The Fight for Corals Loses Its Great Champion

But Ruth Gates was never given to doom. As one of the world’s foremost coral scientists, she was under no illusions about the perils that corals face—but was relentlessly optimistic, nonetheless. She firmly believed that reefs can be saved, and was looking for ways of doing so, perhaps by breeding hardier varieties of corals that could better weather the climatic upheavals of the future.

To lose anyone is tragic, but to lose someone like Gates—an optimist’s optimist, a cornerstone of hope—is especially so. Her friends collectively describe her as someone who truly contained multitudes. Empath and fighter, iconoclast and team-player, introvert and spokesperson: She was all these things, and also an outspoken advocate for corals and the people who study them. “She was radiance that we were privileged to gather around, our hands toward the fire,” said Ouida Meier, one of her lab managers, in an email to her team.

Gates, who was born in England, decided she wanted to be a marine biologist in elementary school, after watching Jacques Cousteau documentaries. “She was told she wasn’t smart enough, and that she should go into athletics instead,” Burton-Gates recalls. In typical fashion, she ignored her detractors and did both. She eventually became the director of the Hawai’i Institute of Marine Biology and the founder of a nearby karate school—the Coconut Island Dojo. A third-degree black belt, she would do knuckle and fingertip push-ups to the sound of breaking waves. And “when she hit the practice bag, it sounded like a gun going off,” says Burton-Gates.

This path to scientist and sensei was a long one. She moved to Jamaica in 1985 as a naïve graduate student, who just happened to find herself studying Caribbean corals at a time when they were starting to die. They would expunge the colored microscopic algae that live in their tissues and provide them with nutrients, becoming wan and weak in the process. Gates showed that these bleaching events were more common in warmer waters—a crucial connection that decades of later work would confirm. “It was a terribly important discovery,” says Peter Edmunds from California State University, Northridge, a coral scientist and close friend of 34 years.

After getting her Ph.D. in 1990, Gates moved to the University of California at Los Angeles. That period, Edmunds says, was difficult. She spent 13 years stumbling through four separate stints as a postdoctoral researcher, and publishing papers at a slow pace. Still, she learned to use the new tools of molecular biology to make important discoveries about the relationships between corals and their algae, the molecules they use to communicate, and the means through which heat sunders their partnerships.

It is easy to see a successful scientist and think that she emerged fully formed, like Athena from Zeus’s forehead. But Gates’s oldest friends remember when she was a hard-drinking, chain-smoking, twentysomething wild child—an identity she deliberately walked away from when her father died from alcohol-related illness. When I interviewed Gates last year, she recalled that her therapist once told her that you can’t control what people do to you or what happens around you. You can only control your response. “That was a profound statement,” she says, and it changed how she saw not only her own life, but the reefs as well.

She recognized that action is necessary, and that slow, hands-off research won’t cut it in a time when corals are dying so quickly. “Twenty years ago, I don’t think we really had a sense of how urgent the problem would become,” she told me. “We’ll have to do something to help reefs get through 2050. We have to act now and perhaps not wait for permission.” Hence the super-coral project.

This attitude drew criticism from several other coral scientists, who argued that it wasn’t their place to intervene, or that we didn’t know enough to pull it off, or that such work would distract from the more important goal of stopping climate change. Gates held firm. “She was always a disruptor,” says Virginia Weis from Oregon State University, who knew her for 29 years. She suspects that Gates faced backlash not just because of her action-oriented views, but also because she was a woman scientist who didn’t conform to traditional views of femininity. “The Aloha shirt-wearing guys were threatened by her and it didn’t faze her. She wasn’t quiet or silent.”

He, and others I spoke to, were struck by how often Gates admitted that she could be wrong, that her approach might fail, and that there was so much she did not know. In this, she was iconoclastic, too. “She wasn’t ego-driven, she was mission-driven,” says Hollie Putnam from the University of Rhode Island, who was one of Gates’s students. “That’s so rare for people at the top of their field. She wanted what was good for corals, people, and science. She didn’t want to build a kingdom.”

The kingdom sprang up around her nonetheless. Her work turned her into a rock star of coral science—a role that she publicly embraced, but that wore on her privately. Weis describes her as “a classic introvert on a stage”—someone who seemed to embody extroversion, but who secretly longed for quieter company. Such moments became rarer as her career took off. “She’d shake her head and wonder: How did this happen?” says Edmunds, who recalls freer days of sitting on a dock in Jamaica Bay, watching passing comets. “In many ways, she still felt like just a grad student. Most people didn’t see that, but it colored so much of what Ruth did.”

For example, she always made time for people, even when it became hard to pin her down. “She’s here, there, everywhere, until she’s with you and then she’s really with you. Her support was complete and concrete,” says Kim Cobb from the Georgia Institute of Technology. “There was an endless amount of her and everyone felt like they had their own piece,” adds Weis.

Gates especially advocated for people who, like her, faced extra challenges in science because of their gender or sexuality. When she took over the presidency of the International Society of Reef Studies, she intentionally diversified its largely male and white staff. “Ruth was the first person I had a candid conversation with about what it meant to be a woman in science,” says Beth Lenz, who was one of her students. And Matsuda, who is transgender, adds: “She helped me grow into my scientific identity wholly, and pushed me to be my authentic self unapologetically.

Reefs also come in various forms. Some scientists are looking for so-called “bright spots” that are disproportionately vibrant and resilient despite the challenges they face. “Ruth herself was our bright spot,” says Rebecca Vega Thurber from Oregon State University. “Losing her feels like a horrible metaphor.”

“It’s now on us, the dozens of scientists she trained and took under her wing,” Vega Thurber adds. “We’ve put so much faith in her as our leader, our torch-bearer. Now it’s time we became bright spots ourselves.”

Indeed, in the last interview I did with Gates, she said she was heartened by the drive she saw in the young researchers entering the field. She was, as ever, optimistic. I asked her how she stayed that way, despite the decades of ecological decline that she had witnessed. “I don’t think a lot about what’s happened in the past and whether it’s better than what it is now,” she told me. “I’m pretty much always in the present.”

“Maybe that’s a lucky personality trait for these crazy declines,” she added. “I try not to spend a lot of time mourning loss.”

ED YONG is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers science.

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