The Marsden Flag visits Hawaii
Associate Professor Simon Davy is a marine biologist researcher based at the School of Biological Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington. Recently, his research team visited Hawaii as part of a Marsden grant awarded in 2012 and took the Marsden flag along with them.
Associate Professor Simon Davy is a marine biologist researcher based at the School of Biological Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington. Recently, his research team visited Hawaii as part of a Marsden grant awarded in 2012 and took the Marsden flag along with them.
Coral reefs are in serious decline, in part because warming causes corals to lose their symbiotic algae (thermal bleaching). However, there is immense debate about whether corals can adapt to climate change, with some suggesting that bleached corals might acquire new algae that are better suited to the prevailing environment. Associate Professor Davy and his team propose that the potential for partner ‘switching’ is linked to host-symbiont integration and the consequent nutritional flux between the two partners, with optimal nutritional exchange determining success. The research team plan to test this hypothesis by applying modern bioinformatic, proteomic, and metabolomic approaches.
The team visited Hawaii earlier on this year to carry out a study on symbiont uptake by larvae of mushroom corals. The photos were taken at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology (University of Hawaii), on Coconut Island, O’ahu.
The glass dishes on the water table contain male and female individuals of the mushroom coral Fungia scutaria, which are spawning about 2 days after the full moon in July. Once they spawned, the researchers mixed egg and sperm samples together to produce coral larvae (planulae), which were then infected with one of two different types of symbiotic algae (Symbiodinium sp.); one type is very successful at forming a symbiosis with this coral, while the other isn’t. The team are now assessing how the type of symbiotic alga influences the metabolite profile of the coral larva, while they also labelled these larvae with a 13C tracer and will track the release of 13C-labelled photosynthetic products from the alga to the coral larva at the cellular level via nanoSIMS (scanning imaging mass spectrometry). This latter work will be conducted next year at EPFL in Switzerland. This research will shed light on how symbiosis success is related to the quantity and quality of the nutritional compounds that are transferred between the two partner organisms.
For more information, please contact A/Prof SImon Davy on simon.davy@vuw.ac.nz