Can a High-Tech Fertility Clinic Save the World's Largest Superorganism?

The world's largest superorganism is probably Australia's Great Barrier Reef. It's a vast conglomeration of different organisms, and, at 1,600 miles long, it's certainly the planet's largest structure comprised of living things. Naturally, it's dying. Over the last 30 years half of the entire reef has been lost, scientists say.

It's dying so fast, in fact, that scientists are rushing to preserve its DNA in a massive gene bank—both to research ways to help the coral adapt to the warming, acidifying, carbon-rich ocean waters that are killing it, and to preserve its biodiversity in liquid nitrogen so that it might be thawed and respawned in happier future climes. It's mostly climate change—which is warming waters and causing coral to "bleach"—that's killing coral, though pollution and ocean acidification are speeding the process.

So, an international effort is underway to take billions of sperm and eggs samples from the 400 endangered species that comprise the reef, and store them in a network of onland gene banks in Australia. Some of the samples will be kept for the future, and others will be used to help regrow currently damaged parts of the reef.

“We create a coral fertility clinic and we put them [the sperm and embryonic cells] in a bank, to hold them for now, but to use them in the future,” Mary Hagedorn, from the US’s Smithsonian Institution, who is advising on the project, told the Independent. The paper's recent report explains how the initiative will work:

The establishment of a gene bank, using human fertility techniques, is a bold response by scientists seeking to conserve the reef … The project is akin to a captive breeding programme for endangered animals. If all goes according to plan, the genetic material will be thawed and used to grow new coral which will then be reintroduced into “the wild” – transplanted back into the ocean – to help restore and repopulate damaged reefs.

Some of the samples will be used for research aimed at improving coral’s resilience and ability to adapt to changing conditions, while some will remain in storage indefinitely – for hundreds, or even thousands, of years.

Creating a coral gene vault sounds like a grim and radical project, but it's actually not a new idea. The drive to begin preserving threatened coral in banks like this began at least four years ago, when 16 countries met at the Global Legislators Organisation for a Balanced Environment conference in Denmark. The nations raised the prospect of freezing coral, and agreed it was likely to be necessary.

"At this meeting, politicians and scientists acknowledged that global emissions of carbon dioxide are rising so fast that we are losing the fight to save coral and the world must develop an alternative plan," the BBC reported at the time.

Now the project has begun in earnest, with the largest, perhaps most vulnerable coral system at its core.

''Well it's the last ditch effort to save biodiversity from the reefs which are extremely diverse systems," Simon Harding, of the Zoological Society of London, said at the meeting four years ago. Now it's 2013, and the dire state of reefs worldwide has only worsened. And we're officially embarking on that so-called last ditch effort. After all, if climate change continues apace, all reefs may be gone by as soon as 2100.

I, for one, look forward to one day visiting the frozen remains of the world's largest superorganism in some a museum in the outback.