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Speaker talk: Russ Kelley on Coral Identification - Sat 2/5 4pm

Do you plan to attend Speaker Talk: Russ Kelley on Coral Identification


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    18

Chromis

Supporting Member
Our first speaker talk of the year will be on Saturday, Feb 5 at 4pm over Zoom (virtual event).

Russ Kelley is ZOOMING in from Townsville, Australia to help us identify corals! He will explain coral taxonomy and the work that led up to his Coral Finder guide.

About Russell:
Russell Kelley is a science communicator specialising in coral identification, reefs and the marine world. In a career spanning 40 years he has worked as a marine educator, film maker, author, scientist and communication designer.
His published work spans scientific papers, book chapters, educational tools and international natural history television productions. He is manager of BYOGUIDES and author of the Indo Pacific Coral Finder and the Reef Finder - uniquely designed searchable, smart ID guides which form the basis of the training courses he runs world wide. Russell and his team have trained over a thousand people in coral identification.
A coral reef geologist and biologist by training Russell has a passion for telling stories about the natural world. In particular he loves revealing the 'big picture meaning' in the smallest of things. He is a recipient of the Australian Coral Reef Society medal for science communication and a Churchill Fellowship.


You can find out more about the guide and Russel at: https://byoguides.com/pages/about-byoguides

(We’ll figure out the Zoom link soon and post it here)
 
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I’m looking forward to it! The ways we identify and talk about corals in the hobby leaves a lot of room for improvement. His coral and reef guides are well known for being both rigorous and approachable, with a focus on education.
 
Reminder that this zoom meeting is coming up on Saturday, please RSVP in the poll if you haven’t already. We will send out the Zoom invites to those on the Yes and Maybe lists as usual.

Russ is planning to address some frequently asked questions about coral identification and there will opportunities for questions.
 
Our speaker talk is coming up tomorrow at 4pm. I encourage everyone interested to make sure you RSVP using the poll above, so you can receives the Zoom info.
 
My takeaway from this talk is that BAR needs to purchase its own DNA sequencer.
It would make ID so easy… if there is a database to compare to - has anyone sequenced coral DNA yet? My understanding of how Aquabiomics works is they compare to an existing database. I’d guess if corals were sequenced, you could know what corals live in your tank from the tank water analysis also.
 
It would make ID so easy… if there is a database to compare to - has anyone sequenced coral DNA yet? My understanding of how Aquabiomics works is they compare to an existing database. I’d guess if corals were sequenced, you could know what corals live in your tank from the tank water analysis also.
Sorry; I should have mentioned I was kidding about buying a sequencer. They're likely in the six figure range.

(Wall of text incoming because I'm a geek. Tl;Dr is "we probably can't/don't want to do this as a club due to cost")

If there was legitimate interest in this, it would probably run to the tune of several thousand dollars for sequencing several corals (I have not priced sequencing lately, but I'd say five, maybe seven corals for that price). We'd need to collaborate with a local university that has a sequencing core (off the top of my head, Berkeley, Stanford, or UCSF, with Stanford being my first go-to since there is a member in a bio department there).

What Aquabiomics does is a bit different (reading a little bit of a specific segment of dna from lots of different bacteria to profile the relative proportion of different species) than this (reading a lot of all the DNA to make sure you've got a complete genome from start to finish).

There are potentially ways to get some information on coral genetics from tank water, but that introduces a whole bunch of headaches we'd likely rather avoid. I think the method most likely to yield reliable data would be to take a small amount of coral flesh as a starting sample.

I'm happy to go a bit more in depth on this if anyone's interested; it's something that is a cool thought experiment, and extremely useful in taxonomy, but beyond what a club could easily do.
 
My takeaway was we have a lot of really smart people in the club. Even though it was a long talk, I appreciated the passion that Russ showed the entire time.
Definitely. It's always a rare treat to come across somebody with both technical expertise and the ability to communicate it to a wide variety of audiences, given that anything that isn't "research" and "funding" tends to be actively selected against in academia.
 
Sorry; I should have mentioned I was kidding about buying a sequencer. They're likely in the six figure range.

(Wall of text incoming because I'm a geek. Tl;Dr is "we probably can't/don't want to do this as a club due to cost")

If there was legitimate interest in this, it would probably run to the tune of several thousand dollars for sequencing several corals (I have not priced sequencing lately, but I'd say five, maybe seven corals for that price). We'd need to collaborate with a local university that has a sequencing core (off the top of my head, Berkeley, Stanford, or UCSF, with Stanford being my first go-to since there is a member in a bio department there).

What Aquabiomics does is a bit different (reading a little bit of a specific segment of dna from lots of different bacteria to profile the relative proportion of different species) than this (reading a lot of all the DNA to make sure you've got a complete genome from start to finish).

There are potentially ways to get some information on coral genetics from tank water, but that introduces a whole bunch of headaches we'd likely rather avoid. I think the method most likely to yield reliable data would be to take a small amount of coral flesh as a starting sample.

I'm happy to go a bit more in depth on this if anyone's interested; it's something that is a cool thought experiment, and extremely useful in taxonomy, but beyond what a club could easily do.
You could do coral 18s rRNA sequencing for probably about $100-200 per pop, for just identification...
 
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