Name: 【TED】Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: A love story for the coral reef crisis (A love story for the coral reef crisis | Ayana Elizabeth Johnson)
Uploaded: 2019-11-06T23:37:55.000Z
Duration: 6 min 43 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Once upon a time, I was a stubborn five-year-old

who decided to become a marine biologist.

Thirty-four years, 400 scuba dives and one PhD later,

I'm still completely enamored with the ocean.

I spent a decade working with fishing communities

redesigning fishing gear and developing policy.

I've been helping to figure out what sustainable management can look like

for places where food security, jobs and cultures

In the midst of all this, I fell in love.

There are over 500 fish species that live on Caribbean reefs,

but the ones I just can't get out of my head

Parrotfish live on coral reefs all over the world,

I want to tell you five incredible things about these fish.

First, they have a mouth like a parrot's beak,

This is key, because many reefs are overgrown with algae

due to nutrient pollution from sewage and fertilizer

And there just aren't enough herbivores like parrotfish

After all that eating, they poop fine white sand.

A single parrotfish can produce over 380 kilograms

and just see contrails of parrotfish poop raining down.

So next time you're lounging on a tropical white-sand beach,

parrotfish are a big part of what makes coral reefs so colorful.

they have multiple wardrobe changes throughout their life.

Fourth, with this last wardrobe change comes a sex change from female to male,

These large males then gather harems of females to spawn.

Heterosexual monogamy is certainly not nature's status quo.

And parrotfish exemplify some of the beauty

sometimes when parrotfish cozy up into a nook in the reef at night,

they secrete a mucus bubble from a gland in their head

So this is a confession of my love for parrotfish

algae-eating, sand-pooping, sex-changing glory.

Now that groupers and snappers are woefully overfished,

midnight blue and rainbow parrotfish are now exceedingly rare,

and nets and traps are scooping up the smaller species.

As both a marine biologist and a single person,

And then, there's my love for their home,

which was once as vibrant as Caribbean cultures,

because hundreds of millions of people around the world

depend on reefs for their nutrition and income.

is that places like Belize, Barbuda and Bonaire are protecting these VIPs --

Also, more and more places are establishing protected areas

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【TED】Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: A love story for the coral reef crisis (A love story for the coral reef crisis | Ayana Elizabeth Johnson)

entire

incredible

term

devastating