Marine biologist explores mysteries beneath the waves

BY SALLY ACHARYA

No one can call his research dry.

For most faculty, research means long hours in book-filled offices. Kiho Kim plunges into sparkling waves in a scuba suit and glides down into a jeweled netherworld where he is on intimate terms with star coral and staghorn coral, brain coral and torch coral.

He has snipped coral and planted it on planks in neat rows to observe how the passage of water, with its microscopic cargo of food, affects its growth. He has plucked coral to ferret out the secrets of its internal chemistry, and tried to determine what implications there might be for people in coral’s striking ability to fight the infections that travel so easily in its watery home.

RELATED LINKS > Kiho Kim > Biology Department

Kim has a laboratory at AU, where he teaches marine biology, but his real laboratory is the ocean. “The oceans are probably much more important than we ever gave them credit for,” he says.

Oceans cover much of the earth, but it only became possible to study them in depth after 1943, when Jacques Cousteau and Emile Gagnan invented the Aqua-Lung, the first diving suit with pressure regulation. Before then, scientists had been limited to the shallow edges of the ocean, and little could be studied unless it washed ashore.

The seas regulate global climate and may be a storehouse for important medicines, but much of what happens beneath their vast surface remains a mystery. Even today, no one has seen a live giant squid. “It’s a wide open field, figuratively and literally,” Kim says.

He has been conducting a long-term, open-ended study since 1996, when he motored up and down the Florida Keys, splashing from the boat every time a hard bottom suggested the presence of coral reefs. He has since narrowed the study to eight sites with diseased coral, which he then studies for antifungal compounds produced to fight the disease.

Diseases can spread more quickly in the ocean than on land. Does that also mean that animals or plants are better adapted to fighting diseases? And if so, what are their defenses like, and what can they teach us?

Kim initially hoped that studying fungal diseases in coral could have medical implications. A huge percentage of people who die in hospitals, particularly the elderly and immune compromised patients, die of fungal infections. Fighting fungal infections is difficult, since it rarely goes away and any medicine that kills fungus kills human cells as well.

Unfortunately, while coral do indeed turn out to be highly adapted to fighting fungal diseases, the protective compounds in coral turned out to be “lots of little spears rather than a single magic bullet,” Kim said. The sheer complexity of coral defense mechanisms appears to make them impossible to replicate in medicinal form. But for marine biologists, the complexity is part of the fascination. After all, they are explorers in what is still largely terra incognita—or, rather, oceanus incognito—since relatively little is known about the basic processes of life undersea.

Of course, ocean science can’t be done from a laboratory. Kim’s own time in the field has included two years on a Smithsonian research island barely the size of his current laboratory, where the research scientists slept in cabins on stilts over the water. It was on that island off the coast of Panama that he met his wife, also a biologist. Their son attends AU’s Child Development Center and is already adept at snorkeling—although only, so far, in the bathtub.

During spring break, Kim introduced a group of students to hands-on science through a spring break class on the Natural History of the Florida Keys. Does it bother him to suspect that some of the students might have been lured a wee bit less by the science than by the chance to earn credit while scuba diving? Not at all. After all, that’s how he got hooked.

As an undergraduate, “I don’t think I had a biology streak in me,” he says. Then he heard of an ecology class that included rainforest trekking and scuba diving in Costa Rica. “I thought, ‘Yeah, it sounds like fun. Sure, I’ll spend three weeks in Costa Rica.’”

Those three weeks in the field opened his eyes to the natural world. As he battled thorns on a hike in the rainforest, he found himself thinking with fascination about evolution and defenses against herbivores—things he had only heard about in class until his encounter with the wild. “Unless you bump into those thorns, you don’t really understand,” he says.

He hopes to make the spring break class an annual offering. This summer, he went to the British Virgin Islands to check out a marine field station for another possible field class.

“You have to live it, dive it, touch it, feel it. That’s the best way to learn, if you’re having fun.”

You have to mathematically model it, too. But to understand the oceans, you first have to dive into them. Which begs the question: What is a marine biologist doing in Washington, D.C.?

It’s true that coral reefs aren’t part of the local ecosystem. But Washington has advantages, such as the Smithsonian, whose collection of coral dating to the 1870s
is providing important information for Kim’s work on the impact of pollution on coral, and Washington is also where many of the policies that impact the oceans are enacted.

As for the Florida Keys, Kim says, “I tell people marine science is only an airplane ride away.”