Robyn Williams: This is The Science Show, with some mega-themes for Easter: saving the reefs all over the world, going cosmic with stories of Isaac Newton, Vera Rubin, and even Lucretius, but then coming back to Earth on the lovely Norfolk Island to nurture some newly hatched green parrots.
It’s been my pleasure in the last couple of weeks to introduce our Top Five scientists…well, two of them. Young researchers who have joined us to learn some of our media ways, and this time a third, one who has been working with reefs made by shellfish. He’s introduced by Natasha Mitchell.
Natasha Mitchell: A big welcome to Dr Ian McLeod from James Cook University, a marine biologist focused on the protection and restoration of shellfish reef ecosystems. Ian is a multidisciplinary researcher with two decades broad experience working in environmental research, management, communication, on (he says) every continent.
He is currently involved in leading the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program. If anyone watched Reef Live late last year starring RN’s own Ann Jones and Hamish McDonald, we really saw first-hand how precious this ecosystem is and how unique it is. Ian’s talk is on rebuilding reefs in a changing world. This year marks the start of the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration in fact. Can we use our smarts not to just destroy nature but to rebuild it? Welcome Ian.
Ian McLeod: Thanks Natasha. This morning I was reviewing our team’s plans for how can we raise millions and millions of baby corals to help restore damaged reefs. And the project that I was reviewing was all about the use of probiotics to increase health, what kind of nutrition requirements for the really little baby corals once they settle out of the water, and also how can we manipulate the microbiome of surfaces using types of textures and different inoculations to make them the perfect environment where a coral wants to settle down and grow.
