely seen movements in different coastal communities to ban unsafe sunscreen and like this is a field of research that is beginning to grow. It's a new thing that we're seeing and it's like really important to consider these kind of like stressors and these daily things that we're doing that may or not be harmful to reefs, right? Considering what sunscreen you use, just like considering any type of chemicals that you're introducing, introducing to a natural environment is a really important thing. However, where you know a lot of what what we are concerned about is that you know in the grand scheme of the impacts facing corals, it is a very small drop in the bucket compared to climate change and that you know can be a really that's always a really hard thing. Like we're still like we're you know the research is ongoing with how bad these chemicals are and the effects that they have. But what we the danger is when that's where we stop, right? Like you know considering your sunscreen choice is a really great point of departure, you know same thing with like plastic straw bands and things like that for people you know who might not consider how their daily actions affect coral reefs to begin to learn more and to like understand like you know how are my actions affecting the reefs. What else can I do and to kind of like figure out what it is that each of us are doing every day, right? That affects the planet. But if that's the stopping point, that's a really dangerous thing because you know just changing your sunscreen is not going to slow down our loss of reefs. Afterward, Shale sent me a link to a piece written just a few weeks ago by two coral scientists in Florida who said that people are being led to believe that there's extensive scientific evidence about the impact of oxybenzone on corals and it's simply not true. So it went on to cite three main factors that are actually killing coral. Climate change, there are biological changes like diseases and invasive species, there's overfishing and the overfishing depletes the fish that eat the algae that overgrow on corals. There's also water quality issues like wastewater and land runoff that dump those pollutants and sediments into the reefs. So, sorry everyone. So don't just change your mineral sunscreen and be like nailed it. Yeah, let me. So actually, okay, I got permission to tell this part of that story. Oh, okay. And like an example of that is a colleague of mine recently went into a local classroom to talk about corals and the research we do and she asked the students like what was the biggest threat facing corals and everybody said sunscreen. Oh no. And you know, that's a really, that is like the kind of oh no moment and she actually spoke with some of the teachers and they're like we have no idea. Like this is what people have been telling us. This is what we've been telling our students and that's where you know, that's not good. You know, it's it's it can be a it's a great way to get people to understand that, you know, small actions that we take every day can have really big impacts. However, you know, in no way is like we have to focus on climate change. This next question was asked by a listener if you started making these beautiful paintings inspired by episodes. So to see them you can check out the allergies Instagram and then follow her to because she is wonderful. Roryah Hancock wants to know how excited are you that Pantone's color of the year is corals. Super excited. Anytime that Chorles can go, you know, making into social media, get across, people's radar. Like why is that, you know, do I want to learn more? It's really great because there's a lot of animals in the world that are endangered. Right? Like Chorles are, you know, part of why Chorles are such a great, you know, organism to talk about these kind of things is that they're gorgeous. You know, it's like having, having, you know, companies celebrate Chorles, bring attention to Chorles is always greatly appreciated and really exciting. I didn't know that it was Pantone's color. It's really here, I'm excited. Yeah, I remember always excited, you know. Also, side note, huge ups to Pantone for naming the color not just Chorles, but living Chorles. Alive, non-dead, non-bleached, thriving, magical Chorles, too long, but living Chorles works. Saratari asked what makes them so colorful. Is it that symbiosis? Yeah, so very often, like most, there's, I feel like everything I'm saying and every Chorle thing, except then this other thing does have something totally different that we didn't expect. So yes, in general, like the, a lot of the color we're seeing are these symbiants. However, Chorles also do produce their own colorful pigments. You can take a black light and shine a black light on Chorles and though oftentimes you'll see like fluorescence, if you've seen Chasing Chorle, the movie, you'll see actually during some of the bleaching events as the Chorles are bleaching, they actually will start to glow in these blues and purple colors. And there's been a lot of hypotheses on