Dr. James Porter is a Professor of Ecology at the University of Georgia. He is an expert in coral, climate change, and the connections between these issues and human health and social justice. He was the scientific advisor of the award-winning film "Chasing Coral" (presently on Netflix) and its educational and outreach materials. His testimony before Congress on the connections between coral and productive human society "greatly influenced the U.S.’s decision to sign this U.N. Ocean Biodiversity Treaty."
Episode Description
14 percent of the world’s coral has been lost since 2009, according to a report from the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network. The loss of these reefs impacts the ocean environment. Coral Reefs support almost 30 percent of marine life as well as the world economy. The plight of coral reefs is the subject of the documentary Chasing Coral who’s lead scientist we have joining us today Dr. James Porter.
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Rosemary Pennington
Fourteen percent of the world's coral has been lost since 2009. That's according to a report from the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network. The loss of these reefs impacts the ocean environment. Coral reefs support almost 30% of marine life, as well as the global economy. The plight of the world's coral reefs is the focus of the documentary Chasing Coral and this episode of Stats and Stories, where we explore the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics. I'm Rosemary Pennington. Stats and Stories is a production of Miami University's departments of statistics and media, journalism and film, as well as the American Statistical Association. Joining me as regular panelist John Bailer, emeritus professor of statistics at Miami University. Our guest today is James Porter. Porter is a professor of ecology at the University of Georgia. He's an expert in coral climate change and the connections between these issues and human health and social justice. Porter's testimony before Congress on the connections between coral and the productive human society helped lead the US signing the UN Ocean Biodiversity Treaty. He's also the scientific adviser of the award winning Netflix documentary Chasing Coral, and he's at Miami University to deliver the 49th annual Hefner Lecture. Thank you so much for joining us here today.
James Porter
And thank you for the invitation. It's wonderful to be back in Ohio. Oh, yeah, Ohio. That's true. Yes, I grew up here and spent my first 25 years in Tiffin, Ohio, and a little bit in Xenia, which is not so far from here, where we had family farms. But we'll get into that, as the show goes on. Great. That's great. You have a lot of corals there. Fossil cars, yeah, fossil corals. But no, I changed to marine biology. And we can tell that story too. Yeah.
Rosemary Pennington
My question, for the people who may not know, what is coral? And why is it so important?
James Porter
Well, coral is an extraordinary animal. It's related to seeing enemies. But what makes it so different and so special, is that it's also involved in a symbiotic association with living algae, 15% of the coral is actually plant and the remaining 85% is animal. And the effect of that is that whenever a coral wants to eat, it simply has to spread its tentacles in the sunlight. And it's got a salad bar growing inside.
John Bailer
Great, that's a great image. I love that. You know, that's a sign of someone who really thinks a lot about communicating in a way that will connect a scientific concept to a broader audience. So kudos for that.
James Porter
Well, thank you, that actually comes from my being a teacher where you find that context is more important than content to get an audience involved.
John Bailer
So when I watched the Chasing Coral documentary, The film had some imagery showing just how large some of the coral reefs are. Can you talk a little bit about just how massively big some of these structures are?
James Porter
Well, they are, coral reefs are the only living thing that can be seen from outer space. When you look down from a Space Platform, the structures that you see are the living reef, and that's how large it is visible from space.
John Bailer
I think that, when was it, that the Great Barrier Reef was almost the same size as the East Coast of the US, from Maine to Florida.
James Porter
That's, that's true. It's simply amazing. And yet, coral reefs cover less than 1% of the surface of the planet, only 1%. And you said in your introduction that they have 25% of marine species of plants and animals, the new work from the Smithsonian, is coming to suggest that as much as 30 to 50% of all marine species are found on coral reefs that are 1% of the planet.
Rosemary Pennington
So how do you figure that out? I mean, 50% seems like an incredible number, like how do we know that these reefs are supporting so much biodiversity?
James Porter
Well, we resort to statistics. Oh, yeah, we're doing a rarefaction analysis where you plot the amount that you know, versus the amount that you've sampled, and that curve is going straight up and hasn't leveled.
