Bertarelli-Annual-Report-2024-FULL - Flipbook - Page 22
Bertarelli Foundation
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Conservation of the Chagos
Brain Coral (Ctenella chagius)
Lead Investigator: Dr. Bryan Wilson, University of Oxford
Ex situ colonies of Ctenella chagius (recovered from
the Chagos Archipelago in 2023) were bred for the
first time at London’s Horniman Museum and Gardens
in March, revealing their reproductive strategy to be a
brooding one, releasing fully formed planulae into the
surrounding waters - this biology will significantly drive
future conservation actions. As part of the ongoing
research, colonies were also asexually fragmented, and
a second ex situ broodstock population established at
ZSL in London Zoo. Collating current ecological data
from five years of Marine Science expeditions, the
IUCN Red List entry for Ctenella was revised (since the
last formal assessment in 2008), and the coral’s Threat
Status uplisted to “Critically Endangered” in the October
announcement - simultaneously (and the first time for
any coral species), the species was also evaluated for
the IUCN Green List assessment, to be published in
early 2025. A proposal to develop the next stages of the
Conservation Action Plan for the species was favourably
reviewed and in September, invited to the final stages of
the UK Government’s Darwin Plus Main funding round. A
survey expedition in November was led to the Mauritian
archipelago of Saint Brandon to search for an extant
population of Ctenella but confounded by unseasonable
cyclones.
The Natural History Museum’s Paleobiology team
successfully obtained ancient DNA from one of their
archive specimens of Ctenella, which will be sequenced
to assess the extent of genetic bottlenecks in decimated
global populations. Finally, the project was awarded
funding in December by Oxford NanoPore’s ORG.one
initiative (for Critically Endangered or Extinct species) to
sequence the genome of the coral with their long-read
technologies - again, the first coral species to be invited,
and which will bolster the fidelity of the existing QIAGEN
NGS Profile award effort.
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