Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

by Elizabeth Kolbert

Coyotes profit from human disturbance but skirt areas dense with human activity; they have been dubbed “misanthropic synanthropes.” In botany, “apophytes” are native plants that thrive when people move in; “anthropophytes” are plants that thrive when people move them around.

And so we’ve created another class of animals. These are creatures we’ve pushed to the edge and then yanked back. The term of art for such creatures is “conservation-reliant,” though they might also be called “Stockholm species” for their utter dependence on their persecutors.

Since 2006, the Park Service has been delivering supplemental meals, including brine shrimp and fairy shrimp—Grubhub for fish.

There is no exact tally of how many species, like the pupfish, are now conservation-reliant. At a minimum, they number in the thousands. As for the forms of assistance they rely on, these, too, are legion. They include, in addition to supplemental feeding and captive breeding: double-clutching, headstarting, enclosures, exclosures, managed burns, chelation, guided migration, hand-pollination, artificial insemination, predator-avoidance training, and conditioned taste aversion.

That harsh conditions should beget diversity is textbook Darwinism. In a desert, populations become physically and then reproductively isolated, much as they do on archipelagoes. The fish of the Mojave and the neighboring Great Basin Desert are, in this sense, like the finches of the Galápagos; each inhabits its own little island of water in a sea of sand.

Pister collected all the Owens pupfish left at Fish Slough, with the intention of moving them to a nearby spring. They fit into two buckets. “I distinctly remember being scared to death,” he would later write. “I had walked perhaps fifty yards when I realized that I literally held within my hands the existence of an entire vertebrate species.”

“What good are pupfish?” they’d demand. “What good are you?” Pister would respond.

Like the Owens pupfish, the Shoshone pupfish was believed to be extinct, then was rediscovered, in this case in a culvert bordering an RV park. Susan Sorrells owns the RV park, as well as the town’s only restaurant and its sole store. With the help of various state agencies, she has created a set of pools for the Shoshone pupfish, which have proved a great deal more adaptable than their Devils Hole cousins.

The town of Pahrump also used to have a fish of its own, the Pahrump poolfish (Empetrichthys latos), which still exists, though, sadly, not in Pahrump. The fish’s original habitat was a spring-fed pond into which someone, either by design or by chance, released goldfish. The goldfish flourished, while the poolfish crashed.

Since its rescue, the Pahrump poolfish has lived on in an aquatic diaspora, wandering—or, really, being trucked—from one pond of exile to another.

Much of Guadalupe’s job involves trying to prevent the poolfish from encountering anything like a real predator. As people move more species into the desert, new emergencies keep arising.

“There’s one over there,” Guadalupe said, pointing to what looked like a small lobster poking its head out from under some muck. It was a red swamp crayfish. Red swamp crayfish are native to the Gulf Coast, from Mexico to the Florida panhandle. They’ve been moved around a lot because people like to eat them. For their part, red swamp crayfish like to eat poolfish.

Her professor explained that corals, which are tiny animals, have, living inside their cells, even tinier plants. Gates wondered how such an arrangement was possible. “I couldn’t quite get my head around the idea,” she said. In 1985, she moved to Jamaica to study corals and their symbionts.

Two of the region’s dominant reef-builders—staghorn coral and elkhorn coral—were being devastated by an ailment that became known as white-band disease. (Both are now classified as critically endangered.)

In 1998, a so-called global bleaching event, caused by a spike in water temperatures, killed more than fifteen percent of corals worldwide. Another global bleaching event took place in 2010. Then, in 2014, a marine heat wave set in and didn’t let up for almost three years.

Corals thrive in alkaline waters, but fossil-fuel emissions were making the seas more acidic.

Gates explained that Kaneohe Bay had been the inspiration for the super-coral project. For much of the twentieth century, it had been used as a dump for sewage. By the 1970s, its reefs had mostly collapsed. Seaweed had taken over, and the water in the bay had turned an eerily bright green. But then a sewage-treatment plant came online. Later, the state teamed up with the Nature Conservancy and the University of Hawaii to devise a contraption—basically, a barge equipped with giant vacuum hoses—to suck algae off the seabed. Gradually, the reefs started to revive.

