Abstract Summary
Additional co-authors: Gabriel Juarez, Bruce Fouke, Forest Rower, and Linda Wegley. Materials scientists are engineers who study how synthetic and natural materials interact with their environment, whether that be mechanical, chemical, electrical, thermal, optical, magnetic, or even biological. They design materials to perform some intended function in those environments and are credited for major technological advances in the aerospace, automotive, electronic, defense, and even health care industries. Many of the resulting products we make use of everyday. A field to which materials science has not yet significantly contributed, but has the potential to help make significant advances, is in coral restoration science. Specifically, we propose that materials science and engineering can help to tackle the fundamental problem blocking robust coral reef recovery: recruitment and survival of coral juveniles. Corals suffer from widespread recruitment failure: >98% of juveniles raised for restoration die within two years of outplanting. In this talk, I will present work we have done the past 12 years in engineered scaffolds for bone replacement and repair as a particularly relevant example of how materials research might help coral restoration. I will describe how we design, fabricate, and evaluate materials with different compositions and combine structural features at multiple length scales, from microns to centimeters, that encourage a particular biological response, like bone regeneration. Our team aims to apply these principles not only to larval recruitment and settlement, but also to shifting reef systems back toward desirable organisms (corals, coralline algae, herbivores) and away from harmful competitors (pathogens, macroalgae, turf algae, cyanobacteria). By combining materials engineering and coral restoration science, we aim to describe how substrate characteristics affect critical biological outcomes on reefs, including the factors that promote: 1) growth of photosynthetic, non-pathogenic, and other beneficial microbes, 2) coral attraction, attachment, settlement, and calcification, and 3) coral-facilitating organisms such as coralline algae.
