Professor Steve Simpson
speaker
54 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 17 Jul
Professor Steve Simpson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Hi there.
Okay, so coral reefs are the rainforests of the ocean.
They're the most beautiful kingdoms of life.
They're busy, bustling cities.
And although they only cover about 0.1% of the ocean's surface, they host about a quarter of all known marine species.
They're built by animals called corals.
And these individual corals are probably only about the size of a pea, but they can reproduce by simply producing copies of themselves.
So when a coral grows, it's creating hundreds, thousands, millions of individual copies of its next door neighbour effectively.
And it builds a limestone skeleton as it grows to lift the coral up towards the light and
Now, the animal doesn't need the light, but inside the skin of every single coral are millions of cells, which are algae that captures sunlight, converts it into sugar, and the sugar actually feeds the coral.
So it's like living in a skyscraper and growing all your vegetables on your balcony.
And these skyscrapers, rather than just being tall, thin buildings, are the most incredible branching, bushy, convoluted, different shapes, which create hiding spaces for everything then to go and live inside.
Absolutely, yeah.
So sadly, coral reefs depend entirely on that relationship between the corals and the algae that live in their cells.
And when the waters get warm, particularly in a heat wave, so you end up with several degrees Celsius above the seasonal average, the relationship breaks down.
And so the coral ejects all the algae, which works for a few days, but it quickly starts to starve.
So actually a bleached coral is still alive initially, but it is starving on the inside because there's no sugar coming in from that sunlight being captured by the algae in their cells.
You know, we worked on the Great Barrier Reef, a stunning coral reef that you can see from space.
And in three weeks, we watched that reef die before our eyes.
Yeah.
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