Shayle Matsuda

But just the fact that these things exist is very exciting.

Also, in the last, like, 10 years ago, if I had said, like, coral bleaching to somebody on the street, they might be like, I have no idea what you're talking about.

But there's been a huge push and education and excitement around coral reefs in the last, you know, handful of years where people have heard about this.

Like, people know.

People are starting to really care about it and understand why it's important, why it's important to them, like, why they want this for their future generations.

And so corals have really come into the...

national, international conversation in a way that they haven't before.

And because of that, there's a lot more hope for these big overarching changes that we need on a systemic scale to potentially start to happen.

The thing that sucks most about being a coral biologist is...

watching something you love die and not being able to do anything about it yeah and like and that's something that's you know shared by probably everyone in our field like you know i love corals like biologically speaking like i'm so fascinated by them they're such interesting animals but so much of my research is around keeping them around right and it's

Anytime you dive on a reef that's bleaching or a reef that's been devastated by any kind of impact, especially one that you'd seen flourishing before, you have an emotional reaction.

It's a very devastating feeling.

And that pressure of... It's not just...

If I don't finish my dissertation, then I don't get to graduate.

But so much of this work that we all are working on is going to have an impact right now or not.

And are we doing it right?

Are we asking the right questions?

And that's definitely the hardest part, for sure.

Oh, man.

We could do a whole podcast on that.