Cnidariology (CORAL) Encore with Shayle Matsuda

Will changing your sunscreen save coral reefs? What even IS a coral? Where do they grow and what do they eat and why are they so pretty? Is it reefs or reeves? The wonderful and charming coral biologist and cnidariologist Shayle Matsuda takes time out of his busy schedule during a coral spawning event to chat about how magical and beautiful coral can be and why reef health is important. Also: whether or not "Finding Nemo" got coral right, making transitions during grad school, and how to pursue your ambitions while being bravely authentic. He'll quickly become your favorite cnidariologist.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alie Ward?

  This episode is sponsored by Seed. Bloating, irregular bowel movement, gas. When your gut is off, it gets your attention. Seed's DS1 is a three-time award-winning probiotic, clinically shown to improve regularity, reduce bloating, and alleviate gas so you can move and eat more freely. Take better care of your gut with Seed. Get 25% off with code 25OLOGIES at seed.com/ologies. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. We have to say that. Being safer on the road starts with the person behind the wheel. That's Mazda's philosophy when designing every vehicle. Their proactive safety features help keep you more aware, connected,

• 0:45Alie Ward?

  and engaged during every drive, which means your car does more than help protect you. It makes you a safer driver, which helps protect everyone. That's why Mazda has been named Consumer Reports' safest new car brand. To learn more, visit MazdaUSA.com. Consumer Reports does not endorse products or services. Oh, hey, it's 2026. This is Ally. 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 gonna 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.

• 1:29Alie Ward?

  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 day jitters. 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 gonna 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 just get into it. Enjoy. Okay.

• 2:13Alie Ward?

  So this episode was recorded in beautiful Hawaii. 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 jaunt, 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, contraire. 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

• 2:56Alie Ward?

  show at patreon.com/ologies. 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 that 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 coworkers about the show and who rates and subscribes and leaves reviews, which you know I read. Okay, it's me again, 2026. This is a fresh review from a longtime listener, an elementary school teacher, Serena G., who wrote that every one of your episodes inspires

• 3:39Alie Ward?

  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 kid-safe Ologies episodes, no swears, we now have Smologies, S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S. 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 Smologies, S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S. There you go. Okay, nidariology. Totally a word. It's a well-documented, legit term. It's a study of animals that are over 10,000 species who have nidocytes, which are these specialized cells for catching prey. And where does this? Lovely silent consonant weird word come from?

• 4:22Alie Ward?

  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 "nidae," 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 cnidarians, 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 this ologist by your favorite toothologist, squid expert Sarah McAnulty, Sarah Mac Attack 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.

• 5:07Alie Ward?

  They were awesome, they do wonderful science and history trips, it was a joy. Rachel, she led 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 cahiri snails. They're all being monitored by these wonderful marine biologists there. This ologist got his bachelor's at UC Santa Cruz, double majoring in environmental studies

• 5:49Alie Ward?

  and feminist studies, got his master's 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 week, 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 10 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.

• 6:32Alie Ward?

  So, once we figured that out, it was all smooth sailing. 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 nodariologist, Shayle Matsuda.

• 7:31Alie Ward?

  9:59, Shayle's due here at 10:00. I'm sitting by the pool. He has so little time. I'm just essentially gonna throw this microphone in his face and like, start rolling before we even hit the elevators. Wait, were you behind the column? How long have you been here?

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Like, five or 10 minutes.

• 7:49Alie Ward?

  Oh, my God, me too. Oh, my God, what a work.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  I came in the other side.

• 7:53Alie Ward?

  I was literally like, 10 feet away, reading about microplastics of coral and wanting to cry.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's awful.

• 8:02Alie Ward?

  Like, here's my thesis. And you are a nodariologist? Did I say it right?

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Sure. I was thinking about that earlier, or coralologist, maybe.

• 8:14Alie Ward?

  Coral, I mean, is our corals nodaria?

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, the nodarians.

• 8:19Alie Ward?

  Okay, nodarians.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  The phylum they're part of. And... What unites all of those animals is their stinging cells, their cnidocytes.

• 8:28Alie Ward?

  Oh, that's the common thread.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  We must be related.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so like anemones, or jellyfish, and corals all produce these little stinging cells that are used in defense or prey capture.

• 8:39Alie Ward?

  I've already learned so much about corals. I didn't know that they got little stingies. And so, what exactly is a coral?

• 8:48Speaker 01

  That's a great question that we think about all the time, actually. So, corals are animals, first and foremost, but the corals, when you think of a coral reef, corals, they're much more than like the sum of their parts. So, the coral animal looks white, they have clear tissues, and they secrete 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 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.

• 9:25Alie Ward?

  Oh my god.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  And, just like you and me, corals also have a microbiome. They have bacteria that live inside of their tissues that also play a lot of really important roles.

• 9:35Alie Ward?

  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 pitched that creature in a sci-fi series, people would be like, "Mmm, 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 plausible." Now, what is with them being a skin bag?

• 10:07Speaker 01

  This is like the hardest question.

• 10:09Alie Ward?

  I know.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  It's like, oh man, like we have a term for this, it's called the coral holobiont. And that is like the coral animal itself, its symbiotic algae, its bacteria, their fungi, their archaea. There are a lot of different obligate symbionts that these corals have that are critical for their life and function.

• 10:25Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm. So, it's kind of like a skeleton?

• 10:29Alie Ward?

  A soupy mix of goodness and then like a little transparent skin over it?

• 10:33Speaker 01

  And the transparent skin is the animal itself. So if, just like trees that grow in the forest, if you count their rings, you get an 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.

• 10:58Alie Ward?

  Oh, my gosh. Is it similar to trees in that there's a ring for every year of growth because of seasons? Or is that different?

• 11:06Speaker 01

  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 a 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.

• 11:30Alie Ward?

  Wow. So when you see, let's say, a coral out of the ocean and it's like a piece on a...

• 11:35Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 11:36Alie Ward?

  Well, yeah, I know. Number one, it's not a happy coral. But when you see like a decorative coral, are you seeing essentially just its skeleton?

