ANNA MARSDEN: This is a problem that has become acute on this

generation's watch. And terribly, the forecast is if we

did nothing for coral reefs, we would lose them in the next 25

years. They would be extinct.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Coral reefs are among the most important

ecosystems on Earth. But rising temperatures, pollution and mass

bleaching events are pushing these extraordinary ecosystems

toward collapse.

I'm Ranger Rosie Holdsworth and in this episode fellow ranger

and ocean lover Ajay Tagala explores how technology inspired

by Formula One racing is being used to restore the world's

coral reefs before they disappear forever.

Welcome to Wild Tales and the story of racing for reefs.

AJAY TEGALA: Often called the rainforests of the sea, coral

reefs are among the most diverse and valuable ecosystems on the

planet. They provide shelter for thousands of marine species,

protect coastlines from storms and erosion, and support the

livelihoods of millions of people around the world. Healthy

reefs are essential to the balance of ocean life, and the

health of our oceans is deeply connected to the health of our

planet.

Put simply, When coral reefs thrive, oceans thrive. And when

they decline, the effects ripple far beyond the sea.

So what is coral?

ANNA MARSDEN: They are this remarkable organism that happens

to be an animal, vegetable and mineral all wrapped into one.

AJAY TEGALA: Here's Anna Marsden, Managing Director of

the Great Barrier Reef Foundation.

ANNA MARSDEN: And as the world gets a little bit warmer and

oceans heat up... We're observing more frequency of an

incident called coral bleaching. It's essentially where the coral

structure, which is wrapped in an algae, the algae over

photosynthesizes, so it creates too much energy and food, and so

the coral host spits out the algae.

So essentially when you see these stark images of white

coral reefs, they're starving because they've lost their food

source, because it's too hot for them to exist with the plant

that gives them their food source.

AJAY TEGALA: The Great Barrier Reef Foundation was founded 26

years ago after the first coral bleaching event on the Great

Barrier Reef.

ANNA MARSDEN: So a coral bleaching event is a terrible

thing to witness, but it's not dead coral, it's deeply

heat-stressed coral. But if the heating event goes on for too

long or if it's too extreme... The corals just starve to death.

AJAY TEGALA: And while coral bleaching remains the most

urgent and visible threat facing coral reefs, it's far from the

only danger putting these underwater cities at risk.

ANNA MARSDEN: Coral reefs have always had a bit of a perfect

storm of threats. There's been unsustainable fisheries, of

course, there's, you know, plastics and marine debris.

There's also, in Australia, we have this terrible

crown-of-thorns starfish that just eats coral. And when they

become... They plague proportions. They basically just

mow down a coral reef.

So these threats have always been around, but there's always

been enough of a recovery window for coral reefs to repair

themselves because they can repair themselves. What we're

seeing is there's just too many coral bleaching events of a

frequency and a severity that there is no longer the natural

window for corals to recover. So for example, since 2016, we've

had five

mass coral bleaching events on the Great Barrier Reef. And in a

normal environment, a coral reef given five years after a coral

bleaching event or a big cyclone where the corals get all beaten

up, it will look as pristine as you've ever seen it. So if you

can get a recovery window of about five years, fantastic.

We're getting one or two.

AJAY TEGALA: A significant amount of the world's coral

reefs have already been lost, including over half of the Great

Barrier Reef, the world's largest coral reef system.

ANNA MARSDEN: It's 2,300 kilometres long. So it's the

size of about 50 million football fields. So an ecosystem

that large to lose half of its biodiversity, if half the

housing in London was to just be removed, you think about the

displaced communities, all of that disruption.

That's what's going on in the oceans right now. This is a

problem that has become acute on this generation's watch and

terribly the forecast is if we did nothing for coral reefs, we

would lose them in the next 25 years. They would be extinct.

Well, or very close to. So we have to solve this.

AJAY TEGALA: And in September 2023, an unexpected partner

joined the race to save coral reefs.