John Bailer
Wow. So, you know, this is such an incredibly important keystone species and, you know, sort of this, you know, as this species goes, so much of the ecosystem that depends on it. Well, we'll go. So can you just tell us a little bit about kind of, when you describe its connection to that 30 to 50%? What are some of the levels that are supported by the levels of life that are supported by corals?
James Porter
Well, that's a wonderful question because all levels of life are supported all the way from primary. It produces bacteria all the way to the top predator of sharks. But here's an amazing statistic: 85% of the time that a new family order class or phyla first appeared on this planet, it did so on coral reefs. So it isn't just a species diversity that's important. It's the entirety of life. Coral reefs are the museum, the cradle of civilization, and there are museums where they retain species. So the problem is that if we lose coral reefs, we don't just lose the species on them. And the things they provide for humankind, we lose life's ability to generate new life.
John Bailer
So you started this, this idea of quantifying impact. So if we lose this, we have to think about where we are now, and how things change. So can you talk a little bit about this? I noticed in some of your work, that you go back decades in terms of looking at different stressors on coral life. So perhaps a place to start would be, what are some of the stressors that impact the health of corals?
James Porter
Well, the stressors that impact corals, historically, were things like overfishing, and pollution, and invasive species. But recently, the main stressor is climate change because of the temperature. Now, here's the irony, okay, so everybody thinks of coral reefs, they're tropical, you see palm trees, and blue sky and water, beautiful clouds. But the irony is that corals are much closer to the high temperature that will kill them, then to the low temperature that will kill them, you only have to go 1.5 degrees centigrade, above the summer average temperature, and the coral will bleach and turn white, and die. So that number is 1.5 degrees centigrade. That's the number that I gave to John Kerry, when he went to negotiate the Paris Climate Accords. That's why you keep hearing that number, 1.5. That's the number below which we can live in a world with coral reefs, above which we're going to have a challenge to do that. So the main stressor right now is just the heat.
Rosemary Pennington
When did scientists first start to understand that this temperature issue was impacting corals in this way?
James Porter
Well, the first show of temperature as a really important stressor occurred in 1985. So it's really relatively recent, you know, and we had excursions above that 1.5 degrees in Florida Keys elsewhere, and there was this massive die off, and no one knew what it was about. So we began to do laboratory experiments, the kinds of things actually that undergraduates can do, you put a coral in an aquarium and you just raise the temperature a little bit, a little bit, a little bit. And all of a sudden, 1.5 kept coming up as the number above which you cannot go. And so there was the field observation of the corals bleaching and dying. And then the laboratory observation that the students were doing showed that 1.5 degrees threshold, and we put two and two together, and the coral community, I think, really was the first group that got terrified by climate change.
John Bailer
You know, it's interesting when you're talking about the 1.5 degree change, because I've often heard discussions of a two degree change to try to reduce it to, you know, to not exceed a two degree increase in global mean temperature. And I'm thinking that's kind of bad news as a context of the story.
James Porter
Well, the two degrees is a fallback position. I mean, we're trying to be realistic and tell people well, what's the goal and if you're not going to make the 1.5 degrees, well, you shouldn't just stop trying. Let's strive for two degrees. But for coral reefs, that's not good. On the other hand, one of the things that corals can do is they can move a little bit farther north. So we have new coral settling off Fort Lauderdale in the middle of Florida. And off to Georgia for I'm from Savannah, there's an environment called the Grays Reef National Marine Sanctuary. And eventually, it's going to have the water temperature of Miami, and it will have corals there, on the other hand, will extend this story all the way to Boston, Massachusetts. Boston will never have coral reefs, it will have the water temperatures of Miami, Florida, in the next century, not in this century. But it won't have Cole Reese, we're back to the algae again. Because the winters are not too cold then they're too dark. So human beings have changed the temperature of the planet, but not the angle at which sunlight hits it.
Rosemary Pennington
How do coral move larvae?