• 11:46Speaker 01

  Yes. When we say coral reef corals, they're a particular type, a group of corals that live in the shallow waters, that have these algal symbionts that rely on photosynthesis to get their food.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  But corals are a really large group of organisms and we have deep sea corals that don't have these symbioses that just feed heterotrophically by eating plankton or things in the water. And a lot of corals 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.

• 12:24Alie Ward?

  Which we should leave in the ocean.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  Leave in the ocean.

• 12:26Alie Ward?

  Now, are those getting harvested just for decorative purposes?

• 12:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, very often. There's a lot of protections in different places about corals, but it's not everywhere.

• 12:38Alie Ward?

  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 gonna get arrested on a beach, do something else. Have a better story, you know? So maybe don't have coral decorations.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:02Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  You know, but what you can have is that we're, you know, with technology increases, we're, we're doing a lot of work with like 3D imaging and you can like go home or, you know, go to a museum or, you know, tech place and get a coral printed and put that in your house.

• 13:17Alie Ward?

  Yes, you can admire them in a, in a way that's a replica.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 13:22Alie Ward?

  That makes sense.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  It just is beautiful.

• 13:23Alie Ward?

  Right, you could, I'm sure you can even cast, cast them and then pour a little plaster of pears in there.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 13:29Alie Ward?

  We fixed it. P.S. Yes, I did look it up and there are hollow coral shaped molds. You can pour plaster of pears 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?

• 13:47Speaker 01

  Um, I've been studying corals formally for four years during this degree, but I've been interested in corals for, 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 at the Sycera.

• 14:07Alie Ward?

  Oh, cool.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  As a younger person.

• 14:10Alie Ward?

  And were you always maybe drawn to the sea? Were you always like an aquatic person?

• 14:16Speaker 01

  Uh, that's a good question, too. Uh, so I grew up just outside of Chicago where even though I felt like I was growing up on a body of water, like Michigan, you know, it's not a marine environment, it's freshwater 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 Shedd Aquarium and seeing all the 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, uh, you know, most of us in the United States. Aren't lucky enough to grow up on a coral reef.

• 14:50Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  And so a lot of our first exposures to this, you know, especially those of us before like YouTube era and whatnot, was going to our local aquariums and really seeing these organisms that, you know, you don't even read about in the ocean.

• 15:03Alie Ward?

  If you're wondering, where are corals? I asked corals.org 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 blew my 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?

• 15:39Speaker 01

  It's an interesting, I'm gonna give you my journey story and you can like hack this up however you want.

• 15:43Alie Ward?

  I love a journey story so much.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  It's a journey story.

• 15:45Alie Ward?

  Okay, let's get to know Shayle's science background. Settle in.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  So I had one of those moments where like I, I was always drawn to nature, to being outside and playing outside. I was a very like, I was not a video game kid. I was a, wanted to get muddy kid. But when I got to college, I kind of went a different science route. I studied, you know, 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. My, I had a dual degree in environmental science and women's studies. And I kind of went the second route and just kind of worked with youth in nature in underserved, underserved communities.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  And I got, I got to this point, you know, my little bit later twenties, I decided to, you know, quit my job and move out of my house, sell all of my stuff and travel and figure that out. And something that happened for me on that trip was I finally decided to learn scuba diving. 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 snorkeling, just like opened up in a really three-dimensional, dynamic way.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  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, you know, what is this environment that I'm in? And I want, like, looking at everything, but also being, you know, really struck by how polluted it was as well.

• 17:35Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  From there, basically went, I wanted to make sure that was the right choice. And so I applied to, sitting in these little internet cafes, like applying to these like coral reef monitoring like volunteerships, just to like learn a little bit more, make sure this is the like big life switch I was ready to make. And I joined one that was in the Yucatan in Mexico, where 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, and that experience really kind of solidified that. You know, I moved back to San Francisco. I went to City College to make up some coursework that I hadn't done the first time.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  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, and then from there, I realized that, you know, being, 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 neighborhood who are like right upstairs, that you can just go upstairs and talk to about like all the really cool things that we're working on. And then 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.

• 18:58Alie Ward?

  So I have never been yet snorkeling in an alive reef.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  Oh, you gotta do that. You're here.

• 19:04Alie Ward?

  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?

• 19:13Speaker 01

  It's so beautiful.

• 19:15Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  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 gonna 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, 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 gonna see when you're down there. And it's, it's just, it's, it's so exciting. Like there's so much to see and you'll, 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.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  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, it is like, it's like a, you can think of it almost like a, you know, metropolis in the ocean and full of a diverse cast of players.

• 20:17Alie Ward?

  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?

• 20:24Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, absolutely. You know, and sometimes you, you forget, um, 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, oh, did you see that shark that went 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've seen it 20 years ago. Cause we're seeing these changes at, at such a rapid pace that we're witnessing them in our lifetimes and that's, that's new.

• 21:05Alie Ward?

  Yeah. So what is Shale working on in terms of protecting these bony, soupy, squishy, mysterious, gorgeous little critters?

• 21:13Speaker 01

  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 gonna 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 wanna go like broad or like my stuff.

• 21:31Alie Ward?

  Actually, let's go broad a little bit just cause people don't know shit about corals.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  That's true. People don't. But they're the coolest animals.

• 21:40Alie Ward?

  I know.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, so corals are all, coral species are all really, really different.

• 21:46Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  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, eggs and sperm into the water. Some are large and they grow in these really big shapes, some are very small, even single polyp corals. And so they, and 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

• 22:30Speaker 01

  around the world who work with these different corals and these different coral reef environments that are all widely different can, 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, 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 be put out in the reef? And if they experience these higher temperatures downstream, will that initial exposure help them survive?

• 23:01Alie Ward?

  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.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  And with coral bleaching, what's really hard about that is it's, it's this whole balance of how hot and for how long. So if there's like 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 like what coral bleaching is.

• 23:36Alie Ward?

  Yeah, I know, that one expression.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  So I was like, okay, like that probably doesn't make any sense yet. So corals, you know, have these, these symbiotic algae that are obligate, that means they're required for the corals to live, they provide up to 95% of their daily nutritional needs. And

• 23:55Speaker 01

  Everything, when the temperatures are good, everything is happy. You know, the corals get what they need, the symbionts get 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. You're out! So kind of how when 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, that can actually be detrimental to us. And the same thing's true with coral bleaching. So as the corals are purging out these algal symbionts, it's not just all at a time. Like, you can watch a coral start to pale, losing its color, right?

