Andrea Grottoli Podcast
===

David Staley: As you look to the future of coral, are you optimistic or pessimistic?

Andrea Grottolli: I am cautiously optimistic. We still can make a big difference in the future of coral reefs, but we can also make some bad choices and there will be nothing left. And that is really up to humanity to decide. There will be survivors, there will always be survivors and stragglers here and there, but whether you have thriving, healthy coral reefs, I think we're probably past the point where we will for sure have thriving coral reefs globally. 

Jen Farmer: From the heart of The Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff with departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials and mathematics and languages, among many others. The college always has something exciting happening. Join us to find out what's new, now.

David Staley: I am pleased to be joined today in the ASC Marketing and Communications Studio by Andrea Grottoli, College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Earth Sciences. She has published peer reviewed journal articles in such journals as Nature, Global Change Biology and Nature Communications, and she has been featured on National Public Radio and several websites and newspapers. 

She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the International Coral Reef Society. Dr. Grottoli, welcome to Voices. 

Andrea Grottolli: Thank you. 

David Staley: I want to start with, if you don't mind, a definition of coral. And I'm not certain, I am completely certain what coral is. It's a life form, obviously. What kind of life form is coral? 

Andrea Grottolli: Corals are animals. 

David Staley: They are animals. 

Andrea Grottolli: They are animals, but they are symbiotic with single celled algae that live inside their cells. So they are what we call mixotrophic, meaning they get food two ways. They can eat zooplankton and particles in the water column with their tentacles that they extend and stuff that food into their mouth, like that's the animal part.

And they can also get sugar through photosynthesis of the algae that live inside their cells that photosynthesize like a plant. And this makes them very, very well equipped to maximize their feeding capacity in coral reef environments. 

David Staley: So are there other life forms like this that have this kind of both and feature to them?

Andrea Grottolli: Yes, there are other symbiotic organisms. Symbioses happen in all kinds of ways. This one is a algal animal symbiosis, but we are symbiotic with bacteria, for example. Our guts are full of bacteria. We can't function without that bacteria. That's a symbiosis, also. 

David Staley: Tell us about the work that you do with coral reefs. It's, really quite interesting. 

Andrea Grottolli: I am interested in what makes some coral resilient. The climate is changing dramatically, and the combination of rising seawater temperatures, ocean acidification, pollution, and overfishing is devastating to coral reefs. And when we have these heatwave events that cause coral bleaching, we get mass mortality events.

David Staley: And when you say coral bleaching, what does that mean? 

Andrea Grottolli: Coral bleaching is a heat stress response where that symbiosis breaks down. The coral release their endosymbiotic algae and we see through the clear gelatinous tissue of the animal host to the white skeleton underneath, giving them a white appearance, hence the term bleaching.

And when they're bleached, they cannot photosynthesize because they've just ditched their endosymbiotic algae and they're much more reliant on the feeding side of their nutrition. It's the only thing they've got left. And my research really focuses on how coral maximize feeding as a survival mechanism.

David Staley: When we see them bleaching, does this mean, they're dying? 

Andrea Grottolli: It means they can die, yeah. They're starving. If the heat stress event lasts too long, then they die. And last summer, for example, in Florida, there was a heat wave that resulted in 70 percent mortality throughout the Florida Keys. It was devastating.

David Staley: Is that where you do most of your research? When I think of coral reefs and bleaching, I think of the Great Barrier Reef outside Australia. 

Andrea Grottolli: I do most of my work in Hawaii, but more recently I've started working in Florida a bit more. 

David Staley: And so this implies that we can find coral all over the place and not just Australia as I assumed.

Andrea Grottolli: Yes, everywhere between the, 22 degrees north and south, basically that band around the equator. If it's shallow enough and sunny enough, you'll find corals. 

David Staley: Aside from the tragedy that they're dying or they could die, why do coral matter? Why is this important? 

Andrea Grottolli: Corals are incredibly valuable for the goods and services they provide, not just to the environment, but to humans, as well.

For example, the global estimated economic value of coral reefs is almost $10 trillion. In Florida alone, annual economic value is $7. 5 billion. $1.1 billion of that is tourism and it's associated with 71, 000 jobs. So it has this huge economic value. On top of that, it is , critical for infrastructure protection.

