So lets take our blackberries in. The federal government. Did they issue you a blackberry . No, actually, have a palm pilot. I have a real. Plane. Thank you so much. This has been so fun. Ari. Thank for being here. My name is natalie gonzalez. I am a council member, Montgomery County. I represent district six in and also the chair of development for the Montgomery County. Besides all that, im a big environmentalist so im. So when the mayor of gaithersburg contact me and said, natalie, would you like to introduce author . And i said, yes, but whatever you give me or whoever you, me, you must be in an environmentalist like me, because thats what really im just really passionate about it. So he said, well, have you met Michael Mehta webster . I said, no. And he said, well, well, you should. And then he told me about the rescue effect. So you havent read it. Raise your hand if you had read the book already, if you have, lets just say okay. If you havent. Then im sure youre going to be eager to find it because i read it with children who are going to be here shortly. And it was actually breathtaking. So with that, im going to just a little bit i have the great honor of introduce professor Michael Mehta webster. Hes a professor of practice in the department of environmental studies at new york university. Is an expert on ecology conserving ocean and philanthropy as well. An ardent natural enthusiast. He has led efforts to connect edge science to protecting species and ecosystems in the wild. As executive director of the Coral Reef Alliance with that going to the mic to mr. The professor Michael Sahakian he can enlighten us about his book. Thank you. Well, thank you so much for that introduction, natalie and. Thank you all for showing up today. Im super to be here and i dont know if youve going to some of the other sessions. This ones a little bit different. Were not doing an interview. Im just going to tell you a little bit about my work and my book, and im going to start by just talking a teeny bit about the rescue effect. Thats the title of the book. And what that is, is its this tendency in nature for nature to be able to respond to environmental change successfully, a resilience in nature. And were to talk a lot about that today. But before we go there, i want to just do a quick poll. Who in the room in the last couple of months has seen a story, tv or in a newspaper about some environmental issue, some species, an ecosystem. All right. So a lot you as youre paying a little bit attention, youre seeing this. All right. Raise your hand if it was a good story. Okay. We got you. Excellent. Yeah. And what you can see is consuming the alternative was a bad news story. Yeah. When we hear about things in the environment and conservation, thats what we hear right now. And theres a good for it because theres a lot of things in the environment, nature that people are understandably about. But i want to talk in this session today about a little bit about the other side of things as well, which is about how nature is actually pretty good at dealing with change and that the story of whats going on in nature is not entirely that gloom and doom story. Theres another side. And the reason that other side exists is the rescue effect. All right. There we. All right. How many of you, that kid, when you were growing up who wanted to be a marine biologist . Right. I mean, it existed, right . So when was four years old, thats what i decided, i was like, im going to be a marine biologist. Thats what i was going to. And i did that. I made that decision of this guy right here. This is jack. And i used to watch these specials on pbs of Jacques Cousteau going around the in the calypso. And i was like that, is what i want to do. It probably helped that i grew up ionsi in a little tod li corn farming and dairy farming. Im like, yeah, i want to get out of here. I want to go there. Well, i guess i must be because not only was i that kid that wanted to be the marine biologist i became marine biologist. And by the i was in my twenties, i was in graduate school doing research. And the thing i really wanted to study was coral reefs. I was so in these amazing ecosystems and all the colors and the species and what i really wanted to know about were the fish and summer many, many of the turn white like this and some of these coral heads were gigantic things were like a, you know, like a statue on a city Street Corner that would take you like a minute to swim around underwater. These are colonies, coral, that had probably been living for hundreds and of years. But that year they bleached and most of them died. And so it started dawning on me that theres something really important goinon here, this is an event that this reef has probably seen in hundreds and hundreds of years. Theres real aroblem here. And so tshift a bit of my focus away from the fish that i really love that got me voed in the system in t pce and starting to take a look at what was going on with the corals. So these are corals in this photo, if you can se one that branching kind of heart shaped, one in the fd and that tbackground looks a bunch of little circles. So i say colony because corals made of a bunch of individual animals. The animals look Something Like a little anemone if youve ever seen an anemone before. And theyre all clones of each other in a colony. One starts the colony and it and makes two. It divides and makes for makes eight and so on and so forth. They can grow into these colonies of thousands and thousands of genetically identical animals. And you can see if you look closely at the one in the reound, these little pits, but in the background, all those circles are the individual. Miracle biology going onl these corals. The color of these corals is not the coral. Thisomething e its little tiny. You think of it as tiny plants. They little algal. , little species of algae that live in single cells and they actually live inside the of the coral in a mutualistic. And the way this works that the coral provides a nice place for algae live in the sun and the algae grow inside the coral and they produce food and they give some of the extra food to the coral. The algae gets, a place to live. It gets nutrients