Because if they can't, then there's no way that they can grow to be the size of a house and 1,500 years old. SP: You know, I think what we're seeing is that the corals themselves have a mechanism within them to just keep their DNA in very, very good shape.
![bikini atoll mutated sharks bikini atoll mutated sharks](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/yQpSuWoWEvw/hqdefault.jpg)
JT: Are you starting to see anything that would suggest that they're genetically different yet, though? That stuff is made up of a whole string of chemicals called bases and then the sequence there of those bases is essentially the sequence of the entire genome. The stuff that basically makes up our cells and lets them work. SP: Genome sequencing being you take all of the DNA that is an organism. What we were trying to do is bring a different level of technology in and say, well, can we then use genome sequencing to figure out exactly how much damage the radiation in the environment has been doing. We have long been fascinated by how corals can live so long, I mean these corals that we're talking about are 40 or 50 years old, but we know that other corals similar to them are 500 years old or 1,000 years old.
![bikini atoll mutated sharks bikini atoll mutated sharks](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/91ZaBEvCp0L.__AC_SX300_SY300_QL70_ML2_.jpg)
And that was one of the strangest things, you see these very big corals in Bikini Atoll, they've been growing for 30 or 40 years in this higher radiation source and the kind of work that we do here in the lab has a lot to do with the genetics of corals. JT: Yeah so are these coconut crabs or the corals you've seen, do they differ from what you'd see in less radioactive water? Coconut crabs, for example, they eat nothing but radioactive coconuts on Bikini Atoll and how they're dealing with the caesium-137 we just have no idea. So it's a very, very devastated place from the standpoint of the original human population and the longest-living organisms there are animals that have had to deal with this radiation for so long. You can breathe the air though, so everything's good, right?. So it's impossible to farm there, you can't really fish there, you can't drink the ground water. There are places on the island where we register three, four times background radiation and, you know for example, the coconuts there - they planted a lot of coconuts after the blast but the coconuts are radioactive, you can't really eat them or drink the milk or anything like that because they are pulling caesium-137 out of the ground water that's still in there and still pulling it up onto the surface. SP: Well, you know, it's got a higher radiation level than it should. JT: The area is bathed in radiation still, isn't it? And yet, we found a large number of corals and a good coral diversity growing to the point where we started wondering, well how are these animals that have lived there - and corals are animals - how have they lived there for 40 or 50 years in the presence of this underlying radiation and still done so well? There are cracks in the reef that go for hundreds of yards straight where this one side of the reef has bumped up a couple of feet from the other. Strange in that the bottom of this hydrogen bomb crater, for example, is like talcum powder - so, so fine. SP: Well the diversity of things that is there and is not there. So I think things started coming back pretty quickly, but it's still hit-and-miss - if you don't mind the pun - and it's a very strange environment. SP: We know that there were corals that were recovered from pretty deep - 120 feet or so - that were continuously growing some places in the lagoon and we found a very big coral colony, like the size of a pool table, and we figured that they must have taken 40 years, 50 years to grow that big meaning that they started growing again just a decade or so after the bombs. JT: And it's been more than 60 years since the bombs were dropped. The ocean tries to recover, even from something as devastating as these bombs. Bits of coral growing up from tiny pebbles to the soccer ball size to the size of small cars, and fish swirling around sharks.
![bikini atoll mutated sharks bikini atoll mutated sharks](https://cdn.images.dailystar.co.uk/dynamic/1/photos/630000/936x622/684630.jpg)
SP: then what, for example, is that there was an island there in 1935 and now it's 160 feet of water because it's a hydrogen bomb crater and in that hydrogen bomb crater marine life is trying to come back. STEPHEN PALUMBI: We went there to basically witness what happens when you do the most destructive thing we've ever done to the oceans, which in this case is dropping 23 atomic bombs on a coral reef.