James Porter
Planktonic larvae, the adults are sessile; they've got their core reef skeletons that they attach to the seafloor. But the planktonic larvae can drift, and they do drift with the Gulf Stream going north. And right now many of those coral larvae settle on Gray's reef off Savannah, Georgia, but they don't survive, because it's too cold. But as the world warms, those temperatures will move north.
John Bailer
So how far north can they go? I mean, if you've disappointed our friends in Boston, no,
James Porter
It's probably Beaufort, North Carolina is probably somewhere there at Cape Hatteras. Anything farther than that, just too dark in the winter.
Rosemary Pennington
James, you've mentioned coral bleaching a couple of times, what exactly is Coral bleaching?
James Porter
Coral bleaching is when the coral turns white. And it does that because it loses the algae. So the sea anemone part of the coral can do just fine, and it will survive those higher temperatures. But the algae, we essentially cook them, we're cooking the spinach is what we're doing. And as a result, when the algae dies, the flesh of the sea anemone is transparent. And you see right through it to the polar white limestone skeletons underneath.
John Bailer
So when this happens, you know, is there any recovery? Is it possible to have kind of a, you know, if things sort of settled down? If it does?
James Porter
Yes, thank you for that question. So the first year, what happens is the algae die, and they bleach, and the coral can survive from the fat reserves that the algae have provided it in the last year. But if there's a subsequent bleaching, a second year of bleaching, then they don't have the energy to survive. And in the second year, they die. So corals can survive a severe bleaching event for one year, but not two consecutive years. So that's the problem with climate change. We're worried that these sequential bleaching years will occur back to back and 2040 is the year that we have chosen, that is highly likely from a statistical point of view, to start occurring.
John Bailer
Wow. You know, there's so much to process and as you're describing this, I'm you know, thinking about this amazing resource that supports 30 to 50% of marine life, you describe it. So talk to us a little bit about the human connection to this. I mean, you know, part of your interests, you know, is the idea of human health and social justice and how it connects to corals to help connect the dots for us.
James Porter
Absolutely. So there are 180 sovereign nations on the earth, 90 of them that's half have coral reefs within their territorial boundaries. And the United States, of course, is one of those with Florida and Hawaii, but of the other 90 nations, again, almost three quarters of them, many of their people have their sole source of income and protein coming from those coral reefs. That's where those countries get their hard currency. Fact, we made a bumper sticker in Jamaica that said, protecting the reef hard corals equals hard currency. But if we lose coral reefs, which has mostly been caused by developing countries burning fossil fuel, coal, oil and natural gas, then the economies and the livelihoods and the cultures of those other 90 sovereign nations on Earth are threatened.
Rosemary Pennington
You're listening to Stats and Stories and today we're talking to James Porter, about the health of the world's coral reefs. Why did you decide to participate in Chasing Coral?
James Porter
Oh, that's actually a wonderful long story. Actually. It started out here in Ohio, where I was growing up in Tiffin and near Lake Gary and of course, I learned to swim and I got my senior life saving certificate. And then I get to college and all freshmen have to take calisthenics, you know, jumping jacks, and I went to the PE department and I said, No, I don't want to take jumping jacks for a whole semester. Can I do something else? I said, Well, if you take one of these PE courses, you'll get out of jumping jacks. And I said, Well, I'll find one and I signed up for the pool thinking it was billiards but it wasn't and they sat us down at the pool. And he said this year we're teaching, we're gonna teach scuba, and we've got 40 people here, I've only got 20 places in the class. How many of you are seniors? 19 people raise their hands. I was a freshman. Then he looks over the group and he says how many of you have seen your life saving? I've raised my hand because of what I'd learned in Ohio. He says you're in the class. So after that, I got a job after my senior year as a dining assistant and the rest is history. I majored in entomology. Go figure, I now work on the one environment on Earth that has no insight. But it was biology before but at any rate, so I never really looked back, and I kept my Marine Sciences going. And also as a college teacher, I was in the classroom. And unlike many vaunted research scientists at Arwen institutions, I decided to pay attention to the people who are paying my salary. So I, I cared about teaching, and that ability to explain why you'd be interested in a subject caught the interest of Jeff or Loski, who was the director of chasing coral. And he had seen my before and after images from Jamaica and how the roof was changing. And he said, Dr. Porter, we'd like to interview you for a film we're making. I didn't know him. I didn't know anything about this. I said, Okay, how long will it take? You know, so one hour turned into three, three hours turned into three days. And at the end, Jeff asked me, will you be our chief scientist? And I said, Hell, yes.
