THE future of Australia’s ocean jewel, the Great Barrier Reef, is in safe hands thanks to a conservation program involving Taronga Western Plains Zoo.
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Coral cells from samples taken from the Great Barrier Reef are now cryopreserved as part of the Frozen Zoo at the Taronga Western Plains Zoo.
The program allows frozen coral samples to remain alive for hundreds of years in order to be used to restore and potentially reseed reefs if needed in the future.
With partners from Australian Institute of Marine Sciences (AIMS) and Monash University, scientists Dr Rebecca Spindler, from Taronga Zoo, and Dr Mary Hagedorn, from the Smithsonian Institution, spent two weeks collecting the sperm and embryonic cells from the coral for the program.
For the past eight years the Smithsonian Institution and Dr Hagedorn’s laboratory has worked to develop the technology used in the program, which has already been applied to reefs in the Caribbean and Hawaii.
"It is much of the same technology that they use for cows and sheep and things like that since the 1950s but we are using much more advanced techniques that have been advanced for human embryos," she said.
Dr Hagedorn compared the project to an insurance policy for important ecosystems, which without certain marine life would not be able to exist.
"Australian’s are really concerned about the ecosystems you have, the carbon tax, you are really looking toward the future and I think this is going to be a centre of radiation for this kind of work in terms of maintaining reefs," she said.
Dr Spindler described the work done by Dr Hagedorn as the foundation technology used for the conservation project with AIMS helping select the eight coral colonies of two different species for the project, which were functionally and structurally essential for the Great Barrier Reef.
This allowed the scientists to bank down 70 billion cells for the conservation effort in three days.
"We won’t be stopping here at these two species," Dr Spindler said.
So far only about $15,000 has been spent on the project as insurance for the Great Barrier Reef which brings billions into Australia’s economy but Dr Spindler said the next step involved working with coral experts around the country.
