Biobanking Corals: One Woman’s Mission to Save Coral Genetics in Turks and Caicos to Rebuild Reefs of the Future

Alizee Zimmermann saw corals dying en masse and built a living biobank to hold corals on land. With ocean temperatures hitting unprecedented highs due to climate change, she doesn’t plan on putting them back.

PROVIDENCIALES, Turks and Caicos—On a recent Wednesday afternoon, a group of high school students studying marine science crowded inside a 540-square-foot office turned scientific lab set atop a police station at a popular marina. The students hovered over a sky blue fiberglass water tank as they prepared to watch a special group of corals eat.

 It was feeding time at the Turks and Caicos Reef Fund coral lab and the animals could sense it. 

“Did you give them their wake up call?” said Alizee Zimmermann, the organization’s executive director who built the lab after realizing corals were dying en masse in the ocean. 

“Yes, I did,” her colleague, Gracie Perry-Garnette, responded. 

Moments earlier, the coral aquarist had used a turkey baster to spurt tiny clouds of freeze dried phytoplankton and fishmeal into the tank to wet the animals’ appetite. Like Pavlov’s dog, their tentacles extended, eagerly reaching for more. 

One by one, Perry-Garnette target fed each coral colony made of hundreds or thousands of individual animals called polyps, squirting the nutritious slurry closer to their mouths as Zimmermann and the students watched.

“Some of their mouths open up wide enough you can see into their stomachs,”she told the students as she fed a boulder brain coral, named after its meandering cerebral-like ridges. In between these ridges, tiny slits began to open wide within grass green colored valleys, exposing viewpaths to the animals’ gastric cavities as they ingested their meal. 

Nearly 200 coral colonies are housed in this lab serving as a living biobank for some of the most vulnerable reef-building species at-risk of extinction due to climate change and disease in the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean. To keep them alive and preserve their genetic diversity, they will stay on land indefinitely, Zimmermann told the visiting students. 

“It’s a Noah’s ark of the species,” she said. “We cannot put animals into a burning house.” 

The Global Coral Reef Crisis

Record breaking ocean temperatures and disease are killing the world’s coral reefs, which provide food and habitat to a quarter of all marine life and support the livelihoods and wellbeing of an estimated 1 billion people, according to the World Resources Institute. 

In the last 50 years, more than than ninety percent of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions has been absorbed by the ocean, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports. This has resulted in the upper ocean layers experiencing significant temperature increases, causing heat-related stress to many reef-building corals that grow in shallow tropical waters. Last year, NOAA’s 34th annual State of the Climate report said that the average global sea-surface temperature reached an all time high of 66.18 degrees Fahrenheit.

“The ocean temperatures got hotter and stayed hot for longer than any other time in recent history, or recorded history that we have,” said Zimmermann.

Earlier this year, NOAA declared the fourth global coral bleaching event due to rising temperatures. Corals throughout the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Ocean basins were so stressed they expelled the marine algae that lived in their tissue called zooxanthellae, which under healthy conditions provides the animals with food, energy and nutrients, as well as their color. Entire reefs turned ghostly white. 

In some cases, bleached corals can recover if temperatures cool, but prolonged marine heatwaves like what they’ve been experiencing in the last year lessen their chances of survival. “If it goes on for too long, and they can’t re-recruit the algae, then that’s where we see the mortality,” said Jennifer Koss, director of NOAA’s Coral Reef Conservation Program.

Prior to the most recent mass bleaching, reefs had already been decimated along the Florida Reef Tract and throughout the Caribbean by a mysterious waterborne disease known as Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease. 

It was first detected off the coast of Miami in 2014 and has attacked more than 20 species of hard reef-building corals in nearly 30 countries or territories, eating away the animals’ live tissue and killing entire coral colonies within weeks, sometimes days. 

Zimmermann was scuba diving when she first spotted signs of the disease near West Caicos, an island about 13 miles southwest of Providenciales. It was a moment that would change the course of her life. 

Around the World and Back

As a child, Zimmermann learned how to swim before she could walk, she said. She was born in Turks and Caicos and raised by her French-Moroccan mother who moved to the islands from Miami in the 1970s for a job in the airline industry. 

While at work, her mom would often leave her with a friend who would take her to swim regularly with a wild dolphin named Jojo that enjoyed socializing with humans. It was during these early childhood swims that she fell in love with the ocean. The feeling of weightlessness in the water was addictive and comforting. 

Nearly 6 ft tall, Zimmermann, whose dark brown hair is cut in a chin-length bob, has always towered over many around her and felt an ease in the water she did not always feel on land. “I’ve always been very clumsy, and being in the water, being able to move in three dimensions and not feel that weight, is something that’s always been incredibly important to me, and incredibly powerful,” she said. 

At twelve-years-old, she became certified to scuba dive and never tired of exploring coral reefs, which she said resembled “underwater cities” comprised of endless shapes, textures and colors. “Everywhere you look, there would be some kind of hidden critter just within, within all the crevices and depths.” 

Cover photo:  Alizee Zimmermann applies antibiotic paste to a star coral affected by Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease in Turks and Caicos. Credit: Patricia Guardiola Slattery