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Because as the symbionts leave, that white skeleton's showing through. And then, as that's happening, the longer it goes on, the corals aren't getting that energy, and they can begin to starve.

• 24:49Alie Ward?

  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.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  And what you'll see is, if you go out 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's 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. And we've seen this happen on massive scales on a reef. And once the corals die, you'll start to see macroalgae growing on top of them, and that's when, you know, the structure of the reef environment will then start to really break down. And also, some corals aren't bleaching. Some individuals, like in Canoe Bay during the 2014 and 2015 bleaching events that we

• 25:44Speaker 01

  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 coral's genetic makeup or symbiotic communities that is allowing these corals to perform a lot better?

• 26:06Alie Ward?

  And so when you're looking at, say, two different examples of coral next to each other, are those different individuals genetically? 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?

• 26:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a good question. So a coral colony is a coral, you can think of a coral itself as a coral polyp.

• 26:28Alie Ward?

  What is a polyp? Well, it's a squishy little bugger with a feathery head, and it secretes calcium carbonate in its base to anchor it on a surface, kind of like a cup holder filled with one of those gas station windsock dancers only made out of jello salad. Also, as long as this train has tutu, made a stop into Polypville, it comes from the words poly, many, and p, meaning foot, so poly. And in old Latin, it meant cuttlefish. I personally tend to associate polyps with bad news about colons. And that's because a polyp is a little intestinal dingle dangle 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, though. What is a polyp in the ocean?

• 27:13Speaker 01

  So you look a little mouth, kind of like if you took an anemone, that kind of structure, mouth in the middle, tentacles on the outside. And as a coral grows, it buds off and creates a genetically identical polyp. And as those polyps continue to multiply and spread and grow, you've got a coral colony that is made up of polyps that are all one genetic individual.

• 27:34Alie Ward?

  Do you think that that's all the same person? Or do you think it's a person and a bunch of clones?

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a hard question.

• 27:40Alie Ward?

  I understand that a coral's not a person, too, but do you know what I mean?

• 27:43Speaker 01

  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 stage are corals able to fuse together and share resources or not? Do some species do this more than others? So that's definitely a really good question.

• 27:58Alie Ward?

  Okay, good.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  But we don't totally know the answer to that. You can't just look at one and be like, that's... Three or four genetically distinct individuals.

• 28:08Speaker 03

  Like, we're literally the same person.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 28:23Alie Ward?

  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?

• 28:31Speaker 01

  So much.

• 28:32Alie Ward?

  Yeah, that's cool.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  I mean, it's a really exciting time to be a biologist right now, and asking questions that we couldn't afford to ask before, to have the technology to ask before on these really large scales.

• 28:43Alie Ward?

  And now, what about their stinkiness? Their little stingers, stingers? Stingers, stingers. How is that helping them survive or thwart predators? Or are there predators to coral other than just human mishaps?

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Our mantles, yeah. Yeah. So corals don't have a lot of predators. There's a lot of fish that will... You've probably heard of parrotfish, that will try to eat the macroalgae around coral. Sometimes, they will nibble the coral too. But for the most part, there's not a lot of animals coming towards them to eat them in that sense.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  They use their stinging cells a lot in prey capture. So if you stare at a coral long enough under the scope, and if a piece of plankton swims up, you'll see it almost like being a slide trap. You'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. But the stinging cells, if you touch a coral, which you shouldn't do, it will try to sting you too, but our skin is too thick. But other animals, like Portuguese man of war, for example, there are stinging cells that can affect us too. But corals are pretty safe. Don't touch them.

• 30:03Alie Ward?

  Shayle 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, 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.

• 30:28Speaker 04

  So embarrassing.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  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's there? Who is it? Get an idea of like, what the, what are the functions of these organisms? And like, how important might that be to the health and survival of a coral? A lot of the bacteria, like, you know, bacteria have different, different roles. Like, in us, like, your skin bacteria is gonna be different than your gut bacteria. You don't want those to mix. And like, corals have bacteria that, you know, help in like, defense and nutrient cycling, and things like that. So, we're interested in like, what, what those are doing there.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  We can get a way better idea of what's going on now than we could, you know, 10, 15 years ago.

• 31:16Alie Ward?

  Warning: bummer question. Bummer question ahead. And what do you think is the biggest coral bummer for the coral? Would it be a rise in temperature, or ocean acidification? Pollution? Like, is there, what's their big, uh, what's their big sad trombone?

• 31:36Speaker 01

  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 on reefs today in 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, like, even in our lifetimes, of these massive coral bleaching events worldwide. And a coral bleaching event can, can wipe out entire reef ecosystems in like, one season. And we're seeing them not only, you know, it's not just like a one-off anymore. And here in Hawaii, we've had, we had the event in 2014, again in 2015. The Great Barrier Reef has also experienced these successive events.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  And so while, you know, we're seeing corals that are able to survive one round of this warming and recover, it's like, if you keep on hitting them, what is that affecting? Like, we've got research groups at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology who are looking at like, how does, how does the reproduction affected by, by these events? Like, are we gonna see a lot more downstream things that are happening? And you add things like the local stressors, like, you know, overfishing, or sedimentation and pollution runoff from a lot of the local environments that are there. Those are like, kind of the, the added pressures that, that corals are facing. And it's...

• 32:57Speaker 01

  It is so good, like it is so good and so important to mitigate some of these local stressors, right? Like, you know, diverting pollution and sedimentation. Really important. Like, a coral can't live if it's covered in sediment.

• 33:08Alie Ward?

  Okay, 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 reefs 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 inner algae buddies get blocked. So there goes their nutrient and energy source.

• 33:50Alie Ward?

  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. Okay, 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?

• 34:25Speaker 01

  The most important thing that we need to address, if we want corals in the future, is climate change.

• 34:31Alie Ward?

  And why are coral reefs important? Also, is it reefs, or is it reeves? Is it reeves? I always want to say, like, reeves, like roofs, or like hooves?

