Coral Reefs at the Academy of Sciences

Ecology
Coral Reefs at the Academy of Sciences
By Nora Kirkeby
May 27, 2008, 19:29 PST

If you’re looking for something that’s going to be a spectacular sight, the coral tank at the new California Academy of Sciences building is soon going to have something that will fit the bill inside their walls. Their brand new eco-friendly building is going to have the world’s deepest living coral tank in the world.

To accomplish this, they have had to create UV lights that would penetrate deep into the water, and find a system for feeding the coral. Feeding coral is a great challenge. You can’t sprinkle some fish food into the tank and be done with it. Coral feeds off the calcium in limestone. This is vital, because as the living coral grows, it secretes the calcium from the limestone into a kind of skeleton, which is the coral structure that we’re familiar with.

Several other groups have grown live coral in their aquariums, including the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and the Aquarium of the Pacific, both in California. However, the California Academy of Sciences promises to be in a league of its own. It will be an enormous display! If you can’t make it to the Great Barrier Reef or Hawaii, this is definitely the way that you should see amazing coral populations. Soon it might be the only way that’s available.

We are all lucky that this technology is progressing as far as it has. The ability to house live coral is a recent development. The Waikiki Aquarium was the first as far as we can tell, having started their program in 1978. Thirty years later, the coral population is in crisis, and the aquarium-grown coral may be our only hope of seeing it 20 years from now. Like the breeding of endangered species, the growing of coral could be an important step in conservation.

At this point the rising temperatures are causing many coral species to bleach out. When the water temperatures rise, the coral can no longer convert carbon dioxide into sugar. This poisons the zooanthallae, which are small plants whose partnership with the coral allows it to make it’s own food, and to create the skeleton calcium structure that we associate with coral. The coral can temporarily save itself by spitting out the zooanthallae, and it may recover if the water temperatures drop. However, if the temperatures keep rising, the coral cannot survive without the zooanthallae.

What does all that mean? If we’re unable to correct the current global climate, aquariums like the one in the California Academy of Sciences might be the only place we’re able to see coral in the future. My recommendation of course is to see it before it become extinct.