I could see, nestled inside the coral’s tiny cells, their tinier plant symbionts. Another day, we went snorkeling. It was two years into the marine heat wave that had begun in 2014, and many of the coral colonies in the bay were a ghostly white. Most of them, Gates observed, probably wouldn’t make it. But others were still colorful—tan or brown or greenish. These corals were doing fine.

The aim wasn’t to provide an optimal environment, as at the pupfish tank, but more or less the reverse: the corals were being raised under calibrated stress. Those that thrived—or at least survived—would be crossbred and their offspring thrown back into the tanks for more stress.

“I’m a realist,” Gates told me at one point. “I cannot continue to hope that our planet is not going to change radically. It already is changed.” People could either “assist” corals in coping with the change they’d brought about, or they could watch them die.

I was arranging to visit Gates again, to see how the super corals were coming along, when she wrote to tell me she was dying. Only she didn’t put it that way. Instead, she said that she had lesions on her brain, that she was going to Mexico for treatment, and that, whatever the disease was, she was going to beat it.

Darwin knew that corals were animals and that reefs were their handiwork. Still, the formations baffled him. “These low hollow coral islands bear no proportion to the vast ocean out of which they abruptly rise,” he wrote. How, he wondered, was such an arrangement possible?

The explanation he came up with—controversial at the time, but now understood to be correct—is that at the center of every atoll lay an extinct volcano. Corals had attached themselves to the volcano’s flanks, and as the volcano expired and slowly sank away, the reef had kept growing upward, toward the light.

The same month that Darwin published his monograph on reefs—May 1842—he sketched out for the first time his revolutionary ideas about evolution, or “transmutation,” as the phenomenon was referred to in his day. The sketch was written in pencil and, in the words of one of his biographers, amounted to “thirty-five folio pages of crabbed, elliptical scrawl.” Darwin stuck the essay in a drawer. In 1844, he expanded it to two hundred and thirty pages, only once again to hide the manuscript away.

Darwin was convinced that evolution was unobservable. The process occurred too gradually to be perceived over the course of one human lifetime, or even several.

To Darwin, Nuns and fantails and tumblers and Barbs provided crucial, albeit indirect, support for transmutation. Simply by choosing which birds could reproduce, pigeon breeders had developed lineages that barely resembled one another.

“Feeble man” is changing the climate, and this is exerting strong selective pressure. So are myriad other forms of “global change”: deforestation, habitat fragmentation, introduced predators, introduced pathogens, light pollution, air pollution, water pollution, herbicides, insecticides, and rodenticides.

The heat wave that began in Hawaii in 2014 reached the Great Barrier Reef in 2016, producing another global bleaching event. By the time it ended, the following year, more than ninety percent of the Great Barrier Reef had been affected and something like half its corals had perished. Fast-growing species were particularly hard-hit;

In a bleaching event, it’s the corals’ relationship with their symbionts that breaks down. As water temperatures rise, the algae go into overdrive and begin to give off dangerous levels of oxygen radicals. To protect themselves, the corals expel their algae and, as a consequence, turn white.

If a heat wave breaks in time, corals can attract new symbionts and recover. If it’s too prolonged, they starve to death.

Some bacteria associated with corals seem particularly adept at scavenging oxygen radicals; one idea the group was exploring was whether it might be possible, by administering some sort of marine probiotic, to make reefs more bleaching-resistant.

The corals’ algal symbionts, too, might be manipulated. Of the many different types that exist—there are thousands—some seem to be associated with better heat tolerance. Perhaps it would be possible to coax corals to drop less hardy symbionts and take up with a more robust crowd, the way one might coax a teenager to find more suitable friends.

It’s situated near the city of Townsville,

POWERPUFFS SAVE THE DAY sorry

As at Gates’s lab on Moku o Lo‘e, water conditions at the SeaSim can be controlled to produce calibrated stress. In some tanks, the pH and temperature have been set to simulate conditions in the Coral Sea in 2020. Others simulate the hotter seas of 2050, and others the even grimmer conditions expected by the end of the century.