Coral reefs protect shorelines from wave energy. So it dissipates wave energy from storms and also protects from sea level rise. In Florida, the estimated economic value of coral reefs for coastal protection is 750 million, just for flood protection. Then lastly, they are incredibly biodiverse ecosystem environments.

They have a huge environmental value. One third of all marine species are associated with coral reefs, even though they occupy less than 1 percent of the surface area of the ocean. So coral reefs have economic infrastructure and environmental value to both humans and the organisms that live there.

David Staley: You study specifically resilience. Say a little more about what that means, coral resilience. 

Andrea Grottolli: Right. So we have all these stressors that are really undermining coral health. And I should point out that the models currently are indicating that at the current rate of warming, there will be no corals left by 2050, even if they can adapt. So it is a crisis moment. I study resilience because even under the most dire situations, the most massive mortality events following bleaching, there are always survivors. And I want to understand what makes some more resilient than others? What makes them survivors? What underlying traits or biology, biological features make some more likely to survive than others, and then can we leverage that to identify resilient individuals and use those for coral restoration and conservation management decisions?

So an example of that might be that there are some reefs where survivorship is higher than others, and so conservation might be more successful by focusing on those, because the long term survivorship might be higher. Or, there might be certain species that are more likely to survive and better candidates for restoration and conservation.

There might be populations within a species that are more likely to survive because of some trait or gene or physiological advantage they might have. And so I dig into that. 

David Staley: We're very accustomed, I know, of talking about global warming. Tell us what's happening in the oceans that's causing this problem for coral.

Andrea Grottolli: We're emitting CO2 and other greenhouse gases that cause the atmosphere to warm. As the atmosphere warms, it warms the ocean. So the ocean temperature is a reflection of atmospheric warming. Corals are very sensitive to small changes in seawater temperature. Increases of as little as 1 to 2 degrees Celsius for as short as 10 days above the normal thermal maximum in the warmest months can cause that symbiosis to break down and corals to bleach.

And if that persists, for too long, if the warming event lasts too long, the corals become less and less able to recover and you start seeing mass mortality. And when they don't die from that, they're more susceptible to disease afterwards because they're weakened. And then they are less likely to reproduce because they have less fat reserve for reproduction.

So there's this cascade effect from bleaching events. 

David Staley: Are they adapting? Can they adapt? 

Andrea Grottolli: Yes. There is a whole field of epigenetics where genes get turned on that are better for dealing with a particular environmental, condition. There are traits that some corals have that enable them to cope better than others.

For example, I study coral feeding. I'm an expert in coral feeding. Corals that feed more, are more likely to survive bleaching, are less likely to bleach in the first place, have more fat reserve, and are less dependent on photosynthesis as their sole food source. So they're a little more nimble, either because they feed more naturally, or because they can increase feeding in response to stress.

So I am very interested in that particular trait and why some corals can turn that on and off or have that more capacity there to begin with, but it is highly species specific. It is regionally specific. There are no silver bullets to what makes coral resilient in general, but there are some. broad traits like feeding, like high fat reserves.

There are certain algae species, so corals can have multiple species of algae that they are symbiotic with. Some are more heat tolerant than others. Some species of coral can swap out the endosymbiont algae that they partner with and are then more thermally tolerant in the future. But often these traits have trade offs.

So being less thermally tolerant and your algae don't bleach often comes with other costs, like you might not grow as much. We don't know if it has implications for reproduction. So this is the dynamic of selection and adaptation that is happening right now. 

David Staley: You study this phenomenon, obviously. are there interventions? Are there things that you can do to assist coral in their adaptation and survivability? 

Andrea Grottolli: There are two kind of prongs to that. One is enhancing natural systems through restoration and conservation. And that work is ongoing, where you protect reefs that are more likely to succeed, or you replant corals in an area where some have been lost that there are enough there that they can sexually reproduce and you can get new babies that are used to the new conditions because they're only surviving if they can adapt if they are 

David Staley: Transplant them. Move them. 

