Researchers at UC San Diego have developed a substance which can attract coral larvae, which could overcome an obstacle of reef restoration efforts, it was announced Wednesday.
The researchers at UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Jacobs School of Engineering developed the gel, SNAP-X, which releases scents that attract the larvae. In initial studies, the gel is 20 times more effective at getting the larvae to settle compared to untreated surfaces.
“Coral are animals, and their larvae are selective about where they are going to attach because once they do, they’re stuck there,” said Daniel Wangpraseurt, the study’s senior author and a marine biologist at Scripps with a previous appointment in UCSD’s Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering.
“With SNAP-X, we created a material that releases chemical cues that tell coral larvae this is a good place to live.”
The research, published Wednesday in Trends in Biotechnology, purports that the gel releases coral-attracting chemicals for a month after its application.
It was funded in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Reefense program, which “aimed to develop self-healing, hybrid biological and engineered reef-mimicking structures for coastal protection,” a statement from UCSD read.
According to the university, coral reefs are severely threatened by ocean warming caused by climate change. They are projected to decline by 70-90% at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming relative to preindustrial times, and by 99% at 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F).
“I’m over hearing that corals are dying — I’m more interested in what we can do about it,” said Wangpraseurt, who runs the Coral Reef Ecophysiology and Engineering Lab at Scripps. “My lab’s approach is to combine marine biology with physics and bioengineering to come up with new solutions.”
Beyond their beauty and serving as a sign of a healthy ocean, coral reefs also bring in an estimated $375 billion in economic value worldwide.
For years, a hurdle of trying to restore coral reefs was getting the larvae to choose degraded reefs or manmade objects, which didn’t quite smell right to them. Even if they do settle, getting the coral to then reproduce naturally has been a major obstacle for scientists.
Certain types of algae release chemicals that encourage baby corals to attach to surfaces. Matching these chemicals in a lab has proved difficult.
Wangpraseurt and his team wanted to develop a substance that could deliver these chemical cues over an extended period of time in the ocean to entice baby coral.
“If you just throw these chemical cues in the ocean they dissipate very quickly, making it hard for coral larvae to find their source,” said Samapti Kundu, a postdoctoral researcher at Scripps who worked on the project during her time at UCSD and the study’s first author. “We needed to develop something like an extended release drug delivery system that would slowly release these settlement cues in the ocean.”
By encapsulating the chemical compounds from the algae in silica nanoparticles and then suspending them in a liquid gel that would later solidify when exposed to ultraviolet light, the scientists created SNAP-X, which can cure in place and deliver extended chemical signals.
“I think this material is a breakthrough that can hopefully make a big contribution to coral restoration,” said Wangpraseurt. “Biomedical scientists have spent a lot of time developing nanomaterials as drug carriers, and here we were able to apply some of that knowledge to marine restoration.
“This paper highlights that if you bring together ideas from different scientific fields, you can create innovative solutions to tough problems like restoring coral reefs.”
The experiments were conducted using one species of Hawaiian coral. More experiments are needed to show that SNAP-X can work with other corals from other regions.
Wangpraseurt suggested that the gel could be adapted to other species or areas by loading it with chemicals collected from local algae.
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