Citizen Coral in Panama — Krista Shoe
About Krista Shoe
Krista Shoe is founder of Mother of Corals an organization based in Panama involved in coral restoration and education. Krista who originally worked in the corporate world before moving to Panama to learn about corals, coral reefs, and how to save them. Through her non-profit, Mother of Corals, Krista offers courses for others to learn and participate in coral restoration.
Teaching Coral Restoration: Krista’s Mission in Panama
Krista talks about what motivated to leave her corporate job in the United States and move to Panama where she learned about corals and coral restoration. After a few years she had the opportunity to travel and take her accumulated knowledge elsewhere. To do this she needed to establish Mother of Corals, a non-profit. Covid sidelined her original plans to travel; instead, she now offers classes in Panama where divers and snorkelers can learn about coral and coral restoration. Krista is also doing her own work to establish coral that will withstand rising ocean temperatures.
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00:00:00 Pam Ferris-Olson If I look pale or pained, I'm only nine days out from my back surgery. You're the first person that I've engaged with online, but I think I'm gonna be able to do this with no problem.
00:00:18 Pam Ferris-Olson Today on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast on womenmindthewater.com, I'm speaking with Krista Shoe. She’s founder of Mother of Corals. It’s a coral restoration and education organization for citizen scientists. Krista had a career in the corporate world before she decided to work remotely from Panama. In Panama, Krista was able to be near the ocean and scuba dive, unlike her previous situation which was in high and dry Colorado. Krista set about learning whatever she could about corals, coral reefs, and how to save them. Now through Mother of Corals, Krista offers courses for others to learn and participate in coral restoration.
00:01:08 Pam Ferris-Olson The Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast on womenmindthewater.com engages artists in conversation about their work and explores their connection with the ocean. Through their stories, Wo(men) Mind the Water hopes to inspire and encourage action to protect the ocean and her creatures.
00:01:29 Pam Ferris-Olson Krista Shoe saw the ocean for the first time when she was 9 years old. The experience was memorable; so much so, that she fell deeply in love with the ocean. As an adult, Krista founded Mother of Corals. She teaches citizen scientists about corals and how to keep them healthy. Krista’s work is important because coral reefs are of enormous ecologic, economic, and cultural value. Among other things, coral reefs provide nutrition, economic security, and protection from natural disasters.
00:02:07 Pam Ferris-Olson Mother of Corals is based in Panama along the Caribbean and in the midst of the MesoAmerican coral reef; it is the second largest coral reef in the world. Krista’s mission is to teach others about corals: why they are important and what can be done to help keep coral reefs a viable ecosystem.
00:02:30 Pam Ferris-Olson Welcome Krista. I think it takes a deep commitment to move 3500 miles from home to a foreign country that is so different from where they started. I am eager to hear more about Mother of Corals, your work in Panama, and the story about how it all came to be. Let’s dive in and hear more about your journey and Mother of Corals.
00:02:55 Pam Ferris-Olson Krista, why don’t we start with where you grew up and what did you know about the ocean before you actually went to the seaside at the age of 9?
00:03:06 Krista Shoe So I grew up in Reading, Pennsylvania. So not that far from the ocean, but for whatever reason my family, our first trip to the ocean was Virginia Beach, VA. When I was nine years old and I still have in my memory this picture of me holding up a crab in the ocean. I don't have, like, specific memories about that time but my mom said they couldn't get me out of the water, so I knew I was obsessed back then.
00:03:35 Pam Ferris-Olson So what was so impactful about that visit?
00:03:39 Krista Shoe I think it that it was...It's a mix, right? I actually before that, I've always been sort of the little fish who's always in the pool. And so to be in an active body of water was very different for me and be able to body surf and things like that but also finding little animals along the seashore. You know, this is not something that you experience in swimming pools. And I think the marine life was what really drew me in.
00:04:05 Pam Ferris-Olson So why do you think your original career didn't connect with your passion for the ocean? How did you end up working in the corporate world in a job described as program management and process improvement? That is really a very dry title.
00:04:22 Krista Shoe You know, I actually did start off going to college as a marine biology major. Back then in the early 90s, there weren't a lot of schools that had that major. So I moved to Boston. I went to school for a year there and then just for personal reasons, that I won't into in my life, I had to move home for a bit and so I just started taking classes at Penn State to, you know, get some kind of foundation towards a degree. But you know, then I was after a bit, I was like behind, you know, my friends and peers so I just kind of decided to go the short route and get a degree in telecom. And I just thought, I honestly thought that the dream was in the past.
00:05:08 Pam Ferris-Olson So why did you choose Panama? What you drew there as opposed to all the other places in the Caribbean or Caribbean, depending on how you want to pronounce it?
00:05:19 Krista Shoe Honestly I thought I was gonna be moving here with my job, the one with the stale title. I needed to be in the US time zone. So I knew that right off the bat. I knew I didn't want Canada. No offense to Canadians. But I knew I wanted to be somewhere where I could scuba dive all the time. So once I knew that, I literally was Google searching for things I wanted in a country and narrowed it down to Panama and Nicaragua. And decided on Panama just because it seemed a little bit more, you know, infrastructure built up and ready to for me to be working online more so than Nicaragua. And then I Googled places to scuba dive in Panama and found Bocas.