KIM WILSON: McLaren Racing is probably best known for racing

in Formula One.

AJAY TEGALA: Here's Kim Wilson, Director of Sustainability at

McLaren Racing.

KIM WILSON: We are currently the world champions in both drivers

and the constructors championships.

AJAY TEGALA: As a high-performance

carbon-intensive sport, Formula One faces significant

environmental challenges.

In response, teams are increasingly embracing

Sustainability and innovation, pursuing ambitious goals to

reduce their environmental footprint despite the long road

ahead.

KIM WILSON: As a racing team in Formula One, we recognise that

we need to balance the growth of our sport and our team with the

impact that we're having on the environment, and we take that

responsibility incredibly seriously.

We were the first team to have a validated science-based target,

and we have committed to halve our emissions by 2030 and to

achieve net zero by 2040. We do think that actually we have the

most incredible platform to be able to address some of the

complex challenges that we need to solve in terms of

environmental solutions.

AJAY TEGALA: And can the technology expertise and global

platform of the sport actually help with challenges like coral

reef restoration?

KIM WILSON: We're here to bring both a pioneering and

exhilarating experience to our fans who love and watch racing,

but we're also a really high performance, high precision

engineering company who are really at the forefront of

innovation and technology.

AJAY TEGALA: And it's that high precision engineering that was

exactly what the Great Barrier Reef Foundation needed to scale

up their work tackling coral reef restoration.

Coral reef restoration is a new process. A technique called

coral gardening is more widely used. In 2019, I was excited to

join a conservation project in Gaya Island, in Borneo, where we

took part in a coral gardening assignment. I got such a buzz

from helping to nurture a reef back to its former glory.

However, this project was on a much smaller scale.

ANNA MARSDEN: Reef restoration is quite a new terminology.

Coral gardening's been around for a long time, where people

will crack off a bit of coral and tie it to a tile and let it

grow, and that's great. But on a coral reef system as big as the

Great Barrier Reef, that's just

bonkers to think that you could scale manually reef restoration.

So we've been very focused on how could you upscale reef

restoration at a meaningful level to actually be that

missing inch to help the regeneration and speed up the

regeneration of coral reefs in those small windows of recovery.

AJAY TEGALA: And once a year, coral reefs begin their own

remarkable process of recovery and regeneration. Through an

event known as coral spawning.

ANNA MARSDEN: Sir David Attenborough describes it as one

of the most wondrous events in the world where essentially all

the corals produce these reproductive bundles which turn

into coral babies about one or two nights a year.

And as long as all that coral spawn and those coral babies get

to where they need to go, those coral babies will settle and

then grow into big corals that can be functioning and go on and

the circle of life continues. And it is like an upside down

snowstorm, but it's the most amazing thing to be in the ocean

and witness.

AJAY TEGALA: As coral spawning happens on just one or two

nights each year, if that narrow window is missed, scientists

have to wait another full year for the next opportunity.

KIM WILSON: That's a very tight performance window. And if you

compare that to what we do in racing, that's a very similar

challenge that we have to face. And we're used to solving those

problems. And the key to that is preparation and planning and

have a strategy to be able to perform in that tight window

where you have the once a year opportunity.

AJAY TEGALA: But it's not just the timing that's a challenge

with this process.

ANNA MARSDEN: Unfortunately, because there's so much degraded

corals, all that coral spawns don't always get to where they

need to get to. And then the other thing, the coral spawn is

really delicious. So all the birds and the turtles and the

fish go, nom nom nom, so in this moment where it's like

everything matters, you've got all these amazing animals having

a wonderful time so it's precious. This is the only

chance we have to naturally rebuild the reef because we

don't want to get into designer reefs we want to just provide

that extra inch for mother nature to help give these

spawning events the greatest chance of success.

AJAY TEGALA: The Great Barrier Reef Foundation and scientists

in Australia developed a pioneering restoration technique

known as coral IVF.

