Jean Jaubert spent his youth off the southern coasts of the Western Mediterranean. In the 50s, it was alongside Captain Jacques Cousteau that his interest in the underwater world turned into a real passion. In 1979, he invented the ecological water purification process (known today under the names of MICROCEAN® and JAUBERT NNR SYSTEME) which allowed him to become one of the first scientists capable of raising corals that build reefs. in closed-circuit aquariums. He later became director of the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco. He is still continuing his research today in his private laboratory.
Can you tell us about your adventure with Commander Cousteau and the Calypso?
At that time I was studying the physiology of reef-building corals in the Red Sea and in the Pacific. The actions I was doing required that I stay in the same place for weeks. Moreover, the courses I taught at the University of Nice kept me in France a good part of the year. These constraints were not very compatible with the schedule and the pace of work imposed by the filming of Cousteau's films. Also, the opportunity to sail aboard Calypso had never presented itself.
What was your career at the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco?
In 1965, I was doing an internship at the Oceanographic Museum. To celebrate the Oscar, let theAcademy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Hollywood) had awarded his film " The Sunless World Commander Cousteau had organized a cocktail party where I had been invited with all the staff of the Museum. It was my first encounter with this character who had already become legendary.
Then, from 1968 to 1988, teacher-researcher at the University of Nice, I was in contact with the Museum. So I had the opportunity to meet the Commander and tell him about my attempts to grow aquarium corals. In 1973, the first positive results of these tests had interested him a lot. Also, he had proposed to me to install, in the Museum, two aquariums containing live corals. At that time it was impossible to get live corals in commerce. Also, he had organized, with the support of the Weizman Institute, an expedition to Eilat (Israel) where I had gone to harvest. A few years later, my work culminated in the development of a biological water purification process that was a technological breakthrough. It was finally possible to reconstitute, in closed-circuit aquariums, living mini reefs, ecologically balanced, with their corals and fish.
In February 1988, I had exposed this process to the second international congress of aquaria that the Commander had organized at the Oceanographic Museum. That same year, he had sponsored the two major projects I had mentioned to him, and had encouraged his appointed successor, Professor François Doumenge, and the highest Monegasque authorities, to help me make them a reality.
The first was the reconstruction of a portion of living coral reef, life-size, in a 40.000 liter tank built according to my plans in the museum's aquarium. To find everything I needed to populate this large ferry, I went to Djibouti. This choice was dictated by the fact that Djibouti was the only airport directly linked to that of Nice. The advantage of this direct air link was to considerably reduce transport times and avoid the vagaries of transshipment via Paris airport. With the help of two technicians from the Museum, I had collected and shipped "living" sand, "living" rocks, coral cuttings and fish. Year after year these coral cuttings have built a reef of rare beauty enhanced by that of many multicolored fish. This reef, which will soon celebrate its thirtieth year of continuous growth, is by far the oldest of the reefs built in an aquarium.
The second project that Commandant Cousteau and Professor Doumenge helped me to achieve was the establishment of a research unit within the Scientific Center of Monaco. This entity, called the European Oceanological Observatory, was co-financed by the Principality and the “Major Natural and Technological Risks” network of the Council of Europe. The aim was to use the extreme sensitivity of reef-building corals, first cultivated in the laboratory, to detect and characterize early signs of the deleterious effects of climate warming and other global environmental changes. This problem came to my mind when I was studying the atolls of French Polynesia. Indeed, I had noticed that some reefs, far from any source of local pollution, showed signs of degradation. Also, I had imagined that these degradations could be the first visible signs of disturbances induced by global environmental modifications of which it was important to determine the nature.
At the same time, I was proposed to take the direction of the Faculty of Sciences of the French Pacific University that I had helped to create. But I had preferred Monaco to Tahiti because the prospects of being able to develop a very high level of research seemed to me much more promising. Moreover, in Monaco, I could continue the renovation of the Oceanographic Museum's aquarium by training coral-growing staff and installing and maintaining many live coral bins.
Twelve years after its creation, the European Oceanological Observatory had become one of the best and perhaps the best centers specialized in the experimental study of the physiology and ecology of corals. The researchers I recruited and the teams I had trained were perfectly capable of continuing the work I had initiated. Also, I decided to accept the offer that had been made to me to join the Cousteau Society.
And my first job was to start shooting a movie in memory of Commander Cousteau. So, in December 2003, I went to the Red Sea aboard Alcyone, the turboprop ship for a trip in the footsteps of Calypso. It was, among other things, to see how the funds had evolved and to revisit the emblematic sites of Cousteau's films as the wreck of the Thistlegorm, an English cargo ship sunk by the German air force in the Jubal Strait in 1941, and relics of houses under the sea, off Port Sudan.
This shoot was interrupted in 2004 when the Cousteau Society encouraged me to compete to take the direction of the Oceanographic Museum. I was not pleased with this approach because the Museum, in a recessionary spiral, was facing enormous difficulties. Indeed, after the departure of Cousteau and the peak of attendance caused by the renovation of the aquarium made with my live corals, the Museum had lost half of its visitors, the only source of funding. However, what annoyed me the most was the prospect of having to interrupt, for a period that might be long, the wonderful dives I was doing from Alcyone.