Andrea Grottolli: Yes, so out planting coral colonies or pieces of coral so they can grow, that's one side, and then the other side is technology because it doesn't seem like they're adapting fast enough, and technology can help us sort of bridge that gap a little bit and help enough coral survive the next few decades as a band aid solution while we mitigate climate change and pollution so that there's enough coral left to have enough reef ecosystem function by the end of this century.

On the technology side, there are a couple of different approaches that are being taken. The one that I'm working on is enhancing coral feeding. So I've invented a device to call UZELA, the underwater zooplankton enhancement light array. It's a patented device and it's a fancy underwater flashlight that turns on at night.

It locally concentrates zooplankton because they are attracted to light like moths are to a flame. And it locally provides higher feeding opportunities for coral. Coral that feed more, tend to grow more, tend to bleach less, tend to recover more easily from heat stress. So the thinking is if we can provide more food for coral, that it's a way of technologically enhancing resilience for corals in nurseries, which is one of the stepping stones to outplanting and reef restoration, or on reefs themselves.

The technology has proven useful or I should say we have demonstrated proof of concept. So when we put those lights out the zooplankton increases, the feeding rates increase. And in baby corals, we get higher survivorship and much higher growth. In adult corals, we get higher growth. So we are seeing evidence that it works.

And we're in the process of writing some of those first papers and taking it to the next step, commercializing. Trying to make it available to the broader community to help save coral reefs. 

David Staley: Well, and who specifically do you think would be interested in this technology? Who are the users, I suppose?

Andrea Grottolli: There are a wide range, from individual scientists to state and federal managers, government agencies, and a lot of private foundations and private operators that are invested in protecting reefs for a myriad of reasons, whether it be because they love coral reefs and want to protect that beautiful ecosystem or because it's associated with some other economic value, protecting a coastline tourism, fishing, that kind of stuff.

We have partnered with Coral Restoration Foundation to test UZELA in a coral nursery in Florida. And we are funded with a group in Hawaii through the Department of Defense DARPA program to build a hybrid reef, which is a manmade structure with coral glued to it that one of the criteria is it has to withstand warming events and UZELA is one of the technologies being used in that project to meet that benchmark of corals that can survive the warming events. 

David Staley: So why would DARPA, Defense, Advanced Research Projects why would the military be interested in this technology? 

Andrea Grottolli: The U. S. military has installations all over the tropical Pacific, so they are vulnerable to erosion from storms and sea level rise.

Their interest in the hybrid reef structure is a way to protect their shorelines and their infrastructure in a way that is sustainable. Living corals and living coral reefs are self sustaining and are much, much better at dissipating wave energy than any concrete barrier can.

Because of the intricate 3D structure of corals, they can dissipate wave energy far more effectively than any physical structure humans can make. And so it has this long term vision of building sustainable coastal protection by making reefs where they need them. 

David Staley: So you're working on what's called blue technology. Tell me what that means. All right. Thanks. 

Andrea Grottolli: Blue technology is any technology used in the oceans to enhance or benefit or modify that environment. So it's used for everything from carbon sequestration projects in the ocean to coral shading and UZELA, my device, and artificial upwelling. Any kind of technology that's used in the ocean. has this sort of branding now called blue tech. 

David Staley: Coral shading. Yeah. Is that what it sounds like? 

Andrea Grottolli: Yeah. Yeah. You put a big shade on them and it protects them from light. Bleaching is caused by both temperature and then exacerbated by UV. And so by shading the corals, even when it's super hot out, it can minimize the heat stress because you're limiting the light stress. 

David Staley: So, when you're talking about developing these technologies, what does that mean for you? Are you, like, an engineer? Are you actually, sort of, piecing things together? Tell me about that process. 

Andrea Grottolli: I'm not an engineer but I have built underwater lights before, very low tech when I was a graduate student, and this concept of using lights to locally enhance zooplankton so corals feed more is something I've been working on my whole career, but it's only in the last couple years where it's reached a point where I can transition from that idea to an application that can really help corals, and to build the version that we have now, we partnered with the, um, electrical folks in arts and sciences and the machine shop.

So the electric shop and the machine shop in arts and sciences. The electric shop designed the board and the electronic components. My graduate student soldered it all together and physically built them under the supervision of Eric in the electric shop. And then we partnered with the machine shop to build the housing.

