Ruth Gates
Marine biologist who attempted to breed ‘super corals’ to save the world’s reefs from extinction
RUTH GATES, who has died of cancer aged 56, was a leading marine biologist who devoted her life to trying to save the world’s coral reefs. Corals are tiny, anemone-like animals, or polyps, that often live in huge colonies, forming reefs. Though these cover less than 0.1 per cent of the ocean floor, they protect 93,000 miles of shoreline in more than 100 countries, support perhaps a quarter of all marine species, and act as nurseries for many others. Yet they are in rapid global decline, under pressure from human activity and acidifying and warming oceans. By some estimates about half of the world’s reefs have been lost in the last three decades, and it is thought that the remaining coral could be gone or heavily damaged by 2050 if things do not change.
When coral is stressed by changing environmental conditions, it expels the symbiotic algae that live within it and turns white or bright yellow, a process called bleaching. Unless conditions improve, the polyps will not readmit the algae and so, eventually, they die.
Yet organisms respond to environmental changes through both adaptation and acclimatisation. With corals, the nature of their symbiotic relationships can also alter. As a researcher and later director of the Hawaiian Institute of Marine Biology at the University of Hawaii, Ruth Gates wondered whether selectively breeding and conditioning them could create hardier varieties faster than they would develop naturally.
In 2012 she demonstrated that coral algae come in several genetically distinct varieties which affect how their hosts cope with environmental stress, and in 2013 she and her colleague Madeleine van Oppen won a $4 million grant from a foundation established by Microsoft’s co-founder Paul Allen for a four-year project, beginning in 2016, to breed “super corals” by what she called “assisted evolution”.
This involved some researchers trying to selectively breed the corals themselves, selecting for hardier ones; others working out if resilient corals can pass their genetic strengths to their offspring, and others focusing on how to coax young corals to take up new heat or pollution-tolerant strains of algae as their symbiotic partners.
Giving evolution a helping hand is controversial, with some scientists arguing that it is not the role of science to intervene and that such work might distract from the more important goals of curbing pollution and stopping climate change.
But Ruth Gates felt that the speed with which coral reefs are disappearing makes it urgent to intervene. “I have watched some reefs disintegrate before my eyes,” she told an interviewer. “I just can’t bear the idea that future generations may not experience a coral reef. We’d have to be idiots to stand back for the next 10 years and hope for the best.”
Results so far look promising and the project is into its fourth year of funding.
Ruth Gates was born on March 28 1962 in Akrotiri, Cyprus, where her father was serving with military intelligence in the British Army. Her mother trained as a physiotherapist. Ruth was brought up in Kent where, as a child, she became mesmerised by the television series The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau and decided to become a marine biologist.
She went on to study Marine Science at Newcastle University, where she took a course on corals. In 1985 she moved to Jamaica to do doctoral work on the relationship between corals and their symbionts, during which time she mapped colour variations in local reefs before global warming was widely understood.
Caribbean corals at the time were starting to die. There was a major bleaching event in 1987 and she went on to show that such events were more common in warmer waters – a crucial discovery. She continued her work at the University of California in Los Angeles before joining the University of Hawaii and starting her own laboratory. Although the outlook for reefs was deteriorating she noticed that some reefs which had been given up for dead after a major “bleaching event” in 1998 seemed to be bouncing back, and she became convinced that even if only a fraction of the coral colonies survived, there was hope.
Appointed director of the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology in 2013 after winning the $4 million grant, in 2015 she become the first woman president of the International Society for Reef Studies. She published dozens of scientific papers and, as a third-degree black belt, founded a karate school on Hawaii’s Coconut Island.
Ruth Gates was round-faced with short brown hair and a cheerfully blunt manner. Despite her pioneering work on “assisted evolution”, she once said that “if the tools we develop are never used, I would be the happiest person in the world.”
She is survived by her wife, Robin Burton-gates.