Even a chunk of coral the size of a child’s fist is home to many thousands of polyps, all of which are connected to each other and form a thin layer of living tissue.

Coral sex is a rare and amazing sight. On the Great Barrier Reef, it takes place once a year, in November or December, shortly after a full moon. During the event, called a mass spawning, billions of polyps release in synchrony tiny, bead-like bundles. These bundles, which contain both sperm and eggs, float to the surface and break apart. Most of the gametes become fish food or simply drift away. The lucky ones meet a gamete of the opposite sex and produce a coral embryo.

In the run-up to spawning, each polyp develops a tiny bump, making it seem as if the colony has goose pimples. This is called “setting.” As we looked on, a few of the colonies set. Then, perhaps out of modesty, perhaps out of anxiety, they held back. Gradually, people gave up and started to drift off to bed.

The Great Barrier Reef isn’t a reef so much as a collection of reefs—some three thousand in all—that stretches over one hundred thirty-five thousand square miles, an area larger than Italy.

The number of species that can be found on a healthy patch of reef is probably greater than can be encountered in a similar amount of space anywhere else on earth, including the Amazon rainforest.

Coral reefs are found only in a band that extends along the equator, from about thirty degrees north to thirty degrees south latitude. At these latitudes, there’s not much mixing between the top and the bottom layers of the water column, and essential nutrients, like nitrogen and phosphorus, are in short supply.

(The reason the water in the tropics is often so marvelously clear is that little can survive in it.)

The best answer anyone has come up with is that reef dwellers have developed the ultimate recycling system: one creature’s trash becomes its neighbor’s treasure.

It’s estimated that one out of every four creatures in the oceans spends at least part of its life on a reef.

In concert with various universities and research organizations, GBRMPA was planning to spend at least 100 million Australian dollars (about $70 million in American money) investigating ways it might intercede on the reef’s behalf. These included: deploying underwater robots to reseed damaged reefs, developing some kind of ultrathin film to shade reefs, pumping deep water to the surface to provide corals with heat relief, and cloud-brightening. This last possibility would involve spraying tiny droplets of salt water into the air to create a kind of artificial fog.

But, in the grand scheme of things, artificial selection was just tinkering at the margins.

The Great Barrier Reef might be thought of as the ultimate “entangled bank.” Tens of millions of years of evolution have gone into its creation, with the result that even a fist-sized piece of it is unfathomably dense with life, crammed with creatures “dependent on each other in so complex a manner” that biologists will probably never fully master the relations. And the reef—today, at least—goes on and on.

Genetic engineering is, by now, middle-aged. The first genetically engineered bacterium was produced in 1973. This was soon followed by a genetically engineered mouse, in 1974, and a genetically engineered tobacco plant, in 1983. The first genetically engineered food approved for human consumption, the Flavr Savr tomato, was licensed in 1994; it proved such a disappointment it went out of production a few years later.

With CRISPR, biologists have already created, among many, many other living things: ants that can’t smell, beagles that grow superhero-like muscles, pigs that resist swine fever, macaques that suffer from sleep disorders, coffee beans that contain no caffeine, salmon that don’t lay eggs, mice that don’t get fat, and bacteria whose genes contain, in code, Eadweard Muybridge’s famous series of photographs showing a racehorse in motion.

The Australian Animal Health Laboratory, in the city of Geelong, is one of the most advanced high-containment laboratories in the world. It sits behind two sets of gates, the second of which is intended to foil truck bombers, and its poured-concrete walls are thick enough, I was told, to withstand a plane crash. There are five hundred and twenty air-lock doors at the facility and four levels of security.

As a result of yet another biocontrol effort gone awry, Australia is besieged by a species of giant toad known familiarly as the cane toad. In keeping with the recursive logic of the Anthropocene, researchers at AAHL were hoping to address this disaster with a further round of biocontrol. The plan involved editing the toad’s genome using CRISPR.