ANNA MARSDEN: Essentially what that means is on those coral

spawning evenings we go out there and collect all the coral

babies and we rear them up so they're pretty hardy, sort of a

week old. And then we take them to locations where the corals

are unable to reproduce themselves naturally, although

the reef is just absent, and we can let them resettle.

AJAY TEGALA: But the Great Barrier Reef Foundation needed

help to progress the process in terms of speed, volume and

affordability. Enter McLaren Racing.

KIM WILSON: Coral reef restoration is a highly manual,

very labour-intensive, very sensitive process. So... What we

can bring to the table as McLaren Racing is helping to

make the existing process more efficient, scalable and cost

effective. We have a small team of engineers and they're in a

group called McLaren Accelerator.

They take the F1 know-how and experience that we have in how

we develop a race car, how we go about going racing, and then

they apply it to projects away from the racetrack.

The engineers who worked on this specific project have a mass

manufacturing production background as engineers, so they

really have that beautiful sweet spot of Formula One mindset

approach in engineering, how you can then apply that into

industrial manufacturing processes and taking the best of

both worlds and combining them.

ANNA MARSDEN: Given that we had sort of hit a wall of where

science could take us, the idea of bringing engineers, but not

just any engineers. Engineers obsessed with speed into our

little world and going, " anything you could do here?",

seemed quite curious.

AJAY TEGALA: The current coral IVF process begins with

scientists collecting floating coral spawn bundles during the

reef's annual spawning event. In controlled tanks, the eggs and

sperm are carefully mixed to maximise fertilisation success

before the developing coral are encouraged to settle onto large

tiles.

Those tiles are then cut into smaller tabs, fitted into

ceramic cradles, and returned to the ocean, where the coral

babies can attach and grow, eventually rebuilding the reef.

ANNA MARSDEN: It allows you to produce really hardy, healthy

corals at a large scale and get them where they need to get to.

AJAY TEGALA: McLaren saw two bottlenecks.

ANNA MARSDEN: One was, we have all the coral babies settling on

these big sheets that almost look like chocolate blocks,

little squares. And we were then breaking up the individual tiles

with human hands, sort of squishing the coral babies. It

sounds more graphic than it is. So they were thinking about a

system to precisely cut those sheets.

The second thing was, is you have to take this thing and

place it in these coral cradles. And you're doing all of that

underwater. And let's be honest, after about 10, it's really

boring. So they also saw a process that you could possibly

automate that. That speeds up the production of the next

generation of corals getting out settling.

KIM WILSON: And I remember this so clearly, sitting in a room

with about 10 of us, workshopping, okay, what's the

goal? And that's how we would go about it in Formula 1. So our

goal was, how can we reduce lap time? How can we go around a

racetrack faster? And the goal for us was, how can we plant a

million corals

on the reef that survive in a year? And so what we wanted to

do was develop a semi-automated process to be able to remove

that highly labour-intensive manual part of taking the baby

corals and putting them into the devices and turn that into a

machine.

We didn't want it to be expensive, you know, highly

energy intensive. It had to be something that could be operated

by one or two people to get the output that we needed. And so

that's when we then went into the mode of designing and then

testing and building OSCAR.

It's called the Operational System For Coral Assembly And

Restoration, or as we like to affectionately call it, OSCAR.

Now, it's no coincidence that we happen to have one of our

Formula One drivers who's called Oscar, Oscar Piastri as well.

AJAY TEGALA: OSCAR is the size of a shipping container. And

looks like an enclosed engineering rig with a metal

frame and transparent safety panels. The robotic handling

mechanism moves the coral cradles through different stages

of assembly.

It looks like a high-end electronics assembly machine

that you might see in a factory, but instead of assembling

electronics or car parts, it's rapidly loading baby corals into

reef restoration cradles.