why they're doing that. It could potentially attract new symbiants. It could be sort of like their own kind of sun-screening method to protect their own tissues. So we're still learning more about that, but the Chorles are able, some species are able to also produce their own pigments themselves. So that was a doc called Chasing Chorle. And if you want to see what Chorle bleaching looks like and just get hyped to mobilize other folks to care, this is a great doc to watch. Are there any movies, any fictitious movies that honor or really a fuck with Chorle that you're like, come on, any movies that you're like. I was actually really impressed with the Chorle and finding Nemo. Yeah, they did a really good job. Like there's some other inaccuracies in their biology, but I remember when I first saw it, it came out right when I was graduating college. I was really like, did you. This is like. they did a really nice job with some of the forums. So that's pretty awesome. Chorles don't tend to get a lot of spotlight in a lot of mainstream films. I'm gonna go and IMDB and find out who the Chorle consultant was and chances are you probably know them. Quickest site. So I tracked this down and I think it was a very passionate, ethyologist who's done research on the Great Barrier Reef now at the University of Washington. And he's credited as Adam Summers Fabulous Fish Guy in the special thanks of the 2003 film Finding Nemo. And yes, I found him. I called his office to ask him. He was out of the office. So I sent him an email. I didn't hear back from him yet, but yes, I do want to be his friend. Brooke, Reading Girl wants to know, does Chorle have a smell? You can. so right now that you go on to Kanye E. Bay, you can smell their gametes of. Oh, really? Yeah, after a big spawning event, you can definitely smell them. Nice. Chorle, mucus, deaf. I mean, I feel like it's longer you work with anything than where you gain a nose for it. Yeah. Underwater, you know, we're not really smelling anything. But once you're covered in it, you definitely. it's earthy. A lot of earthy. You know, musky. But that's actually a great question because a lot of. Well, we might not smell the corals. Like a lot of marine organisms use chemical senses to interact with their starting environments and things like that. So there's a lot of smells in that sense going on in the water. In the oceans. So this next question was also asked by listener Grace. And Allegra Violeta Benessmann wants to know, what role does concrete truly play in the health of our coral? And I know nothing about this. Concrete's composition, and we'll look this up, is. it has a lot of same attributes as like calcium carbonate coral skeletons. It's a really great substrate because it's also kind of porous. So a lot of times you'll see, like I think in Mexico where they have that underwater sculpture installation, made it concrete that different corals and sponges and whatnot are all recruiting to. So it can actually act as a pretty good substrate. It's a really great substrate for artificial reefs. So he's talking about an underwater museum in Cancun, Mexico. It consists of nearly 500 sunken sculptures, and they serve as a base for new coral. Why did they make this? You ask? Because too many tourists were snorkeling in the natural local reefs and destroying them. So they were like, "Hey, hey, look over here! Look over here! Look at these! Look at these sculptures!" And it worked. So people go there now, and coral can grow on it. Ding! Perfect. Also, some of the sculptures serve as scathing environmental critiques, like the ones of men in tuxedos bearing their heads in the sand. Ooh! A burn so sick, it scorched underwater. Zane Lebrum wants to know, "Hello! Is the news about the Great Barrier Reef being declared dead true? And if so, is there anything that we can do about it?" That's a great question. So there was that article that came out, I think a couple years ago now, that declared the Great Barrier Reef dead. It's not dead. Oh, there. That's the answer. However, it's not doing so great. And that's why articles like that can be challenging to the overall conversation, because we don't want everyone to say, "Oh, good, it's not dead." And move on. But the Great Barrier Reef had just experienced two horrific, leaching events back to back. And a new paper by Terry Hughes's group out in Australia showed that the recruitment of baby corals to the reef post those events had significantly declined. And so that's one of those, not only are we dealing with the impacts of dying coral on the reef, who's going to replace them? And so these are these kind of the smaller impacts that we're looking at. So the Great Barrier Reef did experience this massive leaching event, lost in some regions lost 50% or more of the coral on the ground. And they're trying to come back. Different sections of the reef are still healthy. You can still go out and see corals in the Great Barrier Reef. But if it keeps getting hit by these events, there's not going to be enough time for things to