Canon Ultrasound Scanner Used to Spot Eggs Inside Living Coral Without Cutting It

Canon ultrasound scanning coral eggs, Digi Mart USA News (Australia): Coral reefs cover about 1% of the ocean but shelter at least a quarter of all marine life, and heatwaves are bleaching corals faster than many can recover. Researchers at the Australian Institute of Marine Science found that colonies of a common branching coral produced 21% fewer eggs after severe bleaching in 2020, but counting those eggs required dissecting samples.

Scientists at Coral Spawning International, working with Canon EMEA’s World Unseen initiative, tested a different approach. They used Canon’s Aplio i700, an ultrasound platform built for hospitals, with high- and ultra-high-frequency probes to scan six species of large polyp stony coral from Australia, the Caribbean and Indonesia while the corals were fully submerged in shallow tanks.

The team described this as a world first.

Coral eggs can be as small as 300 microns. Previously, checking whether a branching coral was carrying eggs meant breaking off a branch, and for large polyp stony corals, researchers cut into a number of colonies to look for gametes.

Jamie Craggs, co-founder of Coral Spawning International, said the team was able to observe egg development on the ultrasound scans, and compared the screen images with macro photographs of tissue from Trachyphyllia geoffroyi, the only species so far checked against the traditional cut-and-look method.

The technique matters for coral restoration because knowing when corals are about to spawn is key. Coral gardening, which grows fragments from the same colonies, produces clones, while sexual breeding adds genetic diversity but depends on catching each colony at the right moment, which may occur only once a year in the wild.

The work is at an early stage. The results have not been published in a peer-reviewed paper, and whether the scans can predict spawning will be tested over the next six months, with corals isolated daily so the team can record when they release gametes and compare those times with the scan dates.

Sally Davey, a clinical product specialist at Canon Medical Systems UK, said the experiment could also open opportunities in minimally invasive surgery and the diagnosis of dermal conditions.