the moderator for this session. i'm here with julie burwald. i want to welcome you to the 10th annual san antonio book festival, and thank you to central library for helping us present this amazing day and to the hon holt family for sponsoring this venue. i want to remind you that. 15 minutes after this session ends. julie will be signing books in the nowhere bookshop tent which is outside in the festival marketplace where you see all those tents out there. please take this time to silence your cell phones. and we're going to talk for a little bit and then we'll open it up for some. questions from the audience, okay. so first i'm going to read. the description from the back of this book because i think it gives you a very good overview of what is in here. but this is what it looks like in hardcover. so go and buy that it's gorgeous. so coral reefs are microcosm of our planet extraordinarily diverse deeply deeply interconnected and full of wonders. when they're thriving these fairy gardens hidden beneath the ocean's surface burst with color in life. they sustain entire ecosystems and protect valuable coasts. but corals across the planet are in the middle of an unprecedented die-off. be set by warming oceans pollution damage by humans and a devastating pandemic. julie burwald travels the world to find the scientists and activists desperately fighting to prevent their loss. through rescue missions unexpected partnerships and risky experiments. she even helps rebuild reefs with rebar and zip ties. as she also attempts to help her daughter in her own struggle with mental illness. we're wild explores what it means to keep fighting a battle who's outcome is uncertain life on the rocks is an inspiring lucid meditative ode to the reefs and the beauty of small victories. i couldn't agree with that more and julie received her phd in ocean science from the university of southern, california. she is the author of spineless and a science textbook and is a science textbook writer and editor and she has written for a number of publications including the new york times nature national geographic and slate. so welcome, julie. thank you. so julie, i think. first would be good to start with something. that sounds really basic, but i actually think that it's also something a lot. most people don't know. so, can you tell us what is coral and how do you describe it biologically and scientifically? yeah, so thank you for that. thanks guys for being here. it's such a pleasure to be at the san antonio book festival. coral are animals just like we are which is when you look at them. it's a little surprising because they have this incredible like they look floral. you know, this looks like a bouquet but they're not they're animals. they're very very closely related to jellyfish, which was the topic of my first book. so i've kind of stepped over one one family to the anthazowans which are which actually translates as flower animals. so coral, you know, everyone always knew they looked flowery, but that it wasn't until like us in the 1800s. they just figured out no, they're animals. they have nervous systems. they have digestive systems. they have muscles, you know, they're like us but a coral is a colony and each individual is called a polyp in the colony and those polyps are networked together through their nervous systems and their digestive systems. so if one polyp over here eats a plankton, which is what they eat, you know, the nutrition gets shared among the colony and then the colonies together form reefs. so there's a lot of collectiveness in coral, but probably the most like kind of superpower for the coral is this fact that they have made this incredibly intense partnership with algae. and so these algae are singular single cells. they're just like plants like trees they can photosynthesize so they can take sunlight and water and carbon dioxide and mix it up and get sugar and it's it's magic right? it's the most amazing thing that happens and the algae live in the corals tissue literally like tattoo embedded in their tissue. and they photosynthesize and then feed 90% of the sugar that they make to the coral and that is the coral's main source of nutrition. so while the coral can eat and it does eat it fires stinging cells just like jellyfish do and gets planked in most of its nutrition comes from the energy and this symbiosis is so important and so powerful and so just mmm impressive that the coral have so much extra energy that they can actually use that extra energy from the sugar to build stone. and the stone comes because they have so much energy from the algae. so the algae really are their superpower and the stone becomes the sketler skeletons. which over the millennia become the reefs and those reefs support a quarter of all marine life in the ocean. so coral, i'm coral or sort of constrained to the tropics so you can see those dots are where all the coral reefs in the world are and they go between 20 south and a little more than 20 north just because of the way warm water moves in the oceans, but you can see they don't take up very much of the ocean. and in fact those dots are probably oversizing how big some of the reefs are so the coral take up about less than a percent of the ocean's area. but like i said disproportionately important for marine ecosystems a quarter of all animals somewhere around people estimate a quarter million animals a species species not animals, but species depend on the coral reefs. so super duper. important outside is important. the reason you see that those reefs kind of hugging the shorelines is because the coral need to be locate themselves in places where they are shallow enough that there's sunlight for the algae that are like the main source of their energy and they're also located in the tropics because that's where the dag lengths are longest most of the time right so it's all about gathering giving their algae a chance to gather the sunlight. they need to produce so much sugar that they directly feed to the coral. the problem is okay. this is really the only graph but i promise so