• 34:44Speaker 01

  I like that. I haven't heard that, actually.

• 34:46Alie Ward?

  I just want to say reeves, and I know that's not...

• 34:48Speaker 01

  Reeves.

• 34:50Alie Ward?

  Okay, like, you know, like...

• 34:51Speaker 01

  Like multiple...

• 34:52Alie Ward?

  You know, foots or feet?

• 34:56Alie Ward?

  But it reeves, okay. I've asked an expert, and it's not reeves. Listen, if elves had hooves, the second halves of their lives, would they be tall enough to reach the shelves? Would they kept their knives to cut up lobes of bread, or would their wives have to put down the scarves they're knitting to get them themselves?

• 35:11Speaker 04

  I can't believe it's not reefs.

• 35:13Alie Ward?

  So why are reefs important? Why do we, why do we want to save the reefs? Other than they're fucking gorgeous and awesome and fish live there. But clearly they are important.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're, yes, all of that. Yeah, they're, they're really important and they're really important for a lot of different reasons. They're really personal to, to many people, but also then on a community and, you know, national, international scale as well. So, you know, having a coral reef environment is, they're one of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the world. They're a bank for biodiversity. And within that, you know, the coral reefs themselves are the breeding grounds and homes for tons of marine life. You've got animals that will come in from like the deeper oceans to, to breed.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  Fish is, is a really important, um, you know, 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, they absorb a lot of that, you know, wave action, that wave power that's coming in. We've all seen, uh, really awful things that have been happening in a lot of our coastal communities around the world because of, you know, flooding and, um, you know, coastline erosion and things like that.

• 36:44Alie Ward?

  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...

• 36:53Speaker 01

  You know, 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, like one of the most exciting moments that I had actually during my master's degree, I studied sea slugs and newt ranks during that time was I was like in my advisor's office, looking through some old papers. And I found this paper where one of the, so this, 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.

• 37:35Alie Ward?

  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 Holorythia parva on Human Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia by Beelymphocytes by Direct Mitochondrial Targeting." Okay, spoiler alert, I'm gonna let Shayle tell you the plot of the paper.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  But these toxins that are like antimicrobial, antiviral, also can be used in medical, biomedical research that, that it benefits humans.

• 38:05Alie Ward?

  Oh my god.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  And so I'm like looking through this box of papers and found this paper, and I'm like, oh my gosh, and I like call my mom, right? And I'm like on the phone with my mom, and I'm like, "Mom, like, guess what? Like, there's this nudibranch 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 like, mind blowing to me.

• 38:26Alie Ward?

  Wait, what?

• 38:26Speaker 01

  Like, this organism that I like, didn't think I was gonna study, and I don't study pharmaceutical things or anything like that, but just that like, this kind of a group of animals that I didn't know much about before could actually have such like a personal impact on me. And there's like, tons of things out there that we haven't discovered yet.

• 38:41Alie Ward?

  Oh my god, what kind of cancer was it?

• 38:43Speaker 01

  Uh, childhood leukemia.

• 38:44Alie Ward?

  Oh my god!

• 38:46Speaker 01

  Which is wild, right? So it's like, I was like, this all came full circle. But it's those kind of moments where there, you know, the reasons to protect coral reefs, we might not even know all the reasons yet.

• 38:57Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  Right? And are we gonna lose these opportunities?

• 39:01Speaker 01

  Because of like, you know, it's not because we don't know better, but it's because it's like, we're not... Ready. Politicians 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.

• 39:20Alie Ward?

  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?

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, not in the way you'd expect. Like, everyone thought I was gonna grow up and wanna be a doctor. Right? That's like a really typical narrative that people ascribe to childhood cancer survivors. For me, what was hard, or I think the way that it affected me the most, like, in my personality, is that I, from a very early age, didn't have this idea of, like, all the time in the world. It was like, if I wanna do something, I have to do it now. And so I was, from a very early age, I was very, you know, for better or for worse, like, everything that I want to happen, it has to happen now. So it resulted in me being a very driven human being. But then, at the same time, it also, you know, causes a lot of anxiety too, and pressure. And I think that it got me really curious about science, about answering questions, and about the fact that, you know,

• 40:15Speaker 01

  like, oh, man, this story too. So

• 40:21Speaker 01

  leukemia is a really interesting thing. Because for, like, you know, centuries or whatnot 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, you know, is it gonna be like an environmental thing, whatnot? And it was only, it was very recently that a paper came out with, like, this new hypothesis that it was, it's kind of like a combination of things. It's like a genetic thing, like a genetic predisposition. And then also, the hypothesis is that babies who are not exposed to, like, the right bacteria in their, like, first year of life were more prone to this.

• 40:58Alie Ward?

  Oh, my God.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  And, you know, so that, that was, like, super interesting. Because like, a lot of, you know, bacteria is like another really big thing in my research today. Like, there's a lot of work going on with, like, coral probiotics, like, can we, 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 coral survive and, like, inoculate them with that at an early age? And then will that help them down the line? So this whole idea that, you know, maybe we could prevent childhood leukemia by creating a probiotic cocktail for babies and then all of a sudden, like, can we solve, you know, or help mitigate, you know, coral diseases by also creating like a probiotic? Like, there's the amount of knowledge we're gaining about bacteria, just in general right now, it's just been like a huge, a huge driver, right, for knowledge.

• 41:42Alie Ward?

  Right, and the notion that it's not just one necessarily species you're studying, but its interaction with several species that almost makes it able to survive and adapt. Shale says that some corals 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 Steph, things that a coral party just aren't the same without both bacteria and viruses.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  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.

• 42:27Alie Ward?

  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 coral is just plain really pretty and nice to look at. So there's that factor, Shale explains.

• 42:49Speaker 01

  And they're also, you know, really important for, for tourism and the economy. And that's also a really great way to kind of switch our, the way that we think about like our, 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, to see the reef. And, you know, it's hard to find an appreciation for something that you have never seen before. Like, you know, we can all kind of relate to that. And we all have those moments where like, you know, you saw something for the first time, even, you know, any, any place in nature, like, we can have those kind of moments. But I think that's really important also.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  And especially like here in Hawaii, the coral 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.

