Exploring the Great Barrier Reef s Most Dangerous Secrets

On this episode of Awesome Planet, I dive into the science of the Great Barrier Reef. Ocean acidification is a major threat. That's absolutely right. And get up close and personal… Don't try this at home, kids. …with some of its deadliest creatures. Welcome to Awesome Planet. I'm Philippe Cousteau. We're onboard the ship Ocean Free, cruising along the coast of Australia. The Great Barrier Reef stretches along the country's entire northeastern shore and is actually made up of more than 250 individual coral reefs. The part I'm going to explore is just off the coast of Cairns. Unfortunately, a massive tropical cyclone passed through here a few days before I arrived, leaving the ocean muddier than usual. But even though the water won't be crystal clear, I should still see plenty of different animals. Even though it's cloudy, the colors and creatures are still striking. The Great Barrier Reef is home to more than 400 kinds of coral, 1,500 species of fish, and 4,000 types of mollusks. Not to mention an incredible diversity of sponges, anemones, and other ocean animals. But of all the unique creatures living on the Great Barrier Reef, there are a few I don't want to encounter in the wild. You know, a surefire way to know that you've arrived in Australia is that the warning signs, they get a lot more intense. We've come to James Cook University to get up close and personal with some of the most dangerous creatures you can find on the Great Barrier Reef. Jamie Seymour is an associate professor at the Australian Institute of Tropical Health and Medicine at James Cook University. If it bites or stings you or has the capability of killing you, I've either worked on it, we're working on it, or we're going to work on it. The tanks in his research centre are literally full of creatures that can easily kill an adult human. Most people think venomous animals are the exception. Almost 50% of the animal kingdom has some form of venom. So it's not the exception. Explain the difference between venom and poison. Toxins, in general, okay, can be venoms or poisons. Venoms are something that has to be stabbed into you, so you're bitten or stung. Snakes are venomous. A poison is a toxin that you ingest, in other words, you take down through the mouth or absorb across the skin. So, poison frogs, not venomous frogs. Right, because they have the poison on their skin. Exactly. The difference between venom and poison, very, very important. The stonefish is the most venomous fish in the world, and it's one of the animals that Jamie handles the most. So this is the reef stonefish. Look like a rock, a stone, hence why they're called stonefish. So they're basically ambush predators. So they sit in the bottom, they wait for a fish to come past and grab it, swallow it down again. Jamie often films his animals with slow motion cameras to get a better look at how they behave. Shots like this clearly show how the stonefish catches its prey and reveals that it isn't by using venom. It's one of the few venomous animals on the planet that uses venom for defence and defence only. So what we'll do is we'll grab one out of the tank and I'll show you. Okay. It's nice to be replicated at home. You know, don't do this at home. So if we have a look, and you'll see he's got a set of spines. Yep. Now each of those spines has venom sacs associated with it. And it's used for defence because sea snakes and moray eels feed these things. The moray eel will try and get the stonefish to go down face first, because if he takes him down front first, all the spines lay down that way. What the stonefish is trying to do is go down tail first. But then... He gets a mouthful of spines. If left untreated, stonefish venom can kill a person in less than an hour. Most accidental encounters are caused by the fish's extremely effective camouflage and the fact that it tends to lie motionless on the bottom of the ocean floor. This makes it easy for swimmers to step on top of the stonefish and get stung. Imagine this piece of foam is your foot. When you step on the stonefish, the dorsal spines pierce through your skin, while the downward pressure compresses the venom sac and forces it to shoot up and into your foot. One of the reasons Jamie works with the stonefish is to create anti-venom for anyone who is unlucky enough to suffer this kind of accidental encounter. And when we come back, he's going to show me exactly how this dangerous job is done. Welcome back to Awesome Planet. Dr. Jamie Seymour has shown us some of the more dangerous creatures to be found in and around the Great Barrier Reef. And the time he carefully spends with these animals, for example, the stonefish, will help countless people should they have an unfortunate encounter. So Sally, what are we doing right now? We're milking a stonefish. A stonefish. It's not something you hear every day or get to do every day. Or maybe for you it is. Yes, it is. It's definitely not something I get to do every day. Milking is the term scientists use to mean collecting the venom, even though it's very dangerous. It's also very important, especially for potentially lethal animals like the stonefish. We'll get rid of that guy, put him back in the water and grab the next one. What is the point of milking a stonefish? Well, we need to collect the venom so people can do research on the venom and we also need to create anti-venom. Anti-venom is a medicine used to counteract the effects of venom. It's specific to each animal, meaning you must first have stonefish venom in order to make stonefish anti-venom. Settle down. You all right? Yep, he's good. Sally's also telling me the fish is flexing, so if it flexes... So you can feel the muscles tense up a little bit, so you don't want it to flip and potentially... Spike. That would sting me. That would be bad? That would be bad. We're trying to avoid that. Researchers like Jamie collect the venom by sticking a hypodermic needle into the sac and drawing the venom out. The