Shayle Matsuda

And they're really important for a lot of different reasons.

They're really personal to many people, but also then on a community and national, international scale as well.

So having a coral reef environment is one of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the world.

They're a bank for biodiversity.

And within that, the coral reefs themselves are the breeding grounds and homes for tons of marine life.

We've got animals that will come in from the deeper oceans to breed.

Fish is a really important food resource for a lot of coastal communities.

It's their main source of protein, main source of protein for many people in the world.

And the reef environment is where a lot of those larger game fish

and come back to coral reefs.

And a lot of our coastal ecosystems are really important for mitigating coastal damage.

So they absorb a lot of that wave action, that wave power that's coming in.

We've all seen really awful things that have been happening in a lot of our coastal communities around the world because of flooding and coastline erosion and things like that.

shale stresses that he doesn't like to focus too much on the potential pharmaceutical benefits of nature because there are other intrinsic reasons for conservation but you know a big something that we are learning more and more about the ocean in general is that there's a lot of these chemicals out there that can be used to help humans and so

For me, one of the most exciting moments that I had actually during my master's degree, I studied sea slugs and their ranks during that time, was I was in my advisor's office looking through some old papers.

And I found this paper where one of the slugs that I study, really cool animals, they will eat things like sponges or different organisms that produce these toxic chemical compounds.

And they will slightly alter them when they eat them.

And they'll put them in their own tissues and use them to fend off their own predators.

Really cool.

But these toxins that are antimicrobial, antiviral, also can be used in biomedical research that it benefits humans.