So I had an idea for the housing. We used off the shelf PVC pipe and fittings, and then they modified them in the shop to insert a lens and to build grooves so we could anchor them and things like that. But it was a partnership. So the patent actually has Eric from the electric shop and Jim from the machine shop named on it.

David Staley: If I'm an undergraduate in earth sciences, is this part of my education? Am I learning how to build technologies? 

Andrea Grottolli: Sure. I have six undergrads in my lab right now and they hear about it all the time. And they're involved in making measurements in the lab on corals that were or were not exposed to UZELA to figure out how it's helping the biology and physiology of the organisms.

They hear me and my grad students talk about it. They see the device. I have one undergrad who is actually involved in the commercialization part of it. She graduated last year. She did come from engineering and did a minor in innovation and technology, or I forget what the minor's called exactly. But, she was very interested in this, and she did the I-Corps program with me. And... 

David Staley: i-Corps? 

Andrea Grottolli: I-Corps is an NSF program. It's an innovation core, is what the I stands for, and it's a way to do market discovery for your product and to figure out who your market might be, what the market size might be, and to figure out if your invented thing is something that's got a path to commercialization.

And so that was offered through the Kenan Center. And this one undergrad and I did it together, and she is involved in the accelerator proposal that was submitted to get funding to start the manufacturing side and scaling up of the device. 

David Staley: I'm always very interested to learn about, my colleagues labs and really interested to learn that undergraduates there. I know that postdocs and graduate students are certainly part of a lab.

How does an undergraduate get into your lab? What are the requirements you have? How easy or difficult is it for an undergrad to be a part of your lab? 

Andrea Grottolli: Depends how you think about it. I've had 93 undergrads in my lab over my career. And so 

David Staley: My mouth is agape. 

Andrea Grottolli: So by some measures, it's easy. But by other measures, because I'm the only coral person and one of only a handful of marine people on campus, I get an email at least every month from an undergrad saying is there a way for them to be involved?

And it just is luck whether or not when they email me, we have a, project that needs more assistance or not. Oftentimes I'll tell them there's nothing right now, but email me again at the beginning of next semester, because you never know. And I've had students email me for three semesters in a row, and then I'll say, yep, we have room now, and they show up.

Mexico, in Panama. 

David Staley: Does this mean you're going underwater? 

Andrea Grottolli: Yes. 

David Staley: Is this underwater work? 

Andrea Grottolli: Sometimes. Sometimes it's underwater. Sometimes we're scuba diving. We probably do a dozen, 15 dives a year for the research. A lot of it is done in tanks. The vast majority of the work is done in the lab. So post processing is intense. But the underwater work is definitely the funnest part. 

David Staley: When did you learn to scuba? 

Andrea Grottolli: When I was 23. So, by chance, I was in Australia traveling between undergrad and grad school. I did a gap year. And, there was a chance to do a scuba certification and dive on the Great Barrier Reef, and I figured I should do that because I may not ever get back to Australia, it's far away.

And I actually cut my trip short by a week so I'd have enough money to pay for the training and the diving. And I didn't know I was going to be a marine scientist when I did that. 

David Staley: That was my next question. So you did this just because you wanted to learn how to scuba. Yeah. And it turned out to be valuable in your career.

Andrea Grottolli: It turned out. Yeah, I had no idea I was going to be a marine scientist. 

David Staley: Why study coral? Why have you decided on that problem? Of all the things that you could study, why coral? 

Andrea Grottolli: I'd like to think that I didn't find coral. Coral found me. I grew up in Northern Ontario. I spent my summers on lakes. I did a lot of work with water as an undergrad. I did undergraduate research on zooplankton, ironically, in freshwater systems. Zooplankton is what coral eat. But I did that as an undergrad. And when I went to grad school I ended up in Texas. It's the long walk of life that I ended up there. And the lab I got into studied coral.

My only goal at the time was to do something marine, to partner with the freshwater work I'd done as an undergrad, thinking I would do a master's, and then work in environmental remediation somehow, and I would have expertise in both fresh and saltwater. But I ended up in a lab that studied coral and did a graduate field course in Hawaii at the end of my first year.