this graph shows. okay on the black just pay attention. so 1975 to 2020 one ish on the bottom axis, right? so starting the 70s and then what you see in that brown line that kind of wiggles up and up and up. that's the temperature of our oceans. so you can see how it's been increasing over time the ocean. has a very high heat specific heat capacity, so it absorbs. again, an outsized amount of the heat that we've added to our planet through climate change through burning fossil fuels and so the ocean is you already at around a degree degree and a half warm or 90% of the heat that the carbon dioxide holds that we've emitted from burning fossil fuels 90% of that gone into the ocean. and so the ocean has really like buffered us against some of the worst effects of climate change and that is problematic for coral. so if you can see those dots on the bottom those places where i put stars those are places where they're those are times when there have been what are called mass bleachings. and what a bleaching is. is i'm just going to go forward to the next slide. so. here on the left side. we have a healthy coral and so those little green bubbles up at the top. those are supposed to be the polyps the individual polyps and then the little green dots inside. those bubbles are supposed to be the algae. and you can see in a healthy coral everything's green and the algae are happy but in a stressed coral. the algae leave they leave. and they take with them when they leave. their color which is green the color of chlorophyll for photosynthesis but they also take the sugar that they usually apply the corals so suddenly in a bleached coral there are no algae. there's also no nutrition or very little nutrition the coral can survive for a few weeks bleached. the cut the symbiosis can be reestablished. but if the heat goes on too long, the coral are white, they remain white and so i'm going to just pop back to that previous slide for oops. sorry for a second so you can see that. in the 1970s the and you know 80s there was one mass bleaching in 1983 and this is a place where like a whole region of the ocean will lose their algae and then starting in the late, you know 1990s through the 2000s into the more recent years. there's been more and more of these mass bleachings and since maybe around 2015 we've been in basically a constant state of mass bleaching somewhere in the world. so the coral of and the algae symbiosis is very very close to the thermal tolerance, and we don't know why but it's it's this is the fundamental problem for coral around the world. and this is what a bleached reef looks like. it's just looks like a pile of bones and so when a reef bleaches, like i said if the water doesn't cool down, soon enough the eventually the coral will starve to death and i and along with it all of the animals that make their homes on the reef. so that's kind of the critical position that we're in right now with the coral reefs. and i hate to leave this ugly picture up here, but we'll look for a moment in the book. you do describe the trouble that coral is in because of climate change, but another thing i got is that coral is also highly adaptive which it seems can give us the knowledge that we need to be able to save them and you describe a lot of the technology that to me pointed to something interesting which is that humans are causing. the climate change that's causing these problems, but we also have the the capacity to invent solutions right. so could you talk a little bit about that and you know what are some of these technologies and and inventions that people are thinking about yeah, so when i wanted to write this book about coral, you know, i knew this i was a scientist. i knew the the situation with coral was very bleak, but what i discovered in the book was that it's not over. coral there's a huge amount of diversity out on the reef whenever you have a mass bleaching there are always survivors. so there's genetic diversity. there's species diversity. there's probably 800 species of coral and they seem to respond differently and there's also different species of algae that can repopulate i believe bleached coral after a bleaching so there's so what the book does is i tried to follow some of the stories where i found hope and where i found successes around the health of coral reefs, and so i'll share two of those with you this. oops. sorry, this is sulawesi. it's an indonesia. and this project is spearheaded by the mars candy bar company, which is a little unexpected, but they have chocolate factories and places where there are reefs in tropical places around the world and a lot of people who work in those factories. benefit from fishing on the reefs about between a half a billion and a billion people get their primary source of protein from coral reefs, so it's not just an ecosystem problem. it's a humanitarian problem as well. and so frank mars who's the grandson of the person who started the mars candy bar company was like what can we do to support the health of reefs in indonesia where they play an important role in people's primary food source. and so this is what? a reef looks like in indonesia that's been destroyed and this is not climate change. this is actually something called last fishing. so in indonesia, and not just an indonesia in many parts of the world because of poverty. there are some fishermen who will use bombs to fish because it's a it's a i know it's illegal, but you know, there's complicated it's hard for we shouldn't. necessarily judge in a way because there's a lot of poverty and corruption in these places too that and people need to speed their families so blast fishing occurs, and when there's blast fishing, it doesn't just get the fish near where the bomb is set. it's also destroys the reef and this is a 30 year old scar. so like this reef has been this it can't reestablish itself. but what the mars candy bar company did was they teamed up with some boat makers and engineered these the guy holding it up on the top right there. you can see they call them a reef star. it's simple to make it's