Rosemary Pennington
Yeah. That's incredible.
John Bailer
So as you reflect on some of the problems that you've worked on, in terms of research questions associated with corals, what were some of the first questions you worked on? So I've got this is going to be this drives Rosemary crazy, because I asked these multiple Yeah, she saw the multiple part question, because I'm curious about the kinds of questions you asked initially, when you started investigating corals, how that changed over time and what the future might be.
James Porter
So that was a logical one, just one, that's great. But it's an extraordinary evolution of what I do. I mean, I started out at the smallest level of biological organization, I was measuring the micrograms of oxygen per centimeter squared per hour of how corals photosynthesize. But the problem was, and how I got to the big picture, is that while I'm doing all of this tiny minute laboratory work, I'm watching the reef around me die. And I've gone then from micrograms per centimeter squared per hour, to hectares per kilometer, per millennia. This is what we're seeing. And it's just looking at the world around you, looking at things that change. So I went first place in the Ohio State Fair science fair. And I did that with a study on butterflies from Seneca County, Ohio. And what I showed was that the first survey of butterflies in Seneca County was done in the early 1900s. And he had something like 58 species, but by the time I collected there in Tiffin, and the surroundings 1965, we were down 45. And the title of my state science fair project was where all the butterflies went. And what I think had happened in Seneca County, of course, is that my family farms had farmed it, we had taken the natural environments, and we had converted them to farmland. So here I am a child, you know, with grandparents on both sides, being farmers, who is seeing the world around him change. And in many good ways, of course, because that is the wonderful background that I came from, that allowed me to go to a good school and then go to college. But the world changes.
Rosemary Pennington
And we Ohioans know that you gave this testimony before Congress that again helped push the US to sign this biodiversity treaty. How did you prepare for that testimony? And what will you trust? What was your goal, as you were preparing for it? Like, what were you hoping you would get these lawmakers to do? I'm assuming besides signing the treaty, right, I'm assuming there must have been something else you are pushing for?
James Porter
Well, in preparing to speak to Congress, I was given good advice. And that was you're going to be speaking to third graders. So keep it simple. Keep the message direct. Keep it clear.
John Bailer
So as a quick follow up, can you give us an example of one of the hard questions you received and one of the easy questions you received?
James Porter
Oh, yeah, they called me a junk scientist. Oh, lovely. Well, and the thing is, part of that came from the fact that in preparing our 2019 biodiversity assessment, we had to use statistics to show that Ah, life forms all across the planet were winking out. And one of the questions is, well, you know, they're probably there and you just didn't see them. And that's, that's the kind of skepticism that you get. But you, you know, you can't assume that everybody's going to be as familiar with numbers as the kind of us who are around this table. But you have to rely on presenting things that are not fake news. So one of the things that I did in the testimony is I showed a pair of before and after examples, of which the coral reef was healthy. And then after the coral reef had died. And in the particular example that I chose to show there was one coral that had survived small and in the lower part of the picture. But I said, Okay, you have a right, you have a responsibility to be skeptical of the things that you see here. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to circle this coral, which you see in this devastated landscape of dead coral. And we're going back to the previous picture that I showed you. And there it is, this is not fake news.
John Bailer
So it sounds like that imagery is a major part of telling the story of change, finding a way to connect and try to influence in a way that's irrefutable. You know, assuming that there's, you know, people are not gonna accuse you of deep, deep fakes and photographic manipulation.
James Porter
Right. That's very recent. Yeah.