In any case, the arguments of the Cousteau Society, in favor of my candidacy, were powerful and perfectly well founded. It was a question of relaunching the cooperation that had ensured the prosperity of the Cousteau Society and the Oceanographic Museum when the Commanding Officer directed the establishment.
After a long hesitation I was a candidate. In fact, I doubted that my candidacy had a serious chance of succeeding in my nomination. Indeed, the very prestigious position of director of the Oceanographic Museum interested many personalities. But, fate caused that post to be attributed to me.
Bombarded overnight at the head of a struggling company with more than 100 employees, I faced a thousand difficulties. Fortunately, I could overcome them. Also, at the end of 2007, my record was satisfactory. Reorganized, the Museum's services were functioning properly. Moreover the increase in the number of visitors allowed me to clean up its financial situation.
So I had considered that the time had come to return to an activity that I had long neglected. The aim was to improve the MICROCEAN® process and make it accessible to as many marine aquarists as possible. MICROCEAN® is the name that I registered in the form of a trademark to qualify the technique which makes it possible to ecologically balance closed-circuit aquariums in which we can easily cultivate reef-building corals. The beginnings were difficult. Indeed, the arrival of a simple technique that did not require much in terms of both equipment and maintenance was a source of concern for the aquarium industry, which derives its main benefits from the sale of numerous accessories. But, the situation is changing. Industrialists are beginning to realize that it is difficult to slow down the development of a technique whose ecological character is making it on the rise. And they are beginning to understand that they would benefit from new customers that could be brought to them by a technique that could increase the number of marine aquarists. In recent years, the "laméthodejaubert.com" forum has popularized it in France. And the conference that I just gave in the United States, at the invitation of the American Federation of Marine Aquarium enthusiasts, MASNA, allowed me to reach thousands of people.
What can you explain to us about the Jaubert technique, your technique for breeding corals in an artificial environment?
My technique is not artificial. It consists, on the contrary, in using natural mechanisms to purify the water of aquariums in closed circuit. This purification provides the corals they contain with a medium whose chemical composition remains stable and similar to that which characterizes their natural environment.
Reef-building corals live at shallow depths because they need an intense light environment. This requirement is the consequence of the fact that their digestive cells harbor photophilic symbiotic unicellular algae without which they cannot live. Why ? Because the products of photosynthesis of these algae cover most of their nutritional needs. Indeed, the energy that they draw from the prey that they capture represents only a small energy supplement.
The corollary of this situation is that reef waters must imperatively be extremely poor in inorganic nutrients, especially in nitrates and phosphates. Indeed, besides the fact that these substances have an intrinsic toxicity, their presence, other than in trace amounts, causes the proliferation of soft algae. These fast growing algae cover the corals, deprive them of light and smother them. This occurs in coastal areas polluted with domestic and / or agricultural wastewater.
In an aquarium, the excretion of fish and the degradation of all organic waste leads to the formation of nitrates and phosphates. Also, the problem to be solved was to find a way to eliminate these undesirable substances.
But before speaking of the means in question, it seems to me interesting to describe the conditions of his discovery. As happens sometimes, the solution came, fortuitously, from an observation made during an experiment whose objective had nothing in common with this problem.
In 1979, we did not know how to preserve, in the laboratory, corals in a physiological state good enough to authorize physiological studies. Also, I had designed and manufactured waterproof data loggers that I positioned on a reef in the Red Sea to study the metabolism of corals. The principle of the technique used was respirometric. The corals were placed in transparent enclosures, fixed in the natural environment, the water of which was renewed every half hour by pumps driven by timers. Between two renewals, changes in the chemical composition of the confined water were large enough to be measurable, but small enough to not disturb the coral metabolism. The same technique was used to measure the metabolism of the rocks that formed the reef substrate and that of the surrounding sandy areas.
By measuring, in this way, the influence of nitrates on the metabolism of sand I had the opportunity to make a surprising finding. When injected into enclosures placed on the sand, the nitrates disappeared at a rate greater than that which could be attributed to their fixation by the microscopic algae covering the water - sediment interface. In fact, this disappearance of nitrates was perfectly normal. It was the work of denitrifying bacteria housed in the deep layers of sand where oxygen is rare or absent. These bacteria were known to marine microbiologists, but at that time, my surprise was that I did not know they existed.
Can you briefly explain your discovery?
The bacteria in question feed on organic matter which they oxidize to produce the energy necessary for their development. When in an airy environment, these bacteria use the ambient oxygen. But, when they are in a hypoxic or anoxic environment, they break the molecules of nitrate (each molecule of nitrate is composed of one atom of nitrogen and three atoms of oxygen) to recover oxygen. The by-product of this activity is the release of an inert gas: nitrogen.
The lesson I learned from the observation I made in the Red Sea was that it seemed possible to remove nitrates from a closed circuit aquarium by depositing a thick layer of "living" sediment.