sacs aren't at the top or bottom of the spine. They're about a third of the way down, so I can actually feel them with my finger. They're pretty firm as well. So they're just... Yep, so if you leave your finger... All the venom. Yeah, if you leave your finger just on the side, can you feel it go down? Yeah. It just deflates like a balloon. Yep. So you asked how much venom we got? Out of one stonefish. Look at that. This is enough venom to cause severe pain, paralysis, and seizures. Without treatment, it could lead to heart failure. In Australia, anywhere between 800 and 1,000 people are stung by stonefish each year. So scientists need to make a lot of anti-venom. And then you just insert the needle into it. It's tensing up. It becomes riskier as you get down the back because you need the tail, and the tail flicks more. And watch those front spines as well. The more agitated they get, it'll raise them up. Stonefish are what's known as intertidal animals. They hold water in their gills and can survive on land for several hours. So being out of the water isn't hurting them. However, that doesn't mean they enjoy the process. The animals actually get grumpy. So what we try and do is decrease how grumpy they are. Because if they get grumpy, they stop feeding. If they stop feeding, they stop producing venom. If the animal's happy, we can milk them about every three or four weeks. But it's not unusual if they get grumpy for them to shut down and stop feeding for a month or two. And we won't see venom out of them for another three or four months after that. How do you keep them from getting grumpy? Put them under as little stress as possible, which is why we've got the cloth across their eyes. And try and make this process as quick as possible. Milking stonefish, just another day at the JCU Animal Research Facility. Don't try this at home, kids. When we come back, I feed the world's deadliest snail. No joke, the hairs on the back of my neck are standing up just a little bit. Welcome back to Awesome Planet, I'm Philippe Cousteau. Here at James Cook University, finding ways to counteract fatal venom is a top priority. Make the wrong move with some of the animals here and you're in a world of trouble. Dr. Jamie Seymour has a lot of experience with venomous animals. And one of the first things he's quick to point out is that just because something looks innocent doesn't mean it's harmless. These are cone snails, the most venomous snail in the world. When you start to think about it, people go, snails? People don't think that snails is a venomous thing. These guys are. There are more than 500 different types of cone snails in the world. The ones Jamie has here are known as Conus geographus, and they are the most venomous variety. A single sting from one of these snails has enough toxins to kill several adult men. Most people think of snails just being these things that wander around. These are active predators, so they're fishing for fish. The venom's there to help them catch prey. Watching the cone snail feed is nothing short of terrifying. It essentially sneaks up to a sleeping fish, shoots it with a venomous harpoon-type tooth, and then swallows the now paralyzed but still living fish whole. They're feeding on small little fish. Yep. Why on earth do they have a venom that could kill a grown man? It seems, for lack of a better word, like an overkill. The main reason for things like cone snails is they have no fingers or teeth. So if you kill something or you attack it, if you don't kill it within seconds, it's gone into the deep blue variety and away you go. And you'll never see it again. You'll go away and die somewhere else and become food for something else. Exactly. It just so happens that the byproduct of being able to kill a small fish in a second can potentially kill a human being in a couple minutes. Here's a better look at how the cone snail delivers its sting. That long tentacle at the bottom is what's known as a proboscis. It's similar to an elephant's trunk, only a lot more deadly. What you've got here is a proboscis. You can see it wandering around. And on the end of that is a harpoon or tooth. And that whole thing is locked to a venom gland. So when it finds a fish, it injects that tooth into that animal and then injects venom down that proboscis. No joke, the hairs on the back of my neck are standing up just a little bit watching that. Jamie and his team collect the cone snail's venom by attaching a small piece of fish to the top of a plastic-covered test tube. The snail doesn't know the fish is dead, so it fires its harpoon, which pierces through the plastic and injects the venom into the tube. We supply a lot of venom to a lot of people doing work on the different components that are in this venom. So they've been able to get hold of a component out of this venom that is more effective than morphine as a painkiller. And it appears to be non-addictive. Not only would it ease pain, it could save lives and change medical science as we know it. So you've got to remember these animals have been around for millions of years. They've been working out these toxins for millions of years. The pharmaceutical industry in the world has only been around for a couple of hundred years. They've got the answers. We've just got to find them. There's no anti-venom for cone snail stings. The only so-called treatment is to try to keep victims alive long enough for the toxins to wear off, which makes what I'm about to do more than a little unnerving. Walk me through the process of getting one of these. OK. So once we put some food in the water, they'll smell it, they'll start moving around. There's only two things you've got to remember. The first one is watch the snail get feeding. OK. And the second one is to watch all the other snails. What you're saying is don't look at the camera while I'm trying to get a deadly cone snail. Correct. Yeah, yeah. That's good advice, Jamie. Thank you. Appreciate that. Don't try this at home, kids. Just take it in and dangle it in