I first saw Ginnie working at her bench in an HIMB lab. Surrounded by little eppendorf tubes, she seemed really focused on what she was doing. I decided not to disturb her at that moment. Then I learned she was working on a unique project, trying to cryopreserve corals. I thought that was fascinating - so fascinating that "needed" to be shared with more people. So I wrote her inviting for a blog interview. She delightfully accepted it, and explained a lot about her research goals, some related environmental issues and her life outside science. Please take your time to read what Ginnie Carter, biologist and DJ, has to tell about her experience with the coral reefs around the world.

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- Tell us a little bit about you: how did you decide to study Biology?

Ginnie: I grew up on a horse farm in Virginia and always loved all animals. I also spent quite a bit of time each summer in San Diego, CA visiting my grandparents and went to The San Diego Zoo, the Wild Animal Park and Sea World every single year. I was always drawn to marine life in particular. When I was a senior in High School we had to do an internship as a requirement of our graduation, and I chose to do mine at the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga, TN which is the largest freshwater aquarium in the world. Before my internship I had thought I was more interested in marine systems rather than freshwater, but I really ended up falling in love with freshwater fish during that time. That experience prompted me to pursue my undergraduate degree in Fisheries Science at Virginia Tech. After that I knew I wanted a graduate degree, and thought it would make me more well-rounded to go into a more biology based program, so I did so at the University of Kentucky (UK), studying the olfactory aspects of fish courtship and reproduction.

- What brought you to study corals?

Ginnie: I had never really planned to study corals, as I was mostly interested in fish, but ended up here in Hawaii rather serendipitously mid-way through my planned time at UK. I was working on my PhD, but my advisor needed to move to Taiwan in the middle. It just so happened that I had done a side project with a visiting professor that was about the right size to write up as a Master’s thesis, so I did so, and graduated with my MS instead. My advisor knew Dr. Mary Hagedorn, but thought she was still working at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. It turned out she was out here in Hawaii, but was happy to have me come join her as her assistant here. Our research here is two sided, we work on corals, but we also work on fish as well, so I originally had more of the fish work in mind when I came, but have since really come to enjoy working with coral as well.

- Coral reefs are very sensitive to environmental changes such as temperature, pH etc. and known to be affected by human activity. In your opinion, what area of research should be prioritized to address this concern?

Ginnie: This always seems like a difficult question to me, to prioritize the focus of “saving the planet”. Without seeming to cop-out of the question, I feel it is really important that at this time of growing crisis, we see the need for collaboration among the different branches of, not only coral science in particular, but science in general. Each environmental change, whether caused by human activity or not, is almost always tied to another environmental factor, i.e. temperature and pH and the carbon cycle. These factors may affect various different aspects of the coral’s biology and physiology and then these things may affect the ecology of the whole coral reef ecosystem. It is important to have people working together to get a broad sense of what can be done and what should be done. A good example of this is some of the work Dr. Hagedorn and I have become involved in Puerto Rico. We have traveled there the past few summers to apply some of the cryopreservation techniques we have learned here in Hawaii with healthy corals to some threatened coral species there. When we go, however, we have been working in large teams with aquarists from zoos and aquaria around the world who have been learning the requirements of what these threatened corals need to survive and grow as juveniles along with other researchers who have been working on the population genetics of the remaining corals out on the reef so that all these aspects can come together to work towards restoration of the reefs in Puerto Rico, which is hopefully something that is actually getting started this summer. I can’t emphasize enough how important collaborations like this are in determining what can be done to help our coral reefs and our planet.

Ginnie and Dr. Hagedorn at work with mushroom corals in Hawaii.

- In your research project, you're trying to apply cryopreservation to coral species. Why coral cryopreservation is important? What have you discovered so far from your research on coral cryopreservation?

Ginnie: I suppose, ideally, cryopreservation of corals would not be that important. I know that sounds like a strange statement to make considering the work that we do, but what I mean by that is that in an ideal situation, the coral around the world would be in perfect health and not need to be banked down in such a way. To clarify what I mean by that, when we talk about cryopreservation of corals, or any organism for that matter, it means that some part of its genetic material, usually sperm or embryos or cell lines, is frozen at super-low temperatures to preserve that genetic material. These methods have existed for awhile and at places such as the National Zoo and USDA, important genetic material is banked this way. For some species, such as agriculturally or medically important species, the material is banked down for future use by humans. For example, our other main line of research deals with standardizing zebrafish sperm. Zebrafish are an important medical research model that has many different strains. Maintaining the strains alive can be costly, so by being able to cryopreserve and bank down the genetic material from these strains, this reduces this cost but still allows the strains to be reconstituted and used in the future. Corals, on the other hand, need to be genetically banked in this way because they are imperiled in the wild. This type of genetic banking acts as a sort of insurance policy to ensure that if a certain species of coral gets severely reduced in the wild, there is still that genetic material available in case we can figure out how to restore it in the wild in the future. This is why I say, it would be nice for this not to be important, as I hope that the corals around the world can be saved before it would come time for us to use the genetically banked material to have to bring them back from the brink of extinction, so-to-speak.
Currently, we are the only lab in the world working on cryopreservation of coral. We have come pretty far with being able to cryopreserve sperm from corals. In fact, sperm from the threatened species that we work on in Puerto Rico is currently banked down in several institutions in the US and Europe.

- What are the limitations to the technique(s) of cryopreservation at the moment?

Ginnie: Corals have proven fairly difficult to cryopreserve. As I said above, we are able to freeze coral sperm, but the techniques are still being optimized. Many factors are involved, from the freezing rate to the thawing rate to the solution and strength of solution in which you freeze. We have worked quite a bit to try to freeze coral larvae, but the process to do so has been quite lengthy and as of now, still going on. Right now, we also have plans to try to preserve stem cells from the coral.

- What are your main interests outside of coral science?

Ginnie: Outside of coral science, my interests are quite diverse. When I’m not in the lab, I spin (DJ) Drum & Bass and promote a few club events here in Honolulu. That takes up much of my free time. I also volunteer for Therapeutic Horsemanship of Hawaii, which is a really great organization that uses horses as a tool to improve the bodies and minds of kids and adults with different mental or physical issues. Being in Hawaii I always try to get to the beach as much as I can, and I even surf a little.

- A take-home message you wanna tell the blog readers.

Ginnie: Try to be conscientious of the planet in your daily lives. It can be hard sometimes as we get busy and want our conveniences, but any little thing you can do helps. Just like I said in response to trying to prioritize research areas, everyone has to work together on everything that is going on right now. It isn’t enough to focus on recycling and forget about air pollution. Everything needs to be considered, and keeping that in mind, every little thing that everyday people do to help out can be just as important as trying to cryopreserve coral larvae. Let’s all work together towards making a planet in which the live corals we have right now in our oceans bounce back and thrive and the coral we cryopreserve is never needed.

- Thank you very much, Ginnie!

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[Em português, aqui.]