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Chapter 1: What is the significance of coral reefs?
Oh, hey, it's 2026. This is Allie. I'm in the American Southwest. I'm in New Mexico. This is my 49th out of 50 states I visited. You're thinking, which one's next? Which is the final one? West Virginia. I got a crayfish guy that I'm going to go out there to see eventually. Anyway, I'm in New Mexico. I'm interviewing a skunk expert that I have been waiting to meet for over six years. I'm
I'm wearing black and white striped socks. I'm so nervous. My palms are sweating. I knew I was getting married for about six months before I got married. Wedding day jitters. Now imagine six years of waiting to meet a skunk expert. Can you believe it? Imagine how I'm feeling. Nervous. I'm shaking. I hope I say the right thing. Jared's coming with me. We're going to talk skunks.
But because I'm in New Mexico, I'm hopping around. We are giving you this encore episode of one that I love, love, love. This was absolutely a joy to record. It was a beautiful setting, wonderful stories about fieldwork, personal stories. This one is just an absolute banger. So just get into it. Enjoy. Okay. So, this episode was recorded in beautiful Hawaii. Ever heard of it?
You're about to just get an earful of coral. But before I recorded it, honestly, I knew neither jack nor shit about coral. Now, all I want to do is stare at videos of coral. Honestly, I used to just consider them to be like the really plucky, kind of quirky settings of a snorkeling jaunt. Kind of like a splashy backdrop in a community theater play. Like, oh, that's nice.
But, you know, what's happening in front of them? What kind of fish do we have? Au contraire. After this episode, you'll be like, move out of the way, fish. I'm staring at a polyp. And yeah, it's totally fun. If you don't know what a polyp is, we will get to that. But first, thank you to all the folks that support the show at patreon.com slash ologies for as little as a dollar a month.
You can submit questions. Also, thanks to everyone who buys and wears shirts and hats and such from ologiesmerch.com. We have some new denim dad hats. If you need a new lid that says, I like weird facts, good intentions, and bad puns. It doesn't literally say that. I'm just saying that it's like people will go, oh, that must be what you're into. Although that's not a bad idea for a hat.
Stay tuned. Also, thank you to everyone who tells friends and coworkers about the show and who rates and subscribes and leaves reviews, which you know I read. Okay, it's me again, 2026. This is a fresh review from a longtime listener, an elementary school teacher, Serena G., who wrote that every one of your episodes inspires awe, even when it's a topic I didn't think I'd be interested in.
Serena G., let's get you some coral. Also, if anyone needs KidSafe-ologies episodes, no swears. We now have Smologies, S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S. They're shorter G-rated edits of classic episodes. They're out weekly for free. They're just in their own feed. So go to your podcast app and search Smologies, S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S. There you go.
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Chapter 2: How do corals reproduce during spawning events?
Okay, nidariology. Totally a word. It's a well-documented, legit term. It's a study of animals. There are over 10,000 species who have nidocytes, which are these specialized cells for catching prey. And where does this lovely, silent, consonant, weird word come from? It looks like when your mom tries to weasel a fake term into a words with friends play. And you're like, no way, Nancy.
That's not enough vowels. But it comes from the old Latin nide, which means a nettle. And it might also have ties to old Latvian and Lithuanian words, meaning to itch and to tickle. So corals are cnidarians. They're underwater animals that poses these kind of beautiful plant looking things from Mars. And they want to just tickle you to death. I'm already sold. I already love them.
But let's hear more. So I was introduced to this ologist by your favorite toothologist, squid expert Sarah McAnulty. Sarah McAttack on Twitter. Follow her. Love her. And she invited me to tag along on a squidding trip to Hawaii, a research trip she was doing. A company called Atlas Obscura was facilitating it. They were awesome. They do wonderful science and history trips. It was a joy.
Rachel, she led it. I love her. Anyway, one day the group got to take a little boat to Coconut Island. and the very island featured in the opening credits of Gilligan's Island. And this was once a weird getaway for Hollywood types, but now it's a research station where grad students tend to marine life.
We spent the day looking at these gurgling outdoor tanks and watching a bay of hammerhead sharks, strolling some beachy trails to stations with urchins and sea cucumbers and kairi snails. They're all being monitored by these wonderful marine biologists there.
This ologist got his bachelor's at UC Santa Cruz, double majoring in environmental studies and feminist studies, got his master's in biology and ecology, evolution and conservation biology in San Francisco, and is working toward his PhD right now at this famed Gates Lab at the University of Hawaii Manoa and the Hawaiian Institute of Marine Biology. The Gates Lab is a coral lab.
This dude has his hands full. The coral were in the middle of a spawning event That very week, but he is amazing and took an hour out of his day to come to my hotel and chat about corals. I was waiting so excitedly in the lobby and I thought like he was maybe five or 10 minutes late, which is fine.
But it turns out we were in the same lobby exactly on time, but just perfectly obscured by a pillar. So once we figured that out, it was all smooth sailing. We talked about what coral even is, why they're important, how he feels about diving, what a dead reef looks like, the state of some reefs around the world, if it's reef or reeves.
Perhaps the importance of balancing work with being your true self. Some advice for aspiring marine biologists. How screwed are coral? What movies get it right? What's up with sunscreens? What is bleaching? And what else can we do to help our hard, squishy pals beneath the sea? So anchor down. Get ready for a wave of coral info with the amazing nadariologist Shale Matsuda. 9.59.
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Chapter 3: What are the main threats to coral health?
What we're working on, like our lab group is working on, is really a whole wide range of questions. But we're really curious about what's going to happen to corals under these future climate conditions. And what can we do to intervene to give them a better chance of surviving? I'm trying to decide if I want to go broad or my stuff.
Actually, let's go broad a little bit, just because people don't know shit about corals.
That's true. People don't. But they're the coolest animals. I know. Yeah, so coral species are all really, really different. That's something that makes them super exciting and interesting, but makes it also a lot harder to come up with strategies to help them survive because they reproduce differently. Some will brood, like releasing coral larvae into the water.
Some will spawn, releasing coral gametes, eggs and sperm into the water. Some are large, and they grow in these really big shapes. Some are very small, even single polyped corals. And they have very different life strategies. They're so different. They associate with different types of these symbionts.
And so what we're really interested in is doing is seeing if, you know, are there types of interventions that we can kind of scale up that managers and conservationists all around the world who work with these different corals and these different coral reef environments that are all widely different can use, or like can use as signals for what might happen in the future or to use to kind of help those corals that are out there survive.
Some of the stuff that we're working on in the lab is Looking at, can we expose corals to non-lethal stressors to condition them to then be put out in the reef? And if they experience these higher temperatures downstream, will that initial exposure help them survive?
What is coral bleaching, you're asking? I get it. We're going to explain that in a second. Don't worry. I got you.
And with coral bleaching, what's really hard about that is it's this whole balance of how hot and for how long. So if there's like a really short high temperature spike, how does that affect these organisms versus if this is more of a prolonged spike?
only a degree or two above that thermal maximum that they have, how does that affect if they're going to bleach, the severity of that bleaching, and then also their ability to recover afterwards? So we haven't really talked about what coral bleaching is. Yeah, I know. That was the next question. So I was like, okay, that probably doesn't make any sense yet.
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