KIM WILSON: We did very much go through a very similar process

to how we go about developing a race car of a regulation season

or a beginning of a year. So we design it, we then simulate it,

and we go to test, we iterate and we improve it based on the

results and the data.

And then we go out to our first race. And then after every race,

we take the data and we improve it and we look at how we can

make it better. And that's exactly the process we're

following with OSCAR and the machine.

AJAY TEGALA: And just like Formula One, the results speak

for themselves.

KIM WILSON: When we timed ourselves on how quickly we were

able to manually assemble these tiles of baby corals into the

cradles, it was taking 90 seconds. With OSCAR, we can do

that in less than 10. That's an 800% efficiency gain. When you

then scale that up, and if it's operating as designed, we can

then go from that 100,000 corals planted on the reef to a million

in a year and we'll do it at a cost reduction as well.

ANNA MARSDEN: I mean the production output of this is a

game changer. You could have on a Great Barrier Reef 15 of these

micro nurseries all working. So suddenly we're finally in a

position to regenerate at a meaningful scale. This is a

story now of leaning in with a solution in a very targeted a

meaningful way. There could be the missing piece for the

recovery of these vital ecosystems.

AJAY TEGALA: OSCAR is now in Townsville in Queensland at the

National Sea Simulator, the world's largest research

aquarium, where he's being tested on baby corals that were

grown in the 2025 to 2026 season.

KIM WILSON: So we're running the machine using those baby corals

and looking at the results. And like we do in racing, we will be

learning from what's gone well, what hasn't gone so well, and

tweaking and iterating the machine as we go. And then the

big challenge will be how do we use it when the coral starts

spawning again in November 2026. I'm very excited to see how we

go with that.

AJAY TEGALA: And as with racing, the parameters and ambitions

continue to change and grow.

KIM WILSON: We still have some work to do because it's really

important that we see this through to a reliable machine.

So again, if I go back to how we approach racing, we put that car

on track at the first race of the season. It's 80 to 100%

different from the car at the end of the season because you're

constantly chasing for that thousandth of a second of

performance gain.

And what I love is that the engineers who have got us from

90 seconds to 10 seconds are like, "we can go faster, we can

do better, that's not good enough". So we want to be

reliable and we want to go faster because that's what coral

reefs need.

ANNA MARSDEN: We need to be able to produce and generate corals

that are tougher because we're still going to keep getting

warmer and warmer and warmer. There's no point just producing

the corals that are weak for the future. What we love about this

is the broodstock that we're using in this process is

surviving corals. These are corals that already have

survived you know, five, six coral bleaching events.

And then we're looking at ways that we can also boost that

thermal tolerance. So the combinations of this throughput

and high production plus the marine science that we're

working on to help these corals toughen up gives us, we believe,

the winning formula to be able to produce corals and keep these

ecosystems alive while the world works on the warming issue and

things like that.

KIM WILSON: When organisations apply the things that they are

good at, their skill sets, to some of the world's most complex

challenges, I think is something that I hope others will take

from this as well. There's been a

lot of doubt around whether or not we were just telling a nice

PR story and to be able to stand up and say I think we have

honestly helped with the conservation breakthrough for

coral reef restoration and this machine could be the life

support that coral reefs need is something I will hold with me

for the rest of my life and look back on it with immense pride.

The collaboration has worked.

ANNA MARSDEN: In a perfect world, these ecosystems will

just be thriving and happy with all the complexity of life,

doing what they need to do because they have for centuries,

they've hit a rough spot.

What we are going to do is aid that recovery and there will be

a time when the corals will be able to repair themselves again

and we can go back to just enjoying them, knowing that the

marine life on planet Earth is happy because coral reefs are

doing their function.

AJAY TEGALA: Thank you for listening to this episode of

Wild Tales. If you want to find out more about the Great Barrier

Reef Foundation or McLaren Racing's Sustainability work,

there are links in the episode show notes.

Until next time, goodbye.