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.