• 43:53Alie Ward?

  And with 85% of the US coral reefs surrounding Hawaii, there's also a really big cultural necessity of protecting and preserving those ecosystems. And there's a piece called "Pukamai Heko'a: The Significance of Corals in Hawaiian Culture", and it's featured in the book Ethno-Biology of Corals and Coral Reef's, with an F, "Reeves", fine. And the lead author of it, Tony McConaughey-Greg, writes, quote, "Hawaiian people consider coral to be an akua, 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 of all living things in Hawaii."

• 44:36Alie Ward?

  And that's something that Shayle 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 blazed through grad school with challenges that most of us don't face.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  Not only did I not have a, you know, a direct, like, go to undergrad, go to your master's 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 themselves in, 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...

• 45:39Speaker 01

  Coming into science and you know, in high school, I was put on like the not the honor science track and it took me a 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. Really? 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,

• 46:21Speaker 01

  you know, 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. The medical industry is a great example of that. Yes.

• 46:51Alie Ward?

  P.S. 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 B, 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.

• 47:33Alie Ward?

  And that was a direct quote from a journal article there. But P.S. Heads 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- Twenty 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.

• 48:13Alie Ward?

  He had situations that called for allies, like preparing for fieldwork 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.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  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, you know, science is hard, but I have lots of people to talk to about my experiments. And so like, I think that like, you know, besides all the like systemic things that we need to do to help make STEM actually more inclusive, we need to find our communities and like lift each other up in that sense.

• 48:59Alie Ward?

  Do you find that maybe underrepresented folks tend to have a little bit more imposter syndrome?

• 49:07Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 49:08Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  Oh, imposter syndrome, yeah. Yes, definitely. 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, 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, you kind of look around the room and you look for your allies.

• 49:29Alie Ward?

  Like, who's got my back here?

• 49:30Speaker 01

  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, 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?

• 49:56Alie Ward?

  Did you end up at a lab that you felt you had a little bit more community? And also, you work on Kona 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?

• 50:20Speaker 01

  It's a good question. So I only actually applied to one program.

• 50:22Alie Ward?

  You did?

• 50:23Speaker 01

  For my PhD.

• 50:24Alie Ward?

  That's great.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  And 100% I applied because I wanted to work with Dr. Ruth Gates, who's an excellent coral biologist and also someone who really valued science communication and connecting to communities in the public and inspiring people to care so deeply about reefs. And those are two things that were very, very important to me. I also really wanted, it was very important to me to work in a large collaborative lab where there's a lot of 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, finding, you know, community on the islands, a university

• 51:09Speaker 01

  or a place that actually has, you know, anti-discrimination policies in place. There's a lot of places that don't. I have a lot of friends who are part of universities that, you know, are in places that you can be, you know, thrown in jail for using the wrong restroom. Wrong, right, in quotes. And then we've seen a lot of, actually some really great response around that from like the scientific community, canceling conferences and areas that are putting up these really discriminatory policies and things like that. And that's wonderful. Like the UC system is, has done a lot of actually great work in that sense by saying, you know, funding travel to these places.

• 51:44Alie Ward?

  One professional mentor who meant so much to Shayle was Dr. Ruth Gates of the Gates Coral Lab he's at now. And she was a veteran coral 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 and toured the 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, and also before Patreon questions. It's a big day for you because they started spawning last night. What kind of-

• 52:18Speaker 01

  That's funny. I was like, because it's Pride.

• 52:19Alie Ward?

  Oh, yeah. Happy Pride.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, they did.

• 52:23Alie Ward?

  They but spawn it's spawnapalooza right now.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  It is, it is. So something really amazing about corals, there's not enough amazing stuff, is is coral spawning events. And so corals, right, you're a sedentary animal, you're not moving around to find your mates. How you're 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.

• 52:46Speaker 05

  From the moon, looking back at the earth. From the planet moon, from the planet moon.

• 52:50Alie Ward?

  Isn't the moon a star?

• 52:51Speaker 01

  It's the temperature, it's like the pressure in the environment that will all come together and cue the corals to release their gametes into the water column. And for the coral species that we study, the rice coral, Montipurcatata, out here in the lab, they spawn two to three months during the summer, on the night of the new moon, and a few nights after.

• 53:12Alie Ward?

  Oh, my God.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  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, like 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 the sperm will start to sink. And, you know, in the next day or so, there'll be swimming coral larvae, these little itty-bitty jelly beans. And then those larvae will then, you know, swim around and look for some suitable substrate to metamorphose into the first polyp, which will hopefully grow into to many

• 53:55Speaker 01

  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, you being a coral biologist, you have to be kind of ready to respond to whatever's going to happen. So we kind of changed our plans and we'll 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 preconditioning tests to see, you know, if you, you know,

• 54:37Speaker 01

  cool them down, if you heat them up, what's that going to do to their settlement or survivorship?

• 54:41Alie Ward?

  So, you can kind of scoop up and, and run them in, in tubs and in the lab and see how they respond best?

• 54:48Speaker 01

  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, is, is very like DIY, you know, grab some buckets. We, we make these big scoops out of like, these like, plastic shoeboxes where we cut like, windows and hot glue on mesh, kind of use those to scoop out the bundles, carefully put them into like, little containers where they do their fertilization, and then oftentimes, we'll even just leave them to sit overnight in 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, to use. They don't sell coral spawning supply kits.

• 55:31Alie Ward?

  I know. There's a lot of Home Depot five gallon bucket.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, lots of buckets everywhere, many lab. Yeah, absolutely.

• 55:37Alie Ward?

  Oh, my god. Shayle wrote a blog post last June about coral spawning, and in it, he describes setting out on the night of the new moon with life jackets and a first aid 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 will fit on the floor of a small whaler 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.

• 56:20Alie Ward?