front. And keep your eye on the animal. So right in front of him. There we go. There you have it. Easy peasy. Isn't that impressive? Impressive is one word for it, for sure. After the break, we explore some of the challenges that threaten life on the Great Barrier Reef. I'm excited to see what comes out of this research. Due to its enormous size, it's virtually impossible to predict the impacts that climate change will have on the Great Barrier Reef. But at the Australian Institute of Marine Science's National Sea Simulator, or SeaSim for short, scientists finally have the tools to begin doing just that. The SeaSim is truly a state-of-the-art marine science research facility. This is like a wonderland in here. All this coral. So much to see. All these fish. At more than 32,000 square feet, it is capable of holding nearly one million gallons of seawater. While allowing scientists the ability to simulate different environmental conditions with an unprecedented level of accuracy. What are some of the different variables that you can manipulate in SeaSim? We can manipulate what we call PCO2, the partial pressure of carbon dioxide, which then alters the pH. And that relates to the issue of ocean acidification. The other one associated with climate change, probably more well known, is temperature. So we can very finely control different temperatures amongst a large number of replicates within SeaSim. Climate change is something people are more familiar with, but ocean acidification in many ways is just as scary. Although coral may look like a dead rock, it is actually home to millions of tiny marine invertebrates. These microscopic creatures secrete calcium carbonate, which hardens to form the coral reef. You have the hard areas, essentially the little apartments and the animals living inside them, and that builds and grows into these enormous reef systems that we see. Ocean acidification is a major threat for them to essentially have the raw materials to build their homes. That's absolutely right. Lina Bey is one of the researchers using the SeaSim to help predict the future of the Great Barrier Reef. What we're really interested in understanding is how corals are going to fare into the future. So we know the oceans are warming and they're becoming more acidic. We can actually simulate those future conditions and we can look at how the corals are coping with those conditions. In addition to changing acidity, scientists have identified rising ocean temperatures as one of the leading threats to coral reefs. When the temperature heats up by as little as 2 or 3 degrees Fahrenheit, it causes the algae that live inside the coral's tissue to be expelled, turning the coral bright white. It's a phenomenon known as bleaching. So this system is mimicking conditions today as they are. That's exactly right. So you can see this guy here, for example, I can lift him out. This is one of the more sensitive species on a reef and it's really very happy. It's got a very nice dark color. That means that the algae in the tissues are nice and dense. Because algae provide the coral with food, coral that has bleached will slowly starve and eventually die. And since the coral forms the backbone for all other life on the reef, its loss is nothing short of catastrophic. So what we've got in this tank here is running the temperatures at 1 degree Celsius warmer than what we're currently experiencing on the reef. So that's what we might expect at about 2050 on the reef. And you can see the coral is really not happy. Yeah, it's not looking too good. But we've got two species of corals here and what you can see is that this species here is clearly coping much better. And so that's one of the things that's actually giving us a lot of hope. That not all coral species are the same and not all coral individuals are the same. This is early on in a five-year study. That's right. Are there any preliminary indications of what we can expect in the next 30 years? Well, we've actually got some really exciting results already. And what we've found is that if we take the baby corals, the larvae, and we expose them to higher temperatures from the moment that they're formed, we can actually train them to have higher temperature tolerance. And so what we're hoping to do is actually to harness that natural ability for conservation. Well, I'll tell you, it's nice to hear some good news because currently there's not a lot to go around. So being able to hear that you're discovering that there is some capacity for adaptation with these corals is really hopeful. And I'm excited to see what comes out of this research over the next few years. It's really terrific. Back at the Great Barrier Reef, the effects of global climate change are already painfully evident. Over the past two years, more than two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef has experienced significant coral bleaching. It's an alarmingly visible reminder that our planet is not alone. The Great Barrier Reef is filled with delicate ecosystems that need our protection if they are to survive. This is why the work that scientists are doing to better understand these systems and their inhabitants is so vitally important. The most exciting thing that I get to do is get to ask questions about how the world is put together, and then design clever experiments to actually test those ideas. For me, the inspiration comes in just finding new stuff and getting an understanding of what's happening. On a daily basis, I get to see stuff that nobody in the world has ever seen before. But the work that is happening today is only the start. It's up to future generations to continue to advance our knowledge so that we can all help ensure our planet has a healthy and sustainable future. If you want to get into this sort of stuff, the number one thing is enthusiasm. Don't let anyone tell you what you can and what you can't do. We need lots of people working on finding solutions to conserve the beautiful ecosystems that we have. I think the world needs us.