From ocean corals to island foxes, Wrigley Institute experts seek to save threatened species

Original story by Tomas Weber

Across USC, Wrigley Institute-supported experts are aiding threatened species and ecosystems.

Race Against Extinction

Seven years ago, marine biologist Carly Kenkel began transplanting hundreds of farmed coral specimens to reef habitats off the Florida Keys to study how they grow in natural conditions. But during the unprecedented Caribbean heat wave of summer 2023, she rushed to Florida — only to find 98% of her coral, and much of the surrounding reef, had died.

“A lot of sites were just devastated,” says Kenkel, Wilford and Daris Zinsmeyer Early Career Chair in Marine Studies. “And in the Caribbean, whenever a reef is lost, it doesn’t come back. This system has lost its natural capacity to heal itself.”

In the wake of the catastrophe, many experts deemed Caribbean corals beyond saving, but Kenkel disagreed. Although the reefs can no longer recover naturally, she believed scientists could help by using pioneering techniques. “If we want to save the Caribbean reefs, our only hope is human intervention.”

One of those novel methods is best described as IVF for coral: Scientists would freeze coral eggs and sperm for future use while banking living specimens in aquariums. This buys time while the world works to slow climate change. “It’s a last-resort insurance policy,” says Kenkel, associate professor of biological sciences. “But the biology is tricky. Spawning happens only once a year, so it’s a race against time.”

VIDEO: Carly Kenkel talks with legendary oceanographer Sylvia Earle about why we can still have hope for the world’s coral reefs

Kenkel and a team of coral scientists and conservation experts are pushing for an international biobank network to store coral genetic material and rapid-response teams to temporarily relocate coral during extreme heat events.

But coordinating action is no small feat. The Caribbean’s coral reefs extend across more than 30 separate territories, each with its own regulations and priorities.

“From the coral’s perspective, it’s one interconnected system. But from the human geopolitical viewpoint, it’s much more complex,” says Kenkel. Nevertheless, she’s optimistic, citing a successful coral breeding program on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef as proof that intervention can work.

The Kenkel Lab is also researching why some corals can handle warmer waters better than others. Coral is a meta organism — a partnership between the coral animal and the algae that feed it. By introducing more heat-tolerant algae, scientists can help corals adapt. “It’s already happening naturally,” Kenkel says, “but humans can speed up the process. It’s the easiest lever to pull.”

The Power of the Ocean

Selectively breeding marine life isn’t just good for biodiversity, it could also help fight climate change, restore polluted coastlines, support agriculture and open up a wealth of new business opportunities.

The waters off California’s coast were once home to flourishing kelp forests. These fast-growing brown algae sheltered a teeming variety of marine creatures while absorbing megatons of carbon from the atmosphere every year. Kelp is also useful above sea level — its extract helps crops become more drought resistant, and the algae is used in everything from frozen foods to toothpaste and pharmaceuticals.

But kelp is sensitive to heat. When water temperatures exceed 70 degrees, it begins to die. Over the last decade, marine heatwaves have wiped out more than 90% of the kelp forests along a 200-mile stretch of the Northern California coast.

Biologist Sergey Nuzhdin has a rescue plan. In 2022, he founded Kelp Ark, a nonprofit kelp nursery and seed bank. The goal of this partnership between USC Dornsife and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is to selectively breed kelp that can survive warmer waters and absorb more carbon from the atmosphere.

“If you planted wild kelp to absorb one gigaton of carbon, you would need roughly a million square kilometers,” says Nuzhdin, professor of biological sciences. “But with kelp bred for higher carbon absorption, we estimate we would need only a fifth of that.”

Nuzhdin envisions large-scale kelp farms off the coast of Los Angeles. Just five miles from Santa Monica, the Hyperion sewage treatment plant — one of the largest in the world — discharges treated wastewater into the ocean around the clock. The excess nitrogen fuels algae blooms, sickens marine life and pollutes L.A.’s beaches.

“If you put a kelp farm out there, it would suck up a substantial portion of that excess nitrogen from the wastewater,” says Nuzhdin. “It would clean the water, make the beaches far more pleasant, help California agriculture — and turn a profit.”

This year, though, Nuzhdin has an even more urgent task. In January, his team of Kelp Ark divers surveyed the murky waters off Pacific Palisades, looking for wildfire damage to kelp forests. What they found was an apocalyptic scene: Ash and debris had wreaked as much havoc on the underwater forest as they had on land.

Nuzhdin’s race to stockpile genetic material from kelp and create more resilient varieties is on.

The Road to Conservation

In the 1990s, the island fox — a cat-sized animal found only on California’s Channel Islands — experienced a catastrophic decline and was on the brink of extinction. But by 2016, thanks to a famously successful captive-breeding program, the species was removed from the endangered list.

“It was one of the greatest conservation success stories ever and the fastest mammal recovery in the history of the Endangered Species Act,” says biologist Suzanne Edmands.

But Edmands recently discovered a silent threat. After analyzing genetic samples from before and after the population crash, the professor of biological sciences found that the genetic diversity of the foxes had dropped dramatically.

“Despite all the celebrations about the population rebound, the genetics are even worse than they were before,” she says. “That makes them highly vulnerable to disease and environmental change.”

Edmands hopes her findings will lead to more rigorous monitoring of island foxes — and serve as a reminder that numbers alone don’t tell the full story of recovery.

Carly Kenkel’s faculty chair is held by the Wrigley Institute, and she has won multiple Faculty Innovation Awards to support her research. The institute has also provided fellowships for graduate students and undergraduate interns in her lab. Wrigley Institute Senior Scientist Diane Kim assists with Sergey Nuzhdin’s kelp seed-banking research, and the institute has provided fellowships for graduate students in the lab. Suzanne Edmands’s long-term research on Channel Island foxes has been supported for more than a decade by a grant from the Offield Family Foundation through the Wrigley Institute.

Read the full story on the USC Dornsife website >>

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