Blog
By Brenna Stallings, MS Student in the Rotjan Lab at Boston University
All of us have dreamed about time travel at some point in our lives. As a coral biologist, I often dream of traveling back in time to see some of the vibrant, sprawling reefs that spanned the ocean before human interference.
While physical time travel is out of reach, our lab at Boston University embarked on a study to see coral reefs through time using our next best option, digital photography. Together with other researchers, and with support from the Blue Nature Alliance, we used photo-documentation of relatively healthy reefs in remote marine protected areas (MPAs) and treated those photos as time capsules to examine change over time.
Over a span of nearly four years, we tracked ~600 coral colonies across six islands in the central Pacific and collected photos of each colony for at least two points in time. We then used these photos to examine the fate of these corals as they moved forward in time, asking questions like, Did they grow or shrink? and What species or colonies performed better than others?
We also looked backward in time to see how corals got to where they were, asking questions like, Did the colony overgrow other species to survive? Essentially, we examined temporal dynamics from past-to-future and future-to-past. In essence, time travel using digital photogrammetry (many digital photos stitched together).
We chose to work in remote, uninhabited MPAs because they offer us the best glimpse into how nature operates. One of the benefits of MPAs is that they attract scientific interest and study - in this case, MPAs enabled us to experience a form of time travel on reefs that are the most similar to what we might have found in a world without people.
What we found is that corals are very dynamic - they grow, shrink, die, survive, and fight - and that each of these scenarios changes with the environmental context around them. We don’t often get the opportunity to look at how corals grow and change in the absence of acute pollution, ecosystem disturbance, or stress, so this was a rare opportunity.
Read the paper to learn more about our time travel analysis of coral.