made out of rebar any boat maker in any island on the world could make it they cover it with boat resin and then you can see this family here. they're putting local sand on top of it so that the coral can grab onto it and then what they do is they pay local fishermen to tie the coral on and these are coral they're called corals of opportunity fragments that are broken loose by natural causes on the reef through way back action and and then they network them together into like a galaxy of restarts and and then about 18 months later the reef recovers. and you can see that just one reef star is left here in the front of this picture after three years. the reef is healed and so there is this opportunity for as we move into a time when the corals we know they're going to be stressed and the reefs are going to be stressed. there's this opportunity for us to create reefs that are really healthy and just like us kind of going into the pandemic or us knowing we're going to period of stressful time the healthier we are before we hit. these these rough stressful patches the better the more likely hood there is for survival. and so that's that's what a lot of people are working on in different parts of the world. that's really beautiful to see that. yeah, let's leave that picture. so, you know, you're so good at explaining the science, but i also this is my second time interviewing julie. i interviewed you about spineless, and i just i love your storytelling. you're such a good writer and you're you do such interesting things with narrative. so, you know, this book likes find this also reads at times like memoir like travelogue the way you describe people. i mean it just like the way that you bring. your experience to life. i just feel like i'm stepping into your shoes, and i was wondering if you could talk a little about your journey as a writer. how did you? how did you get into science writing, but also how did you get into this kind of writing and how do you see this genre? you know, how do you look at the genre that you're writing in? um, so yeah, so as i mean i started off as a as a scientist and i i realized when i was in my i've always been a book person. like i've always just read and read voraciously and i read a lot of fiction, i read a lot of memoir and every time i would read a science book, i would close it and i would be like, okay, i like the information. but i could never write a book like that. and i would put on my nightstand and be like, ah, i probably will never be an author like i could never get to the point of writing a book. and then one time i closed one of those books and i put on my nightstand and i'm like i could never write a book like that. i could only write a book that includes my voice and my story and telling my reader who i am and trying to include, you know, travel and what it is like to understand science and not understand science and try to figure things out. that's the kind of book i could write and so i kind of like in this i could never write a book like that, you know changing the inflection made me realize. oh, i have to tell my read i want my reader to want to turn the next page. i want my reader to follow along with me in my exploration of whatever i'm interested in and i'm gonna i could i need to be vulnerable. i need to say, i don't know and i'm confused or frustrated or whatever it is that's happening because i think that's part of the joy for me of thing is is being with whoever's you know, the author of the book in their their journey, and and so i started writing. yeah a lot of kind of like this memoir science mashup thing, and i didn't know if it was gonna work but as soon it was the only way i was going to be able to write and yeah for spineless the first book i wrote i did have trouble selling it i i had agents tell me yeah, i'll i would love to represent this book, but i you need to take all the memoir out of it and i said but that's not the book. in fact, i did go with an agent for a while who that was her vision and i had to break up with her which was very scary. but now i you know, but then i found both an age and an editor who really see my vision and are good with it and where'd i see this sean we're going i think it's expanding right like i think there's more people who are writing in this way and i also have sort of a philosophical sense that i read this book in grad school. it was called the end of science. and it basically talked about how in the renaissance and science and art were connected, you know like davinci. did everything right? well heat i mean, but you know art and science they were they fed each other. they were part of each other's story and and that was really a beautiful time in a lot of ways. it wasn't in other ways. but anyway, then we had you know this period of like industrial revolution and and scientific renaissance scientific revolution and the arts and the sciences became separated and they made a ton of progress that way, you know, the science really made a ton of progress and this book held that until we unite art and science again. science is going to be stuck. it's going to get stuck and i think we're seeing some evidence of that right now in people not believing science people. feeling like science is able to be discountable and in scientists not being able to communicate that well. with people who need to hear science, so i do have yeah, it's almost like a mission to bring these things together because i do believe progress can be made when art and science feed each other and i think they really do. that's really fascinating. can we hear a little bit? okay. yeah. okay. i'm just going to read a short little bit. so this book like i said, there's memoir in it and this is this book was written as the pandemic hit so my my experiences of coming through the pandemic are in this book and this a section where i'm trying to make sense of what? learned about the genetic diversity of coral but also the fact that like i wasn't able to go to australia to talk, you know to be in the presence of the scientists who are looking at corals