Shayle Matsuda

A lot of the bacteria have different roles.

In us, your skin bacteria is going to be different than your gut bacteria.

You don't want those to mix.

And corals have bacteria that help in defense and nutrient cycling and things like that.

So we're interested in what those are doing there.

We can get a way better idea of what's going on now than we could 10, 15 years ago.

So corals are dealing with a lot of threats right now, the biggest one being the impacts of climate change.

And we're seeing this on reefs today in the form of sea surface temperature warming and ocean acidification, as you mentioned.

Why this is so bad is that we're seeing an increase, even in our lifetimes, of these massive coral bleaching events worldwide.

And a coral bleaching event can wipe out entire reef ecosystems in one season.

And we're seeing them not only, you know,

It's not just like a one-off anymore.

Here in Hawaii, we had the events in 2014, again in 2015.

The Great Barrier Reef has also experienced these successive events.

And so while we're seeing corals that are able to survive one round of this warming and recover, it's like you keep on hitting them.

What is that affecting?

We've got research groups at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology who are looking at how does the reproduction change?

uh, affected by, by these events.

Like, are we going to see a lot more downstream things that are happening?

And you add things like the local stressors, like, you know, overfishing or sedimentation and pollution runoff from a lot of the local environments that are there.