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In the mudflats of Swan Bay, Victoria, royal spoonbills sweep their paddle-shaped bills through shallow water. Nearby, under the grass-covered roof of the Queenscliff marine research centre, a team of scientists from Deakin University are trying to bring the ecosystems those birds and many others rely on back from the brink.

Some of that involves associate professor Prue Francis’s beakers – filled with bubbling brown gunk – that are bathed in red light inside a fridge equipped with sensors, alarms and a backup generator.

The beakers contain golden kelp. The red light keeps them perpetually in an early algal life stage. “They won’t produce the next stage. They’ll just keep growing like grass,” Francis says. Another fridge, smaller and colder, contains trays of tiny vials of the same stuff, but dormant.

These fridges are part of what the university calls its “living library”: a biobank, or long-term storage for at-risk marine life forms. Biobanks act as insurance policies against species extinction, and as research hubs for scientists studying species genetics, growth and resilience in the age of environmental crisis.

“Restoration has become quite an urgent need for not just our coastline but for coastlines all across Australia and the world,” Francis says.

“A lot of our research teams are looking at ways of being able to do restoration, or future-proofing some of our organisms that are getting lost at such a high rate.”

These facilities are becoming increasingly important.

Ear snips and tail tips

Deakin’s living library is one of an array of biobanks throughout Australia, which can store everything from seeds of native plants to the cells and tissue of threatened animal species.

The Australian National Botanic Gardens in Canberra collects seeds from the ACT region, the Australian Alps, Uluru, Kakadu and Norfolk, Christmas and Cocos islands. The seeds are harvested in the wild and stored in a -20C vault but can be grown into adult plants if needed.

Melbourne Museum has a more unusual collection: cryogenically frozen but still-living cells of Australian wildlife. In this biobank, tissue samples (such as ear snips from mammals or tail tips from reptiles), DNA and living cells are kept in 2ml tubes at -196C, a temperature at which all biological activity stops. There’s even the potential to store embryos from threatened species.

It was a crisis that triggered the establishment of biobanks for golden kelp, a foundation species of the 8,000km stretch of interconnected ecosystems that make up Australia’s Great Southern Reef. The kelp provides critical habitat and food for lobsters, abalone and numerous fish species, many of them found nowhere else on Earth.

But this kelp likes cold water, and it’s the first thing to die off when water warms up.

“There was a really intense marine heatwave off the coast of Western Australia a few years back and it wiped out a lot of the golden kelp,” Francis says. “And that was scientists’ call to action, seeing that huge decline, to start establishing biobanks around the different areas where this golden kelp is found.”

Francis was involved in a recent kelp restoration project in two marine sanctuaries in Port Phillip Bay – Jawbone and Ricketts Point – where golden kelp had been overgrazed by purple sea urchins.

“The first thing we did was to reduce the urchins in those areas to a density that we know that they can coexist with the kelp,” Francis says. “Then part of our work was to grow the kelp.”

Golden kelp is an algae, so it doesn’t have a root system like a terrestrial plant. Instead, it has a holdfast: a growth anchoring it to a rock or other substrate. In the lab, that substrate was cotton twine or pieces of green gravel (“Gardening at its best!” Francis says) on which the kelp grew for six weeks before it was sent off with scuba divers to be “planted” in place back in 2022.

Just a couple of weeks ago, a project partner at the Nature Conservancy sent Francis photos of the restoration sites. “They just look absolutely fantastic,” Francis says. “Some of those kelp have gone beyond 30cm in length and are showing reproductive signs as well.”

‘Global challenge’

A distinctive briny smell lingers in the halls of the Queenscliff marine science centre, a product of up to 800,000 litres of seawater that’s pumped through the facility every day and split between the university’s labs and the Victorian Fisheries Authority and Shellfish Hatchery, which is also at the site.

The smell is particularly pronounced in a room full of open-topped bubbling tanks, where Dr Kathy Overton manages a small community of native flat oysters. These oysters used to form vast and complex reefs throughout the temperate areas of Australia, until destructive fishing practices all but wiped them out.

“Less than 1% of historical reefs remain,” Overton says. “They’re definitely one of the most imperilled marine ecosystems that we have here in Australia.”

Last year, Overton collected samples from remnant reefs in different parts of Victoria to fill in some research gaps on these oysters: to understand their genetic diversity and to see if she could get different genetic populations to reproduce. (Three populations out of four in the trial were successful.)

“Having these oysters here means that we can look for different experiments to better understand how we can restore them,” Overton says. “In the long term, it’d be really fantastic to be able to build on this.”

On the other side of the lab, marine ecologist Laney Callahan is running an experiment on seeds harvested from the only flowering marine plant, seagrass.

Seagrass meadows are favoured habitat for fish, crustaceans and other kinds of marine life, while processing carbon and nitrogen, trapping sediment and keeping the water clear. But as seagrass meadows often occur in estuaries and intertidal zones, they are heavily affected by human activity, including coastal development, agriculture runoff, dredging and changes in climate.

“Any time the ocean’s changing because of something that we’re doing, they’re vulnerable to that,” Callahan says.

Seagrass meadows declined substantially in Port Phillip Bay during the millennium drought and in Western Port Bay during large-scale industrialisation in the 70s and 80s. In the most degraded areas of Western Port, the water is full of sediment and the mud is waist-deep.

“That’s one of my dream sites to restore but it’s definitely the most difficult,” Callahan says.

Six months ago, she was out planting 300 sq metres of seagrass in Coronet Bay, a project that’s showing early positive results. But “the goal is to grow bigger. We really want to achieve larger scale restoration this year, hopefully”, Callahan says.

“It’s a global challenge at the moment, seagrass restoration.

“There’s a handful of successful projects that have achieved restoration at a scale that’s ecologically relevant, but very few. And that’s something that we’re all working towards together.”