genetic diversity. okay. as the quarantine were on i thought often of stories and their form. stories follow waves they rise and fall and we are sucked into the energy of their action. when the wave crashes the story ends and we walk away satisfied with the ending. while all waves resemble one another inform like every story each wave is different. there are none the same height breath or frequency. there is variation from the slight ripple to the mass of tsunami. corals live beneath the waves witness to the forever motion of the moon's pool and the spinning of the earth. they house myriad stories, which they share through the generations. spun together with the golden rays of the sun and recorded in the layers of stone at their feet. for them the stories form is not a crescendo falling to completion. it is an endless tale one that existed before the very notion of story and that will endure well beyond. for coral like the water receives like the water. he sees above the story will change form. it will likely fall to pieces contracting for a while into something less substantial. it will probably be a story of destruction and loss of uncertainty and extinction. but because they are awash with variability it will also be a story of survival. the genetic underpinnings of corals are so rich is it it's as if their dna larger larders are stocked for the coming crisis not all will die. they never do. every time the water heats every time there is a mass bleaching there will be those that resist always. even with our powerful tools of genetics and statistics we haven't been able to extract the secret to that story. it is still locked up away deep inside the coral. as the waves continue to roll above we are denied the satisfaction of knowing the ending. that's beautiful. thank you. i have one more question and then i think we can open it up in this book. there's also a very deeply personal story that you're telling. can you talk a little about? that why you felt it was important to include it in this book about coral reefs or you know, was it just a you know, you said it was at the time that the pandemic started. is it just a you know, the swirl of things that were happening around the same time, or was there a different reason? story that is wound up in this book is the story of my daughter who? at the time i started the book. she started struggling with her mental health. and so i was keeping a journal of what was happening with her. we didn't understand what was happening to her. it came on rather suddenly. and then i was also doing research for the coral book and they were sort of two different tracks and i really thought my daughter's story was separate. but as i started researching what was affecting the coral health, i was also researching what was affecting her health and i started to see these parallels in that coral are so invisible to us up here on land. we're terrestrial creatures. we don't think about them very often and mental health. i mean, it's so invisible it can be so invisible as well or mental illness can be so invisible as well. like if you looked at my daughter you wouldn't have realized how sick she was. and so these these ideas were kind of bouncing off each other and then she got really really sick in the early spring of 2020. and she asked we had tried a lot of things to get her healthier, but nothing was really working and she said i think i need to go. to a residential facility where they can give me full-time mental health care because what we're doing isn't working. and that was really hard for me and my husband here, but also like we there's another issue which is that there's only 36 beds for adolescents. she had severe ocd adoles adolescent ocd in the country, so we got on a waiting list. and we were just like we'll see what happens. meanwhile. i was supposed to go to australia like i mentioned to meet with these australian scientists about the great barrier reef in march, and i was hoping we could get her admitted and i could go to australia. but then and her admission date turned out to be march 17th. i was supposed to go to australia march 19th, but you know, march 15th is when the pandemic hits so like it all started colliding together and and everything seemed to collapse upon each other and i got home and i was pretty much in shock after we dropped we ended up driving to wisconsin to admit her. and they let her go in which we were grateful for because she really was. collapsing and and i was kind of in shock i think for a month or so afterwards, but then when i started to write again. i couldn't separate any of these things and also the coral in australia, which i wasn't able to see were undergoing their most extensive mass bleaching. so these stories of my daughter and covid and the reefs health all kind of just spiraled together, and i i didn't know how to extract them from each other. and so i sent some of the writing to my editor and i was like, what do i do? because i didn't think these stories belong together and she said this is your most powerful writing you've ever done and let's try to figure out a way to make it work. so when my daughter came home, i talked to her about it also and she was she became a real advocate for mental health. through this this struggle and she said, you know there shouldn't be a stigma around it. the more people know the better and she gave me permission to write about it, and i tried to write from a mother's point of view not from her point of view because i can't know what that is. and so what i did was i went back and braided in some of the stories of when she was getting sicker and sicker and we were trying to figure out what was going on with the stories of me trying to understand what the scientists were doing about sicknesses on the reef and how that was going to be resolved as well. so i braided that back in and then the end of the book basically pulls those things together and it spirals towards it's inevitable conclusion. i hope it's really beautifully done. i'm just curious as she read the book. she yes my editor and publisher