  These sponsors make it possible for ologies to donate to a charity of each ologist choosing. And this week, Shayle picked two. The first one is Pepe Ohei. 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 pointfoundation.org is the nation's largest scholarship granting organization for LGBTQ plus students of merit and Point promotes change through scholarship

• 57:05Alie Ward?

  funding, mentorship, leadership development, and community service training. And 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. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. If you haven't heard me gushing about Squarespace for years, it's an all-in-one website platform. Whether you're trying to grow a business you have, or if you're just a baby business getting started, it has everything you need. That's where I secured my domain name. It helped me build a professional site. I can update it so easily. I've been using Squarespace since before Ologies existed. After procrastinating for years, I literally built my website in one evening. They have templates, they have flexible editing

• 57:49Alie Ward?

  tools. Squarespace also makes it easy to share your work. You can book clients, you can get paid. They have built-in tools for scheduling and invoicing and email all in one place. Whenever someone I know needs a website, whether they're a scientist that needs to put their work up, or someone who's just starting a business, I'm like, dude, Squarespace. So head to squarespace.com/ologies for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code Ologies to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. You can do it. This episode of Ologies with Ali Ward is brought to you by Alloy Health Menopause. It's inevitable. It's also treatable. This is where Alloy comes in. You're like, what is this? It's a digital health platform, right? It connects you with a menopause specialized doctor.

• 58:34Alie Ward?

  They exist. They're available. Everything is done online. No waiting for an appointment. You don't have to wait in line at the pharmacy. If you've listened to my field trip mystery ... surgery episode, or any of the three menopause episodes we've done. I've talked about how I went through menopause really early and I've had to deal with hormone therapy. Luckily, I've had it for many, many years. And it was hard to get. It was hard to get doctors who understood. So head to myalloy.com and use the code OLOGIES and tell them all about your symptoms. You'll get a fully customized treatment plan and unlimited messaging with your doctor. Plus, you'll get 20% off your first order today.

• 59:15Alie Ward?

  So head to M Y A L L O Y dot com, myalloy.com and use the code OLOGIES to get 20% off your first order. And this code is valid on products only. Total lifesavers. The other day, your pod mother, Jarrett, was like, why do we have to eat every day, like three times a day? But Hungry Root, they get it. And they get to know your likes and your dislikes, your goals nutritionally, what works with your lifestyle, and then they recommend groceries and recipes just for you. They help you discover new meals, ingredients you may not have chosen for yourself, but could end up being like, this is my new favorite. Hungry Root, they just help you spend less mental energy planning meals, shopping for

• 59:58Alie Ward?

  groceries and cooking, so you can just put that time towards what matters to you. And I teamed up with Hungry Root to create an online cookbook. It's called Pod Mom and Dad's High Protein and Low Dairy Menu. And we have a protein-packed chicken avocado rice bowl, sweet potato and chipotle salad. They also have some really great veggie options, too, like this Moroccan vegetable tagine. That's heck of good. You can explore my digital cookbook, Pod Mom and Dad's High Protein Low Dairy Menu, for free at hungryroot.com/ologies. And for a limited time, get 40% off your first order, plus a free item in every box for life with code OLOGIES. Peppa Pig is your preschooler's best friend.

• 1:00:42Alie Ward?

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• 1:01:08Alie Ward?

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• 1:01:43Alie Ward?

  Okay, your questions. Now, first question we got from Laura Crouppens and a bunch of other folks, including... Jessica F. Fritz, Jennifer Alvarez, Kaitlin Fitzgerald, Jenna Martin, Ira Gray, Jessica Zarninsky, Dakota Harriman, Crystal Mendoza, Topher Hennis, Casey Kaiser, Lauren Crouppens, and Jessie E. 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-chemical, some non-mineral sunscreens?

• 1:02:16Alie Ward?

  It's a tough question. It's a tough question.

• 1:02:18Speaker 01

  It's a tough question. People have definitely seen movements in different coastal communities to ban unsafe sunscreen. And this is a field of research that is beginning to grow. It's a new thing that we're seeing. And it's really important to consider these stressors, 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 to a natural environment is a really important thing. However, where a lot of what we are concerned about is that, in the grand scheme of the impacts facing corals, it is a very small drop in the bucket compared to climate change.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  And that can be a really... That's always a really hard thing. We're still, 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. Uh, 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.

• 1:03:46Alie Ward?

  Afterwards, Shayle 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.

• 1:04:25Speaker 06

  Sorry, everyone.

• 1:04:26Alie Ward?

  Right, so don't just change your mineral sunscreen and be like, nailed it.

• 1:04:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, let me, so actually, okay, I got permission to tell this part of that story.

• 1:04:33Alie Ward?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  Um, 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, the students, like, what was the biggest threat facing corals? And everybody said sunscreen.

• 1:04:48Alie Ward?

  Oh, no.

• 1:04:48Speaker 01

  And, you know, that's a re, that is like the kind of, oh, no moment. And she actually spoke with some of the teachers and they're like, we had no idea, like, this is what people have been telling us, this is what we've been telling our students. And that's, and that's where, you know, that, that's not, that's not good. You know, it's, it's, it can be, it's a great way to get people to understand that, uh, 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.

• 1:05:14Alie Ward?

  This next question was asked by a listener who started making these beautiful paintings inspired by episodes. So to see them, you can check out the Ologies Instagram and then follow her too, because she is wonderful. Maria Hancock wants to know, how excited are you that Pantone's Color of the Year is coral?

• 1:05:29Speaker 01

  Super excited. Anytime that.

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  Corals can go, you know, make it 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, corals are, you know, part of why corals are such a great, you know, organism to talk about these kind of things is that they're gorgeous. You know, and so like, having, having, you know, companies celebrate coral, bring attention to coral, is always greatly appreciated and really exciting.

• 1:06:07Alie Ward?

  I didn't know that it was Pantone's color of the year. I'm excited.

• 1:06:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're always excited, you know.

• 1:06:12Alie Ward?

  Also, side note, huge ups to Pantone for naming the color not just coral, but living coral. Alive, non-dead, non-bleached, thriving, magical coral was too long, but living coral works. Sarah Terry asked what makes them so colorful. Is it that symbiosis?