given to it by the the coral gets food. Imagine this if you were hungry right now, if you were a coral. All you have to do is go lie out in the sun for a little and youd get a meal. Its really kind of cool to think about whats going on here with this biology. And because corals are doing, they have some extra energy and they use energy to make a skeleton thats underneath what you can see right here. And its a white skeleton of Calcium Carbonate and they this to hold space to compete with their neighbors. And they also do it to overgrow their neighbors, to get access to the light, same way a tree might try and overgrow tree in a forest. And if you look at a healthy reef, you can see what that looks like. These corals are totally trying to grow over other in this masse thicketo ll out this healthy, healthy coral reef, which you can also seeose corals are building amazing matrix oe dinsional habitat in this stem. All of that structure is corals building different che reef. And if you ever go to a coral reef, yo notice caves and nooks and crannies and commenta all of that three dimensional structure is being by corals and similar organisms can do the same kind of thing. And so we can see that when we look at a reef, we can see all that. But if you pan back, this making of a Calcium Carbonate skeleton does a lot more. Heres a ribbon of reef in fiji and you see that ribbon of reef its entirely made of coral. The coral is basically building a giant wall. It can grow in the ocean, but it cant grow over the surface. So it grows right up to the top and it forms that massive barrier reef in that system. And as long as the core is healthy it can keep growing and can build that system forever. The biggest one of these in the worlis about hundredil long. This is northeastern australia and this is the Great Barrier re. You can see in the upper right of that photo the Great Barrier reef is arguably the largest biologically made structure the pletand its easilyisible from space and. So by building all this stuff on, reefs, the corals e creating a t of value for people and for wildlife, for people. Theres somethg like several ndred of millions of people who rely on coral reefs in some way or anoth for their livelihood. And that includes things like tourm. I mean look at this turtle on a reef in hawaii. Ok, many tourists are above it who have gone to place to see that animal above a coral reef. Theyre important for fisheries. People fish from coral recently also selfish coral ree. Theyre important for shoreline. Those barrier reef block waves help protect the shore. And theyre also really important for bio prospecting, new medicines, cancer, drugs or antivirals or, sunscreens and thing that ive always been most excited about. The corals are really important for wildlife. Coral reefs have Something Like a quarter of. All species in the ocean that are found on them where theyre only this little tiny fraction of 1 of the surface area. So theres all these species chock a block plaque packed into a coral reef in a way that kes coral reefschike tropical rainforests. And so you can tell, im excited about coral reefs. Im excited about corals. But the problem is that corals are facing an existential threat. Actually, theyre facing a whole bunch of existential threats. I dont use that term lightly. What im getting at here is there is a real question about whether we are going to have coral reefs the future . And i could give you a million statistics, but statistics are sometimes hard to like feel. I wont actually show you what this looks like to the that you can see the screen i know the lighting is not perfect this photo thats on the screen right now is a coral reef in discovery bay, jamaica. And this picture was taken in 1970 and it was by researchers who were interested in studying the coral and how it was changing over time. They built that white square, that quadrant, and they put it on the reef and they could go back to the same spot year after year. They drilled a hole in the coral head, the foreground, and they tapped in a little steel pin so they could put it right back in the exact same place. Make sense methodologically, scientifically. But 40 years later, somebody went back and found that pin and took the same photo in same place. D must show that one to you w. I know not easy to see, whats going o is that all that coral that was growing there, that was building that reef, creating all that, its all gone. You can look in the background and maybe see a little bit of coral, but its in reality. This isnt really a coral reef. Its shifted to a different of ecosystem. And this is not unique to discovery bay, jamaica. This same pattern is happening in place after place all over the world, and its got people really concerned. And its not that we dont understand this is happening. Theres actually an over of reasons for why its that this is just a partial list of things we know that are causing this kind of shift. It includes things like overfishing and pollution, outright habitat destruction. It includes diseases that are spreading around coral reefs and killing corals. And the biggest threat of all that we know of right now is coral bleaching, which is tied to Climate Change. And so thats what i saw in el nino in 1998. This is what is really bringing coral reefs down today. So in this slide, thes a photo athows three different panes of the same photo taken at different time and whaithows you is the progression of a coral bleaching from 24 cember to a couple of months later to a few months after that. And what you see in the first fre that sort of orange brown color, which is happy coral reefs with their symbiotic algae in the next frame, the cora a all white. Thats the bleaching. The bleaching happens, the algae and the corals rationship breaks becau the water is too warm. And the coral basically expels those in order to survive. Once that happens. The color of the coral is gone. It lost e lor of its symbionts. And what youre seeing is its skeleton, its transparent flh. So that animalt this point is in acute. If the water cools down, i might survive. And we see that sometimes with coral. But if it stays hot, those are probably going to die. And in this you can see that