And we had to do these experiments as part of the course. And I was in a bikini, cleaning my tank. And I had this moment, like, I could do this for a living. And it just changed the path. But it was not premeditated. I didn't know I always wanted to do that. I found it, because it found me in a way.

David Staley: Describe the, biggest innovation or the biggest paradigmatic change in this field, say over the last 30 or 40 years. What's shifted the way that we think about or study coral? 

Andrea Grottolli: Well, to put some perspective, scuba wasn't readily available until the 70s and 80s. And so the way we studied coral before that was very, very limited.

Just scuba alone made studying corals much more available and accessible. I would say in the last 10, 15 years, the uses of everything omic and sequencing. So genomics, proteomics. 

David Staley: So like gene sequencing. 

Andrea Grottolli: Gene sequencing, microbial, like the way you identify bacteria associated with corals is through sequencing. That has completely exploded. So very high end technology exploration of the natural environment, but also, like in my field I use a lot of stable isotopes. The capacity to process large numbers of samples because of laboratory technology has really pushed the envelope on what we can learn about corals themselves and a growing awareness of the role and value of coral reefs and the need to protect them in the face of climate change.

So those things are converging. The climate change stress, the climate change awareness, the importance and value of coral reefs, people knowing more what a coral reef is because it's on TV a little bit or in movies. It's beautiful, right? It's so compelling. People are drawn to coral reefs because of their sheer beauty, and that has spurred a lot of innovation in research and in technology to protect coral reefs. 

David Staley: As you look to the future of coral, given everything we've been talking about, the stresses that coral are having to deal with, when you look to the future of coral, are you optimistic or pessimistic?

Andrea Grottolli: I am cautiously optimistic. We still can make a big difference in the future of coral reefs, but we can also make some bad choices and there will be nothing left. And that is really up to humanity to decide. There will be survivors, there will always be survivors and stragglers here and there, but whether you have thriving, healthy coral reefs, I think we're probably past the point where we will for sure have thriving coral reefs globally the end of this century, and we are at a point where we are thinking about how can we preserve oases of healthy enough coral reefs so that we can shoot this climate change gap, have enough left on the other side, so that the reefs can be thriving again on a global scale.

David Staley: And that's cautiously optimistic, is it? 

Andrea Grottolli: Well, that's better than zero, which is what the models show. 

David Staley: and so the models seem pretty clear that we should be concerned about the future of 

Andrea Grottolli: coral? 

Yeah, there are some very compelling models out there that shows zero survivorship by 2050, even if corals can adapt.

David Staley: Tell us what's next for your research. 

Andrea Grottolli: Right now we are working on commercializing UZELA. It is showing promise in really helping corals grow more and die less. So getting that out there is one way we can help protect coral reefs in a very stressful environment. That commercialization pathway involves continuing with the patent process, and then developing a manufacturable version of the device, and forming a startup company and doing all that stuff so that we can sell it. And so there's research in that lane. There's complementary research in the field still testing UZELA, showing its efficacy in different environments, different scenarios, different applications for the device. That's in both Hawaii and Florida.

And then I have a third project with a collaborator here in engineering, Rongjun Qin, who is a 3D imaging expert, and we are developing software to 3D map coral reefs using a single GoPro camera that we can then crowdsource video from recreational divers around the world to 3D map the coral reefs in a short period of time. That's the very ambitious sort of 10 year goal on that. 

David Staley: So are you going to be a CEO in the near term? 

Andrea Grottolli: I guess. I don't know. Possibly. 

David Staley: How does that strike you? I mean, as an academic that you'd become a CEO? 

Andrea Grottolli: Yeah, it's a frightening space. But at the same time, pretty exciting.

I never envisioned myself going in this direction, but I am so committed and passionate about helping coral reefs. I feel like it is a privilege that I could do this. And so I think of the commercialization pathway as a privilege and something that I have to do, even if it terrifies me a little bit.

David Staley: Andrea Grottoli. Thank you. 

Andrea Grottolli: Thank you so much for having me. 

Jen Farmer: Voices of Excellence is produced and recorded at The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Marketing and Communications studio. More information about the podcast and our guests can be found at go.osu.edu/voices. Voices of Excellence is produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Jen Farmer.