Question: Have you made any new discoveries?

Lydia Bach answered on 14 Nov 2014:

Yes, I have!

When I was working in the Amazon rainforest the team and me found a new species of frog, that no one had found before, that was cool.
I also discovered something about plant called coralline algae that lives in coral reefs. It essentially looks like a pink rock:

http://seabedhabitats.org/tag/coralline-algae/

Coralline algae are really important because they are the cement in coral reefs: holding everything together.
Climate change will change conditions in the oceans to more extremes (higher temperatures, more salt, more carbon and less oxygen in the water). So we asked: what happens to coral algae when this happens?

So we did an experiment measuring how much coralline algae was photosynthesising (so producing sugar from sunlight) in a location where conditions are good and compared that with a location where conditions are bad.

We found that the coralline algae were producing a lot of sugar under good conditions (they need oxygen, light, waves and so on).
Then we changed the conditions to ‘bad’ (no oxygen, high carbon, too hot and too much light). We found that in the first few days the coralline algae didn’t do well at all, producing little sugar 🙁 , but after a few days they got better and produced almost as much as under good conditions 🙂

That means that coralline algae may be able to survive at worse conditions because they can adapt to them, although we sill don’t know if they would grow at the same speed!