they did once theyve turned gray in that last frame, thats a sign that the coral animals are gone. And other things like, seaweeds and bacteria are growing where they once. So about a dozen years ago i took a new job and i did lots of research around the world. I worked on conservation for a long but i started as the executive director, a coral reef Conservation Organization called the Coral Reef Alliance. And we were really cool work. That was largely what would describe as Community Based conservation. And the idea here was that people who live in coastal environments, who depend on reefs, have a vested interest figuring out how they can interact with their reefs a way that provides benefits to them but doesnt undermine this resource that rely on. And so we worked with them problems like trying to curb overfishing, trying to solve coastal pollution. And we knew from the research that if we did that we could create some benefits for that local reef, including some benefits for corals. Corals tend to grow a little bit better, survive little bit better, the young survive a little bit better. When you do things like make a healthier environment locally. So this is all really great, but i have to as i was doing this work, which i found meaningful and very compelling, i escape this sort of sense of concern that this very scale work might not really add up to anything in. This world where coral reefs are disappear at very large scales and started to wonder, is this is this something thats actually going to make a difference in the long run . And i was talking to lots of donors and lots supporters, and i had to tell them with the straight face, hey, work is getting things done. Its making a difference for these reefs. I realized that in order for to continue to do that, i needed to test some of those assumptions. I need to figure out, do we have reason to believe that coral are going to be able to survive this world that we are creating and, changing so quickly . And is there anything we can do to tip the scales in the corals favor. And so i started this project of working with a bunch of scientists and conservation folks to say, hey can we try and figure out whether or not we might have coral reefs in, the future . And the way we approached this problem, we built a big mathematical model. See big equation, big mathematical that tried to simulate how a coral reef works and corals grow and they reproduce and also how they evolve over. And then we used other simulations to try and figure out do we think corals are going to be able to make it through this bottleneck that theyre in thats in front of them around things like Climate Change and do we think things we can do in conservation are going to make any. Basically, this is an idea were trying to get the best possible answer to this question of are we going to have coral reefs and . Can we help . All right. Im going to summarize years of research in one slide. The answer is yeah it looks like corals actually they potentially adapt to the changes that were creating but they probably cant do particularly on climate if we dont do anything to mitigate Climate Change, its probably game over for. But if instead we mitigate coral Climate Change a little bit, draw down our co2 emissions a little bit, we start tipping the balance in their. The second thing is those little project of doing coral reef conservation, they actually can add up making a real difference for coral reefs. So that thing that was sort of bothering me and, i needed to take a look at. We got some evidence like, yeah, that can make a difference under circumstances. So im a biologist, im an ecologist by training. Im going to do a little biology foray. I hope you guys dont mind too much. Im going to throw out a little jargon, ill explain it. Okay, so whats going on . Are the whats going on inside the model that leads to this prediction that corals make it through . One of them is something that scientists call phenotypic plasticity. Its a big, ugly phrase. It means is that organisms can li across a range of different environmental conditions. Imagine you right now youre at a low elevation. If you went gh on a mountain, your body would begin to immediately change physiologic lee because you would be experiencing less oxygen in the air. Your blood composition would. You dont have to tell your body to do this it just turns on automatically your. Phenotype would be changing. Corals do this too. They can adjust to somewhat temperatures. They can adjust to somewhat different conditions. They can adjust to everything. Thats were having bleaching. But the ability to live across a range of conditions makes a big in the model. The second piece is something that scientists call demographic rescue in this the idea here. So imagine a coral that gets hit by a bleaching event. Letsay its an incredibly severe bleaching event. It kills off every last coral. Well, how is that going to become a coral again . If theres no coral there, reproduce and provide young to the reef . That will never be a coral reef again unless comes in and puts new coral on it. However, corals, when they reproduce sexually, they make larvae that in ocean currents and. So those larvae on one reef can drift through the ocean and land somewhere else. So on our hypothetical reef thats lost all of its coral, if it gets an influx, baby corals in from other reefs, i think of it like a ticker tape parade of, babies coming down from the water and landing on the bottom. It can basically get a restart. Thats called demographic rescue. And it happens on reefs. And we see them get decimated. We see corals in and drift in and repopulate that reef and then the last one is called evolutionary rescue. This is really just darwinian survival, the fittest. But it happens very short periods of time where because like temperatures are going up very fast, theres selection for individual corals that are better at surviving at higher temperatures. And if those individuals survive and they reproduce, the whole population can to being able to survive at higher temperatures at the same time. Now, any one of these things alone is probably not enough for the corals, but when y combine all three of these processes togeth