Back in my laboratory at the University of Nice, I was eager to take action. The largest of the aquariums in which I was trying to grow corals was equipped with a sand filter. This filter had a layer of coarse coral sediment with a thickness of 8 to 9 cm. This sediment was deposited on a grid maintained by shims, 1 cm from the bottom. Its thickness was sufficient for the deep zones to become oxygen deficient and this depletion forces the denitrifying bacteria to break down the nitrate molecules. To achieve this result, it was necessary to stop the flow of water, rich in oxygen, which crossed the sand. Also, I had disconnected the exhauster that drew the water in the free space under the layer of sand. This was the easiest way to test the purifying ability of the sediment layer.
And it had worked very well. The dying corals had regained color fairly quickly and had started to grow. A few years later they had formed the miniature reef whose "recipe" I had presented at the Second International Aquarium Congress. It was in February 1988. The innovative nature of this achievement and the laudatory words that Commander Cousteau had pronounced in the opening speech of the congress had impressed the congressmen among which was the boss of the American firm Aquarium Systems. . Back in his country, he had spoken about my process, arousing interest, the result of which was, to my surprise, marine aquarists baptized my process “JAUBERT NNR SYSTEM” (NNR for Natural Nitrate Reduction).
Is this a method that can also be applied in a natural environment?
This method makes it possible to multiply and cultivate, outside their natural habitat, corals that can be used to rehabilitate degraded reefs.
2018 was an IYOR year. What is your opinion on coral bleaching?
Bleaching is the consequence of the loss of the symbiotic algae that nourish coral colonies. It often results in the death of these colonies. The breakdown of the symbiosis is caused by the combined actions of excessive temperature and a decrease in the alkalinity of the water generally referred to as "acidification". The excessive temperature is the consequence of recurring climatic oscillations more or less directly linked to global warming. The decrease in the alkalinity of water is the consequence of the continuous increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide which, by dissolving in surface water, produces carbonic acid.
Certainly, the climate has been warming for several decades, especially in the northern hemisphere. Of course, the evidence for this warming is indisputable. Certainly, the gigantic amounts of carbon dioxide that humanity releases into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels to produce energy are the main causes of this warming. Of course, the combined actions of the warming and acidification of the surface waters of the seas and oceans kill many corals. Of course, it is urgent to develop renewable energies in order to limit greenhouse gas emissions in order to stop the degradation of reefs. However, this is far from sufficient. Indeed, the damage caused by the rise in temperatures and by the acidification of the water is all the more important as it often affects corals weakened by pollution and the overexploitation of mineral and living resources.
Currently, we tend to forget that global warming attributable to carbon dioxide is a component of global pollution. Also, we talk a little too much about this warming and not enough about the problems posed by global pollution and by the overexploitation of resources. These problems are the consequence of the continuous increase of the world population and of the needs which result from the increase in its standard of living.
Man is the most invasive species. So if this invasion were to continue at the current rate, many wild animals would end up living only in enclosures and zoos because they would not have enough space to feed and reproduce in Nature.
What is your feeling about Nicolas Hulot's resignation as Minister of Ecology?
None and I wonder what Nicolas Hulot went to do in this galley.
What are your ecological hopes for the future and what are your hopes for corals?
The environmental problems facing humankind today are extremely complex. This complexity is not only ecological. It is, too, economical. Except to put one's economy in danger, a nation can do little in isolation. Effectively reducing carbon dioxide emissions, pollution and over-exploitation of resources would require massive international membership and cooperation and enforcement action. But it may be very difficult, if not impossible, for people in developed countries to agree to reduce their standard of living sufficiently. And it would be illusory to think that those in developing countries would agree to moderate their growth and their aspirations to live better.
To combat climate warming, some scientists are studying the possibility of spraying chemicals in the upper atmosphere to make a screen that reduces the amount of heat carried by solar radiation. But this technique poses many practical problems, very difficult to solve, including the toxicity of products.
Other scientists are looking for ways to use plant photosynthesis to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and seawater. Some advocate mass cultivation of edible algae and use it to feed livestock. Others are considering massively spreading iron in the oceans to increase plant plankton development. Indeed, an increase in plant plankton biomass, which is at the base of the food chain (food web), would have the effect of increasing animal biomass and, consequently, the flow of organic waste that is transferred. and trapped in sediments.
Finally, other scientists plan to alkalize the oceans by pouring calcium carbonate, the dissolution of which would absorb carbon dioxide. Calcium carbonate is the most widespread rock on the continents, but the huge quantities that would have to be extracted would require huge mining operations and very high energy costs.
Today, the extraordinary inventiveness of the human species is advancing science and technology at an unprecedented rate. So we can hope that it will solve these serious problems before it is too late.
What is your favorite dive site? Can you tell us about your best memory?
The magnificent reefs of the Strait of Tiran and more generally those of the northern Red Sea which are among the most colorful on the planet and are bathed by these exceptionally clear waters. My best diving memory is the discovery of the Red Sea. After spending my childhood dabbling in the Mediterranean and seeing the World of Silence, Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, the desire to go see corals and their multicolored fish was gnawing at me. So, in 1964, I had embarked, with my wife, on the deck of a Greek liner who had dropped us off at Haifa. Then we joined Eilat by bus.
Aurélie Kula
https://www.fpa2.org/jjaubert.php