The eyes dilate. The body is thrown temporarily off-kilter by the 450 gallons of seawater stacked from floor to ceiling. You have entered what is essentially a high-tech coat closet bathed in a ruby-red glow. The total effect is that of a darkroom, but you won't find photographs here; instead, this space has been carved out of an already crowded aquarium to save some of the most critical creatures on the planet: corals.
“Conservation and restoration of corals — that's the ultimate goal here,” said Albright, who created this Spawning Lab in 2018. Most restoration efforts to date have focused on the coral's unique ability to clone itself, which entails breaking off fragments of a coral’s brittle branches and propagating them in a damaged part of a reef or a nursery. Though this technique has shown promise in increasing coral cover, it risks decreasing genetic diversity, leaving corals more susceptible to climate change and disease.
This is especially important when considering the genetic work happening in a basement in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, where López-Nandam, Larkin, Albright and Payne have been holed up on the eve of Thanksgiving, pacing between the Spawning Lab and a war room of sorts, counting the minutes, ticking off conditions on a whiteboard and anxiously waiting for their corals to spawn.
That’s why everything in this little laboratory is timed precisely according to this underwater world: the lunar cycles, the water temperature and the crimson glow that simulates the time of night in Palau, where these corals are from. “We were able to show that there's a lot of genetic diversity even within a single generation, and that's really encouraging from a conservation and restoration side of things,” she said.