Assisted Evolution with Dr Adriana Humanes

This is Our Time

​Dr. Adriana Humanes is a coral reef scientist from Venezuela. She completed her Ph.D. in Australia, and now is pursuing a postdoc with the @Coralassist_Lab through Newcastle University in the UK….I met her on the ship to Antarctica in 2018.

For the last four years Adriana, and her colleagues have conducted field work in Palau, which is an archipelago of more than 300 islands situated in the Pacific Ocean between Indonesia and the Philippines.

As Adriana explains, coral reefs are facing and unprecedented decline due to marine heatwaves, and also because of mass coral bleaching events. In the last decade, there have been five large scale coral bleaching and mortality events which have affected hundreds of reefs around the world.

During the last massive bleaching event, on the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, almost half of the coral cover lost. Over the last 30 years, worldwide, coral cover has decreased by an alarming 20 per cent.

The research at the Coralassist lab (as well as Adriana's) focuses on testing the feasibility of assisting evolution by identifying coral colonies that have a high tolerance to heat stress, and then, sexually breeding them. The goal is to create next generation corals that have inherited heat tolerance from their parents.

Adriana first went to Palau in 2018, which was not long after I met her, in Antarctica. Although the pandemic has restricted her ability to travel there to continue her onw field research, by coincidence, one lone Ph.D student working with the Coralassist lab flew to Palau on March 7, 2020 … which turned out to be a long stay for her, 18 months, to be exact, where she became the lone student there tasked with keeping the Lab research project going.

Adriana and her colleagues hope to returned this year, for their final leg of field research...after being away for years. And good news! They found corals spawning!

Hopefully this is one more step towards the goal to use these sexually produced corals to help increase their future resilience, and hopefully even restore some vreefs that have been damaged or degraded from heat waves. Who knows, maybe they could even restore some reefs that have endured massive bleaching events, which are predicted to be more frequent in future climate change scenarios.

Only science will tell.

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