recover. Just to go back to what they were. Educating yourself on the politicians and on the laws and bills that are coming up that would directly impact the reefs here. And where we are, that's where we have the most sway, is a really important thing, like going to town halls, also, not just voting, but actually showing up and becoming parts of the conversations that are directly influencing the legislators in your own area can be a really good way to start. And then also, if you're going to a place like the Great Barrier Reef, you know, essentially voting with your dollar, doing your due diligence to look up operators that are eco-friendly, with some of the funding from that might actually go to research, re-fresh duration, but looking for, you know, making sure that your footprint in those spaces are supporting organizations that are doing it right. And our tour operator for Atlas was saying that they don't provide fins because so many times tourists will just absolutely slap a coral reef with the fin. And so, I know that was great. I didn't know that. Yeah, definitely. And that's like thing, like some corals, the structures are big, ask if they're any surfer, like they hurt when you, if you get hit by one. Okay, side note, I just watched a bunch of videos of surfers bailing on coral. Not only are the coral surfer, but, oh man, oh the blood, oh the scars. So there was one video of a Tahitian pro surfer who got a pretty bad scrape up and they show her on the boat afterward and they have to brush the coral bits out of your skin. And then for some reason, they have to rub citrus in it and she's like biting a towel. I cannot imagine the pain. Now, other remedies for this re-fresh, according to some surfer message boards that I just totally larked on are hydrogen peroxide, alcohol. People use iodine. Others say just baby shampoo and scrubbing it with a tooth brush and antibacterial ointments work. But you have to treat it right away because you can be left with a staff infection, which would be hell in our, not in a good way. Please note, I am neither a surfer nor a doctor, so consult one of the two or both. Also, as for the coral, I don't think they have a strategy for first aid. But they're also super fragile. Some of them that I've was really nice like branching shapes. You know, you just a tiny cake that you can kick over a colony that's been growing for a hundred years in like one cake. And so that's great. That's great. It's a great way to educate people on that. A lot of people think they're rocks. So they're like, oh, I'm going to go stand on that. And the polyps, they're just thin layers of tissue. And you're going to crush them like a face bow. Other patrons like Erica, Sarah Peck and Izzy M had questions about Shale's favorites. Hufflepuff, Hillary wants to know which reef has been your favorite to dive in. Do you have a favorite? Can you pick a favorite? Oh, man. All the other reef are going to be like, really? I know. I know what's a favorite. Ooh, this is really hard. So I was lucky enough to have a favorite. I was lucky enough to have a favorite. to dive the blue hole in Belize, which is like a big et al that you can just like sink down until like there's all these sharks everywhere. And that dive and the surrounding reef there, I saw way more, if you, for someone like me, like in this environment, if you see like A shark, that's really cool, like one. And that's because we don't have as many anymore, right? And like sharks are actually a really good sign of like a healthy reef environment. You wanna have all the levels of the food chain. And I had never been in a reef before that environment where there were so many apex predators just living there. So like the coral was beautiful, there was diversity of fish. And but then also like there, I got to see it all together. And so for me that was just a really exciting moment. - Woo! - Oh my gosh. Have you ever been scared of a shark bite? Are you like, nah. - No, not really. Like sharks have a really, sharks are doing awful. The shark fitting is decimating world shark populations. And so much of, you know, like we're talking about, how do we change these laws? How do we ban shark fitting? How do we like, not allow shark fins to be sold and commercial senses in our country? It relates to our own like emotional reaction to sharks, are we scared of sharks? The majority, the vast majority of all shark species want nothing to do with us. They've got very tiny mouths, they're gonna be bottom feeders, or they're just not, you know, they're just the scared of us as we are of them. Anytime you go into the ocean, or nature in general, you have to respect the environment where you are and respect the organisms there. And so, you know, it's always important to know what the, like what the threats are, or they could be, or the, what dangers there could be anytime you go. So whenever I go diving in a new place, I look up like what organisms could I possibly encounter? And if you work with a good operator, you go to areas that are safer, right? But I always