and yes, they required that she read it before which is actually somewhat of a miracle because one of the things that happened was her ocd her ocd convinced her that she was plagiarizing all the time. and so even reading became interpreted as plagiarism, so she stopped reading entirely. and so the fact that she read the book was absolutely wonderful. and yes and she gave approval and she was happy with the way it turned out. well, i hope you got to get a sense of how powerful and beautiful. this book is and how it it's working on so many different levels. so i really urge you to go buy it and start reading it right away. it's it was really exactly what i want wanted and needed to be reading at this moment. so you know, i i want you all to have that experience how let's open it up. how are we doing on time? okay, great. okay, so we have a question. right up here. do we have nina microphone for audience questions? of questions right in the front here. i have three questions. hello. yeah, i have three questions, but i'll ask too. um, you said that coral have a lot of genetic diversity. how far are genetic scientists getting in terms of sequencing the genomes of coral if there are 800 species how many have they tackled? the second question is we have many oceans on our planet. among those oceans or parts of oceans. where are the coral beds? most healthy and where are they the sickest? yeah, great two great questions. so in terms of coral genomes, i bet they've sequenced. hmm in the low teens something. something like that. and there are so there's this one kind of a coral which you can actually see in this picture in the actually almost all of these coral that you can sort of make out are called a corpora. that's the genus and acropra are the most successful genus of coral there's 128 species in that genus alone and some of these coral and i can't tell exactly are what are called weedy species. so they take over the reef and they're very very successful. so these approperous species are often the focus of a lot of the genetic work. there's also parieties which that big massive one in the back is called a parieties and that one is another one that they've sequenced and there's but there's a number of not as many maybe 20 species in that genus. and so they've done they've done a significant amount. what they have discovered or what the problem. okay. so initially there was this kind of idea that we can find the gene for thermotolerance the gene that will allow those symbiosis to be maintained at hotter temperature. it turns out we can't there is probably not a single gene. it looks to be some sort of ability that spread across the genome and that's frustrating. but it's what is out there the good part about it is there's probably many many ways that different species of coral have discovered to be more thermally tolerant. so there's so it's it's a complicated story and that's why i was like, we don't we don't know the ending to the genetic diversity story yet what we do know, which is really good is that thermal tolerance is inheritable? so if you get two parents that can make that our thermally tolerant and you breed them. they're offspring are likely to be more thermotolerant than your next coral over so that piece is is about as far as they've gotten so but because it there is not one gene now, there's one other piece which is interesting and if we have something else it turns out there's a several a couple species of algae that can recolonize the coral. one of those species is more thermally tolerant. so the coral that the species that has been it's actually clade the clay to algae that's been in the coral as the symbiont for millions of years is called claducopium. what we're finding is after the coral bleach. they're often recolonized with a different one called dorisdenium doris didnium can handle temperatures a degree and a half warmer than clouducopium. we don't know if there's a genetic predisposition for some corals to be able to make an alliance with durstinium. and that's one thing a lot of people are going after right now. the problem with durstinium is it's a more selfish algae. it only gives about 60% of the sugar that it makes to the coral. so the coral is making a decision or i don't know if that's the right way to say it. but like what's kind of happening is there's shifting to being less healthy letting getting less energy but being able to have something to go through this this heat wave that's coming. so it's a complicated and really interesting shift in the ecosystems. and then the other piece was yes the let me go back to my very first slide. i think i'll be the easiest way to talk about. parts of the world so, okay. so the the caribbean is in the worst shape. there's only about 60 40 to 60 species of coral in the caribbean. and they are largely under threat. they are not doing well the two acroperous species that live there does the one that i said was the most successful with 128 species in the genome. there's two species only that live in the caribbean and they're both now critically endangered. there are some places in the florida keys where there's only two percent hard coral cover left. the best part of the world is over. so in in the triangle between papua new guinea, can i get up? is that between papa new guinea indonesia? oh, no, i won't be able to reach it. okay well over over and there between papua new guinea indonesia and the philippines. it's called the coral triangle. it's not quite a triangle. that's triangle-ish. the number of species in that part of the world is 600 so 10-fold more than in the caribbean. that's where things are really doing well some of the worst of the bleaching hasn't hit that part yet. there's just a lot more diversity to work with and that's where the mars company was working as well, you know, so they set themself up for success by working in the coral triangle. so yeah. oh. hi, thank you. i'm enjoying your remarks. i have two questions. we'll keep you to one because i know you have a question. my question is actually messed up back a second. i