Features

This Earth Day, Celebrate our Planet’s Blue Heart

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This Earth Day, we invite you to celebrate the blue heart of our planet: our oceans. The oceans produce half the oxygen we breathe, regulate our climate, sequester vast amounts of carbon, and even control the weather. The Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation focuses on ocean conservation because we want to protect, preserve, and restore the health of our planet’s blue heart— our living oceans.

In 1969, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, USA caught fire. Not a boat on the river, or something in the water — the water itself had so much flammable waste dumped into it that it quite literally caught fire, garnering the attention of the entire nation. That same year….

ANNOUNCING 2022 SCIENCE WITHOUT BORDERS® CHALLENGE SEMI-FINALISTS – AGES 15-19

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Thank you to all the students who applied to the 2022 Science Without Borders® Challenge! We received some truly incredible and inspiring artwork again for this year’s theme titled “Ridge to Reef.” Students were asked to illustrate one or more actions that governments, non-profits, park managers, and indigenous communities can take to preserve coral reefs using a ridge to reef approach to conservation.

Overall, we received 510 qualifying pieces of artwork from 49 different countries. In the 15–19 year-old category, we received 211 submissions. The themes and styles of artwork varied greatly. Some students took a more realistic approach when illustrating the ridge to reef actions that they would take to conserve coral reefs, while others used symbolism and artistic metaphors to convey their messages.

Our judges chose 34 incredible pieces of artwork in the 15-19 year-old group to become semi-finalists. These artists span 11 countries around the world including some that contain tropical coral reefs, such as Indonesia, Kuwait, and the Philippines; and countries that do not have any such as United Kingdom and New Zealand.

Without further ado, please meet our 15-19 year old semi-finalists:

The Protists Prophets: An Innovative Way to Unlock the Past, Present, and Future of Coral Reefs

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Coral reef ecosystems are rapidly declining due to numerous local and global pressures such as climate change and pollution. In response to the coral reef crisis, the Khaled bin Sultan Living Ocean Foundation (KSLOF) conducted the Global Reef Expedition (GRE) to assess the state of coral reefs in 16 countries around the world. The expedition helped generate extensive data collection including coral reef maps and benthic surveys and 2,500 sediment samples from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. After traveling more than 50,000 km conducting research, the GRE’s valuable data opens the curiosity to explore unconventional approaches to globally evaluate coral reef health.

Now, the Khaled Sultan Living Oceans Foundation and the University of Miami, Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science (UM-RSMAS) are working together on a new project called Protist Prophets. Run by Dr. Sam Purkis’s lab at RSMAS and funded by the National Science Foundation, this exciting project uses the sediment samples KSLOF collected on the GRE to evaluate global reef health using benthic foraminifers (forams) as markers of environmental changes and stressors. Our innovative scientific efforts will inform reef conservation strategies and develop non-traditional reef management techniques. Plus, we will assemble the Little Creature with a Big Message educational curriculum using the foram data to complement the foundation’s existing Coral Reef Ecology Curriculum available in the KSLOF Educational Portal.

Foraminifera are windows to understanding long-term coral reef stress

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This guest blog comes from Dr. Alexander Humphreys, a geology lecturer and researcher at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. The Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation is working with Dr. Humphreys and our partners at UM on a new National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded project, “Protists Prophets,” that is looking at benthic sediment samples collected on the Global Reef Expedition (GRE) to assess the state of the coral reef environment over the past 1,000 years.

I am a modern benthic foraminiferal researcher, which means that I study some of the tiniest organisms in the ocean in order to learn about past environmental conditions on coral reefs. However, before we get to this story, let me first explain a bit about these little critters and their importance to science.

Foraminifera, or forams for short, are protists, which are single-celled amoeba-like organisms that grow a protective shell, called a ‘test’. Today there are roughly 4,000 species of forams and they can be found living in all the world’s oceans, from polar environments to the deepest ocean trenches nearly 11 km down. Forams are important to science because they have short lifespans and are sensitive to environmental change. This sensitivity causes rapid shuffling of species abundances over time as the environmental conditions and climates gradually—and sometime abruptly—fluctuate. When the life of a foram comes to an end, the story does not stop there because even though the organism decays, its hard protective test preserves well and fossilizes, laying down evidence of these population changes in the geologic record—one that goes back 500 million years! I approach this deep fossil record of foraminifera like the pages in a book that tells the story of oceanic and environmental change. The trick is learning how to read the story that these little protists have to tell.

One month left to apply for the Science Without Borders® Challenge!

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There is still time to participate in our international student art competition, the Science Without Borders® Challenge! Students must submit their artwork by March 7 for a chance to win up to $500 in prizes. 

This year the Science Without Borders® Challenge theme is “Ridge to Reef.” This type of conservation approach works to conserve coral reefs by addressing issues across the entire watershed, from the top of the land down the streams, through mangrove forests and seagrass beds, and out to the reefs themselves. For this year’s theme, we are asking students to create a piece of art that illustrates one or more ways people can use this conservation approach to protect coral reefs.