• 1:06:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, so very often, like, most, there's, I feel like with everything I'm saying and every coral thing, you're like, except then this other thing does something totally different that we didn't expect. So, yes, in general, like, the, a lot of the color we're seeing are the symbionts. However, corals also do produce their own colorful pigments. You can take a black light and shine a black light on corals and they'll, oftentimes you'll see like fluorescents. If you've seen Chasing Coral, the movie, the, you'll see actually during some of the bleaching events, as the corals are bleaching, they actually will start to like glow in like these blues and purple colors. And there's been a lot of hypotheses on why they're doing that. It could potentially attract new symbionts. It could be sort of like a, their own kind of like sunscreening method to protect their own tissues.

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  So, we're still learning more about that, but the corals, you know, are able, some species are able to also produce their own, their own pigments themselves.

• 1:07:21Alie Ward?

  So, that was a doc called Chasing Coral. And if you want to see what coral 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, or...

• 1:07:39Alie Ward?

  Really fuck with coral that you're like, come on. Any movies that you're like?

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  I was actually really impressed with the coral in Finding Nemo.

• 1:07:46Alie Ward?

  Really?

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're, they did a really good job. Like, there's some other, like, inaccuracies in their biology, but they're, but the, I remember, like, when I first saw it, because it came out, like, right when I was graduating college. I was really like, did you, this is like, the, they did a really nice job with some of the, with the, with the forums. So I was like, that's, that's pretty awesome. Corals don't tend to get a lot of spotlight in a lot of mainstream, you know, films.

• 1:08:09Alie Ward?

  I'm gonna go on IMDb and find out who the coral consultant was, and chances are, you probably know them. Quick aside, so I tracked this down, and I think, I think it was a very passionate ichthyologist 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 Redinger wants to know, does coral have a smell?

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  You can, so right now, if you go onto County Bay, you can smell their gametes. So usually, yeah, after a big spawning event, you can definitely smell them.

• 1:08:56Speaker 05

  Nice.

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  Coral mucus, def, I mean, like, I feel like the longer you work with anything, the more you gain a nose for it. Underwater, you know, we're not really smelling anything. But like, once you're covered in it, you, you definitely, it's earthy.

• 1:09:12Alie Ward?

  A little earthy.

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:09:14Alie Ward?

  A little musky.

• 1:09:14Speaker 01

  But that's actually a great question, because, you know, a lot of, while we might not smell the corals, like, a lot of marine organisms use chemical senses to, you know, interact with their surrounding environments and things like that. So there's a lot of smells, in that sense, going on in the, in the water.

• 1:09:33Alie Ward?

  In the oceans.

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  In the oceans.

• 1:09:35Alie Ward?

  So this next question was also asked by listener Grace. And Allegra Violetta Benesman wants to know, what role does concrete truly play in the health of our coral? And I know nothing about this.

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  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 out of concrete that, you know, 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.

• 1:10:11Alie Ward?

  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, hmm, 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 burying their heads in the sand. Ooh, a burn so sick it scorched underwater. Zane Lebrun wants to know, hello.

• 1:10:54Speaker 04

  Oh, hi.

• 1:10:55Alie Ward?

  Is the news about the Great Barrier Reef being declared dead true? And if so, is there anything that we can do about it?

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  That's a great question. So there was that article that came out, I think a couple of years ago now, that declared the Great Barrier Reef dead. It's not dead. That's the answer. However, it's not doing so great, right? Like, 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, right? But the Great Barrier Reef, it just experienced two horrific bleaching events, back to back. And, you know, a new paper by Terry Hughes's group out in Australia showed that the recruitment of like baby corals to the reef post those events has significantly declined.

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  And so that's one of those, like, you know, not only are we dealing with the impacts of dying coral on the reef. Who's going to replace them, right? And so these are these kind of the smaller impacts that we're looking at. So the Great Barrier Reef, you know, it did experience this massive bleaching event, lost like, you know, in some regions, lost like, you know, 50% or more of the coral on the ground. And they're, you know, 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, like, 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

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  that would directly impact the reefs here and where we are, like, that's where we have the most sway, is a really important thing, like, going to town halls also, not just voting, but like, 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, that some of the funding from that might actually go to research or refresh duration, but like, looking for, you know, making sure that your footprint in those spaces are supporting organizations that are doing it right.

• 1:13:07Alie Ward?

  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 a fin. And so I thought that was great. I didn't know that.

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. And that's the thing, like, some corals, their structures are big, ask any surfer, like, they hurt when you get hit by one.

• 1:13:31Alie Ward?

  Okay, side note, I just watched a bunch of videos of surfers bailing on coral. Not only are the corals hurt, 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 reef rash, according to some surfer message boards that I just totally lurked on, are hydrogen peroxide, alcohol, people use iodine, others say just baby shampoo and scrubbing it with a toothbrush, and antibacterial ointments work,

• 1:14:16Alie Ward?

  but you have to treat it right away because you can be left with a staph infection, which would be hell a nar nar, 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.

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  But they're also super fragile. Some of them that have those really nice branching shapes, you know, just a tiny kick. You can kick over a colony that's been growing for over 100 years in like one kick.

• 1:14:43Alie Ward?

  Oh, God.

• 1:14:44Speaker 01

  And so, that's, you know, that's great.

• 1:14:47Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:47Speaker 01

  That's great. It's a great way to educate people on that. A lot of people think they're rocks.

• 1:14:51Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:51Speaker 01

  So, they're like flailing around like, "Oh, I'm gonna go stand on that." And the polyps, like, they're just thin layers of tissue, so.

• 1:14:57Alie Ward?

  And you can crush them, like a face bone. Other patrons like Erica, Sarah Peck, and Izzy M. had questions about shales 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?

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 1:15:13Alie Ward?

  All the other reefs are gonna be like, "Really?"

• 1:15:15Speaker 01

  I know, I know. What's a favorite?

• 1:15:20Speaker 01

  Ooh, this is really hard.

• 1:15:26Speaker 01

  So, I was lucky enough to dive the Blue Hole in Belize, which is like a big etol that you can just like sink down into. 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 in this environment, if you see like a shark, that's really cool.

• 1:15:49Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:16:16Alie Ward?

  Oh, my gosh. Have you ever been scared of a shark bite? Are you like?

