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With record heat events, Sydney corals are under significantly increased threat. Forecasts of probable future ocean conditions suggest it is unlikely that native Sydney encrusting corals will survive. Dr Matthews is researching interventions that can be undertaken that meet the essential criteria of scale, economic feasibility, and repeatability and that can increase the resilience of native Sydney coral to the stress induced by rapidly rising ocean temperatures. Her work focuses on creating optimal nutritional conditions using lipid enriched food to enhance their natural resilience to thermal stress and boost the growth rate of the surviving corals.

In this world-first research, Dr Matthews will biopsy native Sydney corals and use a combination of DNA genotyping and lipidomics to determine the optimal nutritional basis for stress tolerance. Dr Matthews’ will optimise the content and delivery of a nutritional supplement for corals from coral feeding experiments run in the SIMS research aquarium, during which she will monitor and measure the rate of growth of corals under different diet and nutritional intake and various temperature controls.

The project will help us predict how Sydney’s corals might cope with future projected conditions, initiate protection methods in areas with more vulnerable colonies, and thus enhance our capacity to manage and conserve Sydney’s valuable marine ecosystems.

This work will be carried over the next 3 years and will contribute to our goals of investment into environmentally related programs of research.