Tuesday April 2, 2024
NPR —
Just after the full moon, Annika Lamb goes into work late at night. She puts on a headlamp with a red light and peers into large tanks of water in a marine science lab.
It’s a special week. Inside the lab, corals with delicate branching arms are about to undergo a vital ritual. Only one night a year, they release eggs and sperm that fill the water like confetti and that will combine to create the next generation of reef builders.
“You’re not really sure what’s going to happen,” Lamb says. “There’s a lot of magic. There’s a lot of unknown.”
Lamb is standing by patiently to scoop up the genetic bundles, in the hope that these corals hold the key to surviving an ocean that is rapidly heating up. She’s part of a team at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, located on the east coast of Australia, that is breeding corals to endure an increasingly hostile planet – what some have nicknamed “super corals.”