• 1:16:19Speaker 01

  No, not really. Like sharks have a really sharks are doing awful. We're shark finning 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 finning? How do we like not allow shark fins to be sold? And commercial senses in our country 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're they've got very tiny mouths. They're can be bottom feeders or they're just not, you know, they're just as 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.

• 1:16:57Speaker 01

  And so, you know, it's always important to know what the like what the threats are or they could be or 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?

• 1:17:17Speaker 01

  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 not disturbing me. There are some shark species that might have like a case of mistaken identity, like if we're swimming around like a seal at the surface in, you know, white shark territory. They can't come up and like, you know, poke you, see if you're food or not. And the way like their strategy for getting food is they don't have arms, right? So they 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 being eaten, not being eaten by a shark, right? You know, unfortunately, it has to do with like, you know, succumbing to a wound from that shark bite.

• 1:18:02Speaker 01

  Um, not scater sharks, and you shouldn't be either.

• 1:18:04Alie Ward?

  For more on this, see the Selacamorphology Selacamorphology Episode on Sharks. Also, I snuck in this teeny tiny question about itty bitty garbage. Sorry, this one's a bummer, but it's good to know. How about plastics and corals? I was reading a little article when I was, when we were waiting for each other on opposite sides of a pillar about microplastics being found in corals.

• 1:18:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, unfortunately, microplastics. So, plastic in general is awful for the marine environment, right? You hear these stories about, you know, straws getting stuck on turtles' noses, or, you know, animals getting caught in plastic bags, or eating plastic bags, thinking that they're jellyfish or other kinds of food. And so, those are a big problem. However, what we've learned, you know, recently is that the plastics, as they start to actually break down, so they're not like necessarily visible to the naked eye, these microplastics are having like a huge impact on these lower trophic levels, on like, um, a lot of these, you know, the plankton are eating the plastics, then the larger animals are eating those plastics. And there have been, yeah, some studies that are looking at, you know, our corals eating these plastics as well. And what does that mean, right? Like, you can't, there's no nutritional value.

• 1:19:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:19:26Alie Ward?

  Anything that you've seen research-wise in the last few years, or any turnarounds that have given you hope?

• 1:19:34Alie Ward?

  You're like, no, everything sucks.

• 1:19:36Speaker 01

  I didn't think that's where you were going.

• 1:19:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. Um, 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 corals that are living up to temperatures that can't here. And like, the difference is that this happened over geologic time, whereas we are speeding things up, and like, can these animals keep up for that?

• 1:20:21Speaker 01

  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 what you're talking about."

• 1:20:33Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:34Speaker 01

  But there's been a huge push and 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 a systemic scale to potentially start to happen.

• 1:21:07Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm. 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 or something? Like, what sucks?

• 1:21:23Speaker 01

  Uh, 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.

• 1:21:34Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:34Speaker 01

  And like, and that's something that's, you know, 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.

• 1:21:52Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:21:52Speaker 01

  Right? And it's... Anytime you dive on a reef that's bleaching, or a reef that's been devastated by any kind of impact, especially one that you'd seen flourishing before, you have an emotional reaction. It's a very devastating feeling. And that pressure of, it's not just, I don't finish my dissertation, then I don't get to graduate. But so much of this work that we all are working on is gonna have an impact right now or not? And are we doing it right? Are we asking the right questions? And that's definitely the hardest part, for sure.

• 1:22:28Alie Ward?

  What's your favorite part about your job? Or about corals?

• 1:22:31Speaker 01

  Oh, man. We do a whole podcast on that.

• 1:22:37Speaker 01

  My favorite part of my job is I'm answering it in two parts, which I know you're not supposed to do.

• 1:22:42Alie Ward?

  No, answer however many parts you want.

• 1:22:44Speaker 01

  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 really quickly, it's a very creative place to be. 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 like 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.

• 1:23:29Speaker 01

  And then also, I take a boat to work every day. I can just 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 an everyday basis.

• 1:23:48Alie Ward?

  Maybe that's why marine biologists are a little bit more chill.

• 1:23:52Speaker 01

  I don't know, I feel like we're really chill and they're also like super stressed out.

• 1:23:56Alie Ward?

  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 a sliver of your time. I know that it's a busy day for coral. Are you going back out tonight?

• 1:24:08Speaker 01

  I am, yeah.

• 1:24:09Alie Ward?

  Excited?

• 1:24:09Speaker 01

  Very excited.

• 1:24:10Alie Ward?

  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 Shayle, you can follow him at Wrong underscore whale on Twitter. That will be linked in the show notes. We're at Ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at Ali 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 toothologist, Sarah McEnulty, AKA Sarah Mac Attack on social media, for hooking me up with this really wonderful nedarriologist, Shayle. I look forward to calling him Doctor Matsuda soon. Thank you also to Bonnie Dutch

• 1:24:52Alie Ward?

  and Shannon Feltes. They have a comedy podcast called You Are That. If you like funny, amazing people, they also manage my merch at ologiesmerch.com. Thank you to Erin Talbert for adminning the Ologies Podcast Facebook group. I was also recently told there's an Ologies Podcast subreddit now, just in case you're on Reddit, or you want to go discuss episodes and share weird ological facts there. So hi Reddit, hi. Thank you to Jarrett 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 dinos and the Purr Cast, which is all about kitties, Stephen Ray Morris,

• 1:25:32Alie Ward?

  who's a pillar serving as a sturdy substrate in 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. Did you love that? How about you loved that? It was so good. I just want to hop in here and thank scheduling producer Noelle Dilworth, managing director Susan Hale, and our current editors Jake Chaffee and Mercedes Maitland 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 Capesacein 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,

• 1:26:16Alie Ward?

  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 roughage. 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 was pretty tight. Bye bye. Pachydermatology, omeology, cryptozoology,

• 1:27:00Alie Ward?

  litology, nanotechnology, meteorology, factology, nephology, seriology, et cetera.

• 1:27:29Speaker 03

  Insurance may all seem the same on the surface, but having insurance isn't the same as having State Farm. It's like getting a granola bar with a candle in it when you wanted a three-layer birthday cake. You wouldn't settle for just any dessert on your birthday. So don't settle for just any insurance. When it comes to getting the help you need, State Farm is the real deal. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 1:27:52Speaker 03

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