feel incredibly lucky every time I have the opportunity to see sharks anywhere. They're beautiful. They never, you know, they're doing their own thing. They're swimming over there, not disturbing me. There are some shark species that might have like a case of mistaken identity, like a forest swimming around like a seal at the surface and, you know, white shark territory. They can't come up and like, you know, poke you to see if your food or not, and the way like their strategy for getting food is they don't have arms, right? So they use their mouths to grab onto things, so they'll come up and, you know, if you think you're a seal, like try to take a bite, but people aren't dying of the, you're not being eaten by a shark, right? You know, unfortunately, it has to do with like, you know, it's coming to a wound from that shark bite. But, not to get a shark, so you shouldn't be out there. - For more on this, see the Selamaca morphology. - Selac, Selac, a morphology episode on sharks. Also, I snuck in this teeny tiny question about an adiabidi garbage. Sorry, this one's a bummer, but it's good to know. How about plastics and corals? - I was really a little article when I was, when we were waiting for each other, and all sorts of things, I was a bit pillar about microplastics being found in corals. - Yeah, unfortunately microplastics. So plastic, in general, is awful for the environment, right? You hear the stories about, you know, straws being stuck on turtles and noses, or, you know, animals getting cotton plastic bags, or eating plastic bags, thinking that they're jellyfish, or they're kinds of food. And so those are a big problem. However, what we've learned recently is that the plastics as a creature actually break down, so they're not necessarily visible to the naked eye. These microplastics are having like a huge impact on these lower terrific levels, unlike a lot of these, you know, the plankton are eating them plastics, the larger animals are eating those plastics, and there have been, yeah, some studies that are looking at our corals eating these plastics as well. And what does that mean, right? Like, there's no nutritional value, if you can't expel those, then all of a sudden, there's something inside of your gut that's taking up space where nutrition could be. And so these are huge, huge problems that are also unfortunately global. - Anything that you've seen research wise in the last few years, or any turnarounds that have given you hope, you're like, no, I don't know. - So ox, I didn't think that's where you're going. - Yeah, absolutely. Like I was telling you earlier, when we, you know, when you see a coral bleaching event and you're like, so many of these corals died, there's all those corals that didn't die. There are, the corals themselves are, there are some winners, there are some survivors, and that's really exciting because without any intervention from us, there are organisms, there are individuals that are already able to withstand these. You look at an environment like, you know, the Red Sea, which is on average way warmer than anywhere else and the corals that are living up to temperatures that can't hear. And like the, the difference is that that this has happened over a geologic time, whereas we are speeding things up and like, can these animals keep up for that? But like just the fact that like, these things exist is very exciting. Also in the last like, 10 years ago, if I had said like, coral bleaching to somebody on the street, they might be like, I have no idea where you're talking about. - Yeah. - But there's been a huge push in education and excitement around coral reefs in the last, you know, handful of years where people have heard about this. Like people know people are starting to really care about it and understand why it's important, why it's important to them, like why they want this for their future generations. And so corals have really come into the national, international conversation in a way that they haven't before. And because of that, there's a lot more hope for these big overarching changes that we need on the systemic scale to potentially start to happen. And I always ask these last two questions, but what's the shittiest thing about your job? What sucks in a way that's either like annoying? Is it moldy wet suits? Is it early mornings or more infrastructure? Is that like, what sucks? - The thing that sucks most about being a coral biologist is watching something you love die and not being able to do anything about it. - Yeah. - And that's something that's shared by probably everyone in our field. Like, you know, I love corals, like biologically speaking, like I'm so fascinated by them. They're such interesting animals. But so much of my research is around keeping them around. And it's anytime you die on a reef that's bleaching or a reef that's been devastated by any kind of impact, especially when that, you know, you'd seen flourishing before it's, you know, you have an emotional reaction. It's a very devastating feeling and that pressure of, it's