The arid plains fringing Australia’s desert centre are more suited to camels than blooms of coral but here, hundreds of kilometres from the coast, a piece of the Great Barrier Reef has been put on ice.
Suspended in a liquid nitrogen chamber of -196°C, the 70 billion sperm and 22 billion coral embryos are part of an ambitious Australian-first project to preserve and perhaps one day regenerate the world-famous reef.
“We know the Great Barrier Reef is in deep, deep trouble because of a number of different things – global threats including climate change and acidification of waters as well as the warming of waters,” said the project’s director, Rebecca Spindler.
“We will never have as much genetic diversity again as we do right now on the reef, this is our last opportunity to save as much as we possibly can.”
Dr Spindler’s team is working with Hawaii-based Mary Hagedorn from the Smithsonian Institute to collect and freeze samples from the World Heritage-listed reef, a sprawling and vivid natural wonder visible from space.
In order to maximise the amount of reproductive cells – gametes – collected the team cut away sections of the reef and took them back to land-based tanks to spawn, an event that only occurs for three days a year.
Experts from the Australian Institute of Marine Science, a major partner in the research, then tagged the reef sections and returned them to Orpheus Island, literally gluing them back to their original sites.
They plan to build up a catalogue of coral species as insurance against increasing bleaching linked to ocean warming and acidification and threats including chemical run-off, dredging and damage from cyclones.
Eventually, Dr Spindler hopes to grow in-vitro reefs which can be used to reseed wild populations – something she is “confident” will be possible in a few years time.
Experts at Dubbo’s Western Plains Zoo, Australia’s top wildlife reproductive lab, keep the frozen reef ticking over with regular liquid nitrogen top-ups while they explore optimal conditions for reviving and mating the coral.
Some 400 kilometres inland from the coast and far closer to desert than ocean, Dubbo seems an unlikely location for marine research. Giraffes, rhinos and elephants roam the 300-hectare zoo and the lab, which backs onto a mating enclosure for the endangered Tasmanian devil, is a hive of hormonal experiments.
Spermologist Nana Satake did her doctorate in pig reproduction and usually works with African and native animals, but she sees the Reef Recovery Project as an exciting challenge.
“The Great Barrier Reef is really a bit of an enigma – there’s very little (research been) done on coral reef production from (its) coral species,” Dr Satake said, describing it as the “rainforest of the ocean”.