READY TO FREEZE: Many stony corals such as Acropora, pictured here at Lady Elliot Island on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, are vulnerable to the effects of climate change. So researchers are working to cryogenically preserve them for later.REBECCA SPINDLER/TARONGA ZOO
Mary Hagedorn is the first to admit she has a somewhat unusual research calendar. “My whole schedule is based on the moon cycle,” she says. “I’m like a modern druid.” But there’s a scientific explanation: Hagedorn works with corals—animals that famously synchronize mass spawning events to nights just after a full moon.
For Hagedorn, a research scientist at the Smithsonian Institution and head of the international Reef Recovery Initiative, such coral spawnings, which occur just once a year for some species, mark the only opportunities to collect the animals’ eggs and sperm—key ingredients for one of the latest approaches to coral conservation. As coral communities around the world succumb to climate change—and the attendant increases in water temperature and acidity—researchers such as Hagedorn are shifting ...
