At Coral Restoration Foundation™, one of our goals is to preserve the genetic diversity of the corals of Florida’s Coral Reef. This is critical to ensure resilience in future populations that make up our reef ecosystems and to protect genotypes that may otherwise be lost in the wild.
One strategy that we employ to reach this goal is genetic sequencing of our coral stock. Genetic sequencing is a technique used to determine the order of chemical bases in DNA which allows us to identify the genes that make up the corals. The different genes that the corals are comprised of dictate the genotype of the individual corals. This is important because when outplanting corals, we spread corals of different genotypes on the reef, rather than corals of only one genotype, in order to expand genetic diversity throughout Florida’s Coral Reef. This process increases the resilience of the reefs because corals of different genotypes will react to changes in the environment in different ways.
For example, while corals of one genotype may bleach rapidly when exposed to higher temperatures, corals of another genotype may bear a higher resistance to bleaching. This increased resilience is beneficial because it provides more of an opportunity for outplanted corals to survive through diverse disturbance events and environmental changes that can drastically affect coral health.
To preserve and organize our genotypes, we keep a representative of every genet in our “gene banks” on our Coral Trees™ that hold genotypes of corals CRF™ that has collected or worked with. CRF™ holds two ocean-based gene banks, one offshore of Tavernier and one partnered with Nova Southeastern University in Broward County and provides coral for two land-based gene banks that are managed by other practitioners. These gene banks are a vital part of the restoration of coral reefs, as they not only increase resilience of outplanted corals through redundancy, but some of the genotypes in our gene banks have been lost in the wild and can only be found within our genetic ark.
One of these gene bank trees is what we refer to as the “Tree of Life” in our Tavernier Nursery. The "Tree of Life” refers to two Coral Trees™ that together, hold one of every genotype of Acropora palmata, commonly known as elkhorn coral, in our care. We currently have 96 different genotypes of elkhorn coral, and each one is represented on these two trees.
One objective of the “Tree of Life” is retaining the ability to confirm the genotype of each elkhorn coral on the tree, guaranteeing they are accurate. We do this to make sure that once we have confirmed the genotype of the corals, we can continue to grow the colonies on the “Tree of Life” until they are large enough to be fragmented.
Our fragmenting process involves clipping small segments from developed coral that can function as genetic clones of the coral they were cut from. When the organisms have reached a suitable size, they are harvested and added to our gene banks to safeguard our genetic diversity from any future disturbance events.
We aspire to sequence all corals from the “Tree of Life” by the end of 2024 to determine all the genotypes of new corals and confirm genotypes of past corals. The gene banks lost many of their stock in the Fourth Global Bleaching Event in the summer of 2023, so after the sequencing process is complete, we will fragment the corals from the “Tree of Life” and re-populate the gene banks in 2025.
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