not just, you know, I don't finish my dissertation that I'm going to graduate, but like so much of this work that we all are working on is going to have an impact right now or not and are we doing it right, are we asking the right questions? You know, and that's definitely the hardest part for sure. - What's your favorite part about your job? Or about corals? - Oh man. - You do the whole podcast on that. (laughing) My favorite part of my job is I'm going, I'm answering it into part, which I know you're not supposed to do. - No, I answer your questions. - I'm ready for it too. - It's like, it's the daily life in the people I work with, for sure, like in the community. When you're working on an issue that's this important, people are really passionate and really excited. And because we're trying to solve something, and really quickly, it's a very creative place to be. Like people are coming up with really creative out of the box solutions and being able to be part of new technologies that are coming in, new ways of addressing these questions, trying just crazy ideas that just might work. Maybe it's something that we might not have had the luxury to do on a system that is doing fine somewhere, but that kind of creative thinking and passionate environment is a really exciting place to be. So that's something great. And then also, I take a boat to work every day. I can just like walk into the water and see the reef. And while that's amazing for research and asking questions, it's also just, it's a luxury. I feel so lucky to be able to be in a place where my study environment is right here, and I can appreciate just the beauty of the reef on a everyday basis. - Maybe that's why marine biologists are a little bit more chill. - I feel like we're like, we're like, we're really chill and they're also like super stressed out. - That's a good point. That's a good point. - You're doing such great work. - I'm so excited that I got to talk to you. Thank you for taking us. It's a liver of your time. I know that it's a busy day for coral. Are you going back out tonight? - I am. - Yeah. - You're excited. - Very excited. - So ask smart, amazing people, sometimes stupid questions, and also just, if you can, please vote. Let's just, let's try to turn this boat around. Also, for more about Shale, you can follow him at Wrong_Wale on Twitter. That will be linked in the show notes. We're at Oligies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at Allie Ward with one L on both. And thank you to Atlas Obscura for the really wonderful time in Hawaii learning about all this stuff. And thanks to the world's most charming tithologist, Sarah McAnulty, aka Sarah McTak, on social media for hooking me up with this really wonderful, netheriologist, Shale. I look forward to calling him Dr. Matsuda soon. Thank you also to Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Feltis. They have a comedy podcast called The You Are That. If you like funny, amazing people, they also manage my merch at oligiesmerch.com. Thank you to Aaron Talbert for admitting the Oligies podcast Facebook group. I was also recently told there's an Oligies podcast subreddit now. Just in case you're on Reddit, or you wanna go discuss episodes and share weird, all logical facts there. So hi Reddit, hi. - Thank you to Jared Sleeper of my Good Bad Brain podcast for assistant editing and being wonderfully supportive on not the easiest week and thanks to the host of podcasts, see Jurassic Right about Dino and the podcast, which is all about Kitties, Stephen Ray Morris, who's a pillar serving as a sturdy, substrate, and putting this all together. The theme music was written by Nick Thorburn of the band "Islands," which is a great band. All right, 2026 Me, to do you love that. How about you love that? It was so good. I just wanted to hop in here and thank scheduling producer Noel Dilworth, managing director Susan Hale and our current editors, Dick J. Fee and Mercedes-Mateland for putting this encore out while I'm scooting about the American Southwest. I'm not just interviewing a skunk expert. I've got four interviews planned. Maybe there's going to be some capsaicin involved. Perhaps we're going to hear a little bit about neuroscience. Maybe some nuclear history? We're going to see. I might try to throw in one or two extra. Okay, anyway, I hope you enjoy. All right. Now, if you listen until the end of the show, you know, I tell you a secret. This week's secret is that when it comes to apples and baked potatoes, my favorite part is the skin. Like, I want to eat other people's discarded potato skins at the table. I'll eat the whole shebang, but I'm just, I'm like a goat. I just love like the chewy ruffage. I don't know why, but also in college, my favorite thing to eat in the dining hall. Of all the things they had in the cafeteria, I loved baked potatoes with soy sauce and then sour cream on top of it. I think of it often and I'm like, yeah, I still stand by that combo. It's pretty tight. Bye-bye. I'm Carl. It's trying to survive. Oh, please. Don't let me die.