John Bailer
So I think that I'm hearing you tell stories in ways that are really important. And so I've been convinced over the course of doing this podcast of of how narrative is such a critical aspect of trying to convince people of positions, that it it ultimately overwhelms data people, people are convinced by a strong story that has this data narrative element, can you talk a little bit about the importance of narrative to try to convey the message of why this is important work, and we need to act on it?
James Porter
I would love to do that. Narrative is something that you learn as a teacher, you learn to engage, you learn to understand, you learn to use examples that are common enough that people will understand. So for instance, another thing that I did in the testimony is that we showed coral growth rings, and I explained, these are just like tree rings. And I got that expression of nodding at people. Yeah, we know about tree rings. And I said, Well, coral growth rings are special, because the limestone that's being deposited in the ring carries with it the temperature of the water in which it was deposited. So we know that these temperature increases that we're talking about are real. And again, they are not fake news. So narrative is a word that came up three times with Jason coral. The first is one, we won first place in Sundance. That was fun. Oh, my goodness, that's so cool. It was snowing. And everybody would come up and shake your hands. And we were on a red carpet. When does that ever happen? emissions? Good, gracious, any rate. When Robert Redford announced the award for chasing coral, he said it is an emotional narrative. That works. And, and that was we were proud of that. Then when we won the Peabody award for excellence in journalism. They cited us for a science narrative that matters. And in the final competition, we were invited to compete with a number of wonderful science films at the Emmy Awards. And I sat next to Sir David Attenborough, who expected to win for his entry, blue planet. But Chase and coral one, he was very gracious about his loss. But what the National Academy of Arts and Sciences said is that this was an emotional narrative of science. And that's why we won.
Rosemary Pennington
I say, before we wrap up, I do want to know how you went from entomology to coral psychology. Did you make that leap? And how did corals become what you focused your life's work on?
James Porter
Well, the first job after I graduated, I was actually going to the University of Kansas to have a forest Entomology Department. When I was going there, I applied and got in. And I, you know, I had accepted. And I got this job with a marine biologist in the summer, and we went to the country of Panama. And the director of the Smithsonian was running around, swearing like a sailor and I won't repeat what he said. But he said, My home institution, the Smithsonian, is telling me that I'm going to be fired unless I follow these new rules by a federal organization known as OSHA, occupational health and safety. Deep, which had just come into being, and they require us to dive with a buddy. And he looks around at me and everybody standing in the lobby says, Does anybody here have a scuba license? I raised my hand, right back to learning to get my seat or lifesaving right here in Lake Erie. And I got into the water with Martin on one hand. And I didn't know anything that I saw. I bought a kit from Ohio, for goodness sake. I'd never been in the ocean before. And so I thought I'd study it for the rest of my life. So now I have a problem. I've been admitted to the University of Kansas. But the only place that I applied to that had both entomology and marine biology was Yale University. And I had turned them down to go to Kansas, because I had been at Yale as an undergraduate. But I called Yale from Panama City. And I said, I know I told you, I wasn't coming. But can I change my mind, please? And they said, Yes. And after that, I called Kansas and said, I wasn't coming. So life isn't linear. Stay open, stay, stay connected.
John Bailer
I'm a big fan of serendipity in terms of paths and trajectories. So I'd like to close with a question related to what is it that we can do? I mean, you've done a great job of telling the story of impending change and disaster that could occur if we did not make some changes. So what on the positive end? Can we act now?
James Porter
Well, I used to tell students, the best thing to do was to vote. Vote your conscience and vote for green initiatives. Now I'm telling students to run for office. Change the World by changing the politics, that is burdening the greening of America. Do all the common sense things like recycling, trying to buy local foods, which is very easy in Ohio to do and supporting all of the initiatives that reduce our carbon footprint? Yes, there may be some costs in the short term. But in the long term, what you will preserve is your future.
Rosemary Pennington
That's all the time we have for this episode of Stats and Stories. James, thank you so much for joining us today. Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University's Department of Statistics and media journalism and film and to the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter @StatsAndStories, Apple podcasts or the places where you find podcasts. If you'd like to share your thoughts in the programs and your email to statsandstories@miamioh.edu or check us out at statsandstories.net and be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories, where we discuss the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.