Creative Cutting-Edge Coral Scientist: Kristen Marhaver

 

 

Kristen Marhaver speaks for the corals. The scuba diver, underwater photographer, and world-renowned expert in coral breeding has racked up more than 2.3 million views of her engaging TED talks, in which she shares her ground-breaking innovations and heartfelt passion for preserving these little-understood and greatly undervalued marine creatures.

“Corals are so distant from us evolutionarily, so foreign and alien, that you really have to be creative in thinking about what their life is like and what they need to survive,” she says.

In her research lab at CARMABI (Caribbean Research and Management of Biodiversity) on the island of Curaçao, Marhaver and her team have made great strides in aiding coral survival by inventing methods for coral breeding, baby coral propagation, and coral gene banking.

“It’s like running an IVF clinic, a neonatal intensive care unit, and a daycare all at once for an endangered species,” she says.

Through hundreds of night dives, she and her colleagues pinpointed the timing for the spawning of numerous Caribbean coral species. Their spawning charts are now used by dozens of research teams to collect and preserve coral sperm and eggs. Marhaver was also the first person in the world to raise baby pillar corals, a nearly extinct Caribbean coral species. Juvenile corals supercharge reefs; they spawn more prolifically and adapt more readily to changing environments.

“Raising young corals today boosts the reproduction on future coral reefs for centuries,” she says.

Her lab’s Genome Resource Bank takes an even longer view. Its 500 billion (and counting) cryopreserved coral sperm can survive indefinitely, serving as the ocean equivalent of a seed bank that endures whatever disease outbreaks or thermal events arise.

She is always eager to speak for the corals: about their critical role in shoreline protection, their value to is land economies, their tremendous potential as a source of future medications and, well, just how cool they are. “There’s lots of reasons to keep corals around, for sure,” she says.

She’s grateful and thrilled to be part of the global community devoted to that very cause. “Collaborators, awesome students, and mentors have been so critical in all the progress we’ve made,” she says. Her father, Carl Marhaver, was her first mentor, who first took her scuba diving at age 15. “He was in charge of all the logistics, and I was in charge of all the small animal encounters,” she says with a laugh.

She credits Tech for providing her with the invaluable combination of lab research skills and field ecology experience that she draws on daily. As a first-year student, she pleaded her way into the lab of Terry Snell. He first let her observe his work on coral stress genomics before promoting her through the ranks as a lab assistant—and helping set her course toward her celebrated career.

In gratitude, Marhaver now sponsors a first-year biology researcher each year at Tech through the FastTrack Research Program. “That’s how it all began for me,” she says. “It means a ton to be able to pay it forward to support someone who is in my shoes 20 years later."

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