read a couple of months ago that coral were detected like i think 200 feet below the surface and the south pacific. yeah, which was so exciting right? because obviously not a lot of sun can go down that far. so my question is do you scientists have a sense of how much coral like how many coral reefs may still remain undetective did like do they know? this is a crazy thing that we do not know where all the coral reefs are and we still don't after my book was published. i was this guy reached out to me from honduras. and he said have you heard of tila bay and i said no and he said he discovered the coral reef there in 2010. this is in honduras. it's not like very far away the coral there are five. they are not like just told you the caribbean's in terrible shape the coral there are beautiful. they're perfect. they're five-fold more than the other like the best part of the mizo-american reef. anywhere else and it wasn't known until 2010 when he decided to just go underwater and and the those croper species. they you were critically endangered. huge stands thousands of them live there. so yes, there is still to be i mean wildly there is still coral to be discovered. so yeah, it does. yeah, i mean it's it you know, but it also shows how little attention we paid to the ocean. you know that point i made about invisibility. it's it's mind-boggling that coral reefs. we don't know about yet, but you know, we've only just we've only explored 4% of the ocean. so we know more about mars than the ocean well. yeah, i i look forward to reading this book. i just recently finished a lab girl by jarrett will hope jaren and when i was reading it it was because i'm a biologist. i'm teach now, but that's where i got. my bachelor's in my master's and i remember thinking there is a certain way you read in science. so when i first started reading her book, i just was like this is i even told him i'm like, this is crazy. i mean she's going into her issues. yeah, and i just would like put it aside but as i was reading it, she just really revealed herself and her feelings about her research and then seeking permission from her friend her colleague before she wrote it, but you're looking at the back page at her picture and you're like, okay, this is her i mean, but what i'm excited about is this genre is coming and i'm glad you're saying that because as i finish the book, i felt like i was in the room with a friend right and so the fact that you have done this with coral i'm just super excited. it's not really a question so much is is it truly a genre that's coming. i mean hers was kind of on the forefront with the new york times and so is this something that's coming and i'm excited. i sure hope so i think so. i definitely i i hope so, i think that yeah. hope jaren was one. i think the immortal life of henry had lacks was one of the first times i saw someone take a story and put a family on it and then kind of there's a there's this there's a scene in that book where she takes. he loves grandson to the lab with her and they look at herself and it becomes a little spiritual or i don't you know kind of this beautiful moment and that was really inspiring for me that like, oh i can take science and be poetic with it and that's okay. and yeah, i think it's i think it's exciting you helen mcdonald also has ages. talk is another one that i think i've loved reading so. just two questions, since you've probably had a very busy day. have you seen the news out of australia regarding their election everything? and do you have a quick the election? so the morrison government is no longer a thing. wow, and do you have a reaction as to what that might mean for the great barrier reef and then second just as a quick one. is there anything the average late person who doesn't work in science or can do to support coral reefs in any way well so i'm i'm speaking from the point of view of some of the scientists in australia who are very verbal about the morrison government on twitter, and i'm sure there'll be elated the morrison government affect supported some of the worst coal mine development in australia, like right on the banks of the great barrier reef, which is critically threatened by climate change as i said, so that's you know, i'm sure there's probably some happiness. i i don't know, you know. enough to say what the next government will do. i do know that there was a lot of effort from people who cared about climate change in australia in the selection. so that's nice that their voices were. recognized awesome that yeah, so the greens picked up a lot of seeds is what he said. so we'll see we'll see what happens but you know, the australian government has done a great job of creating a marine protected area largely preventing mining on the great barrier reef, which could have happened but for a lot of protests in the 70s and 80s, and they do a great job of managing and storing that reef. they get a lot of praise for for help how they take care of the reefs. so but it's also like you know, it is a world heritage. it is an important place that said the great barrier reef has gone through i would think for mass bleachings in the last five years, so it's unprecedented. the other question what can we do you guys it's really about climate change. i mean we are at a point and i know i'm seeing in texas but like climate changes a big problem. it's if the coral reef ecosystems become extinct, it's not just the coral. it's those other quarter million species that depend on the reefs. so it's it's a massive shift. it's not just one species like the endangered species act addresses. it's it's an entire ecosystem and a really rich the richest ecosystem in the ocean and you know, it's all about temperature. so if we can make some changes and client in carbon policy, that's the most important we can do. can we give julie a round of applause? thank you all thank you for being such an engaged audience. julie will be signing books in the in the tent. so and maybe you can answer. more questions happy to thank thanks for coming. thank you. thank you for doing this.