Interview 2

 Ariela Kluk and Sofi Savarese

Mr Roddy

IHSS

4/23/2020

Coral Reefs

In order to learn more about coral reefs in Texas and the plastic around them, Sofi and I interviewed Kelly Drinnen. Kelly’s journey began in Florida where she graduated college with a minor in Spanish and moved to Texas. She did not study Biology, she actually worked with computer science, but her passion for the ocean took over. She wanted to find a way to turn her love for the ocean into a job. She started working at Seaworld and gave tours to people. She worked her way up to being the director of the Education Program and led summer camps. She began working in an aquarium and a few years later got a job at the National Flower Banks Society as the education coordinator.

She spoke to us about the beach clean ups she used to participate in. Kelly, her husband, and her friends would clean up the beach once a month for four years. They mostly found straws from juice boxes, plastic bags, balloons, and rope. They picked all the trash up that they found and wrote the data on data cards and turned them into a research facility. This is an issue because animals are eating and getting entangled in the trash. 

Not only does the plastic affect the animals but it also affects the coral reefs, the plastic fishing nets that fall off fishing boats wrap around coral reefs, the only way to take them off is to break them. The nets rub against the coral breaking them and causing diseases. In Hawaii, organizations are collecting fishing nets to turn them into fule. Kelly told us about her partnership with Turtle Island Restoration Network, they are testing water samples to look at the plastic microfibers in the water. The plastic comes from your clothes and even your face wash. Plastic fibers are breaking off of your clothing in the washing machine and are in the water, she said that this is the most plastic they see in the water. The microfibers in the water are not the only problem, plastic bags floating in the ocean look like jellyfish, and animals eat them. One of the fishermen they know have found plastic in each fish they cut open.

She told us about things the general public can do to keep the reefs safe and clean. She said, “Think more about what you're doing and use less water.'' The amount of water we are extracting is changing things, the more water we use affects the salt levels. This is also affecting the Gulf of Mexico because it is a wetland and it needs saltwater and freshwater, extracting water is taking salt water away. She also told us that in yards, we need to use less chemicals, we don't need  “super green grass”. Fertilizers and weed control runs off into storm drains and gets back to the bayous, then reaching the ocean. Street drains don't get filtered, people dump oils into the drains thinking it will get filtered but it doesn't, it flows into the ocean and affects the reefs. 

Apart from her work with trash and plastic, Kelly also worked in the Flower Garden. The Flower Gardens is a reef off the coast of Texas in the Gulf of Mexico. A current threat to coral is coral bleaching. This is when the coral ejects the algae called zooxanthellae that lives inside it providing food and coloring towards the coral. This happens when the coral is stressed out over its living conditions. In the past few years, there have been many occurrences of mass bleaching events, but the Flower Gardens are currently unaffected. This is due to the depth that the reef is at. The Flower Gardens are around 60 feet underwater so most of the causes for coral bleaching have not yet reached that depth. One of the main problems is ocean temperature. Corals are very picky and will start to bleach if the water temperature varies even 2 degrees from its normal temperature. With the rising amount of CO₂ levels in the water, the temperature is rising quickly making it hard for corals to adjust. But because the Flower Gardens are so far underwater it takes much longer for the temperature to rise. Usually, bleaching events start in late August and early September when the ocean temperatures start to rise. Around this time is when hurricane season starts. Hurricanes actually help benefit the reef because it stirs up all of the warm water so that the coral is not susceptible to it for a long time before it starts to cool off again. Even though natural occurrences like this are helping a lot, the Flower Banks has still seen mass bleaching events in the past. The most recent bleaching event was in 2016 and it is so far the worst.  Because of the current changes occurring in the ocean, scientists say that there will be annual bleaching events by 2040.

Another interesting thing that Kelly mentioned was how oxygen levels in the ocean are killing reefs. A few years ago the East side of the flower banks died and scientists are still unsure of the cause. They have a theory that there was a pocket of water that had no oxygen so all of the sea life inside of it died, not just the coral. Kelly said that this part of the reef will take a while to recover. The Flower Banks are looking at ways to help the reef bounce back. Scientists discovered that when a coral breaks it releases a hormone that tells the coral to grow faster. Knowing this, divers have been breaking small pieces of coral around the Flower Gardens and moving them to the East side of the reef that was completely dead. To help collect their data they attach tags to each of the corals that had a note for people that were diving in that area. The tag says something along the lines of if you see this please take a picture and send it here, with contact information to the Flower Banks Society. This system helped them collect data easier so that they didn't have to plan trips to the reef more frequently.