Abstract Summary
Florida’s corals have suffered tremendous recent declines from climate change (bleaching) and disease, and there is an urgent need to safeguard remaining genotypic diversity from further loss. Because gametes cannot yet be reliably collected and/or cryopreserved, field gene banks must be created to preserve remaining diversity. Current efforts focus on doing this in coral nurseries or large land-based facilities, but an alternative approach leverages the enormous growth of the reef aquarium industry over the last 25+ years, which has created a highly skilled nationwide community of reef aquarists who can be enrolled to maintain and propagate Florida’s valuable coral genetic resources. Priority coral species and genotypes collected by federal and state agencies can be transported to a National Resource Facility “hub” in Miami that fragments and distributes (“uploads”) these genotypes to the network (the “Coral Cloud”). In turn, using an app-based technology platform, the Cloud shares data and photos on growth rate, wound healing, survivorship, and susceptibility to bleaching/disease, which can then be used to inform subsequent genome-enabled experiments on these curated genotypes at the Miami hub. This approach leverages vast yet unexploited expertise in coral husbandry to help solve the problem of how to conserve genotypes long-term at low cost across a dispersed network of ex situ facilities, and could also be used to crowdsource other problems (such as how to improve the long-term survivorship and grow-out of coral recruits) by challenging the Coral Cloud to identify and test novel solutions. The Coral Cloud represents a radical departure from established coral reef conservation practices, but such approaches are now needed to help confront Florida’s growing crisis. In addition, by enrolling an untapped public resource to help coral reef conservation in a meaningful way, the Coral Cloud represents a tremendous opportunity to engage in outreach, activism, and citizen science nationwide.
