SCIENTISTS ARE DEEP-FREEZING CORALS TO REPOPULATE THE OCEAN

Summary from the TLDR newsletter

Coral reefs are degrading at an unprecedented rate due to pollution, overfishing, and destructive forestry and mining practices on land. Most corals could go extinct within a few generations. The Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute's Reef Recovery Initiative aims to help save coral reefs using cryopreservation, a novel approach that involves storing and cooling coral sperm and larvae at very low temperatures and holding them in government biorepositories. The frozen assets can be used to help reseed the oceans and restore living reefs even 100 years from now. Cryopreserved sperm has already been used to produce new coral across the Caribbean.