00:06:00 Krista Shoe And I did come visit here a year before I moved, but it was definitely already set in my mind like “I'm going to this place. I'm going to do it for a year.” You know, that makes me feel safe in your mind. I'm going to do it for a year and if I don't like it I come home. And so I kind of always had that mindset in that first year, but I think right after six months or a little bit longer, I knew. Because A. I had found coral restoration and B. because I had found friends and, you know, much more here than that I was going to end up staying longer than that.
00:06:34 Pam Ferris-Olson It sounds like such a luxury to be able to choose where you want to go, and before COVID when many people were not working remotely.
00:06:43 Krista Shoe Right.
00:06:44 Pam Ferris-Olson So what did you know about coral prior to moving to Panama?
00:06:48 Krista Shoe I know I knew a decent amount about coral just from diving, but I would say that most divers, especially when you start out, you're really about the animals, right?
Always talking about what did you see? You know big or small. And very few people are, you know, talking over dinner on a dive trip about what corals they saw. So I didn't know a ton.
00:07:11 Krista Shoe But I just knew that when I met a guy here, a guy when I was here was just starting coral restoration, and he was a one man show. And you know, I kind of begged him. I was like, I can build your website. I can do your social media. You know, I just want to learn about…And so he and I built that up from the ground for about 3 years together.
00:07:35 Pam Ferris-Olson So apparently you didn't move to Panama to establish Mother of Corals. So when you did decide that you wanted to start the organization, what was the original mission for Mother of Corals?
00:07:51 Krista Shoe The original mission. It started from a gentleman from Mauritius, which is a country off the coast of Africa contacted the organization that I was working for, saying, “Hey, would anyone there be willing to come here and teach us how to do coral restoration?” And the guy that I was working with didn't really want to do that and asked me if I would and I knew immediately that I would want to do that. I Just like traveling anyway. But as we started to get further and further into that process, there was going to be government funding from Mauritius. From that government involved and so that you need your own NGO. And that is really how Mother of Corals was born. And that was, you know, put all the paperwork together. I had everything ready to go in January of 2020. And you can guess what happened to that funding a few months later [Covid pandemic].
00:08:42 Krista Shoe But I had found that there was a market for that and so that is what I really tried to push for in the first couple of years was to travel and teach communities how they can start corals.
00:08:52 Pam Ferris-Olson How does Mother of Corals sustain itself? Do the funds generated from educational components sustain the organization?
00:09:01 Krista Shoe So for now, we still have, I mean, we definitely rely on private donations. We have fundraisers a couple times a year. I do have, you know, one or two private donors that give a decent amount every year that I can rely on. But the educational piece, where you know we have tourists and groups of travelers coming and doing the course, I mean I created that so that it could be something that sustains the organization without having the more unpredictable. You know, relying on donations is unpredictable, right? You try to do a forecast and not know what's happening in the economy nine months from now is very difficult, so I really wanted to create an income that I could be a little bit more predictive with.
00:09:47 Pam Ferris-Olson Give us an idea of the work that's done by Mother of Corals. For example, where do you work? What is negatively impacting the coral in those areas and what do you do to help restore the corals?
00:10:01 Krista Shoe Our biggest damage comes from twice a year, we have a temperature spike in the ocean water which is related to climate change. But that often bleaches a lot of corals. And we're working in a few sites here around the archipelago and we do our courses to go collect the corals that have survived these bleaching events, propagate them, which means cutting them small so they can grow faster, and then we install them on artificial reefs and then we have them near other unique DNA specimens of the same species, so that when they are mature enough to spawn and recreate then they're in theory recreating with the other corals that, you know, are able to withstand the high temperatures. So repopulating the reefs with coral that are already predisposed to be able to withstand that.
00:10:56 Got it. So what metrics do you use to evaluate the success of your work and how long have you been doing this? Do you have enough, uh, a long enough timeline to determine whether you have success or not yet?
00:11:13 Krista Shoe We measure water metrics, so temperature, light dissolved oxygen, we measure fish metrics. So when you're building an artificial reef, you can see the change in the counts and the size of the fish that come based on what you plant in the water. So we track that and we track coral growth and coral survivalship. So those are pretty much standards that are put forth by NOAA. And there's also standards around how often you report on that.
00:11:46 Krista Shoe I do have not quite two year’s worth of data, so it's not quite time to publish results and say here's how we've done. They say you should really try to have about three year’s worth before you like draw a line in his sand and say here's the success of our project or projects? So I can say, you know sort of off the record, but on the podcast that our metrics are very impressive but I'm still, you know, a little ways away to the point where I would publish.
00:12:17 Pam Ferris-Olson Have you encountered a project yet where the efforts appear to be unsuccessful. And if that's the case, why do you think the efforts were unsuccessful?
00:12:26 Krista Shoe There are plenty of things I can say about that project that were successful, but we did have a lot of problems with some species of corals growing there because [at one site] because the property next to there was doing a lot of construction and there was construction run off in the water. [It] caused a lot of sediment that kind of stifled the corals.
So we had a lot, a lot of great success with the fish count and the sponges. And I do think that over time, especially once that construction ends and the water is able to clean itself out that the corals will come back and grow there naturally but to this day we didn't have a large survivorship of the coral.
00:13:07 Pam Ferris-Olson Given the enormity of the challenges that threaten coral reefs, such as rising ocean temperatures and changing ocean conditions, overfishing and pollution, how important are efforts such as those of Mother of Corals in saving coral reefs?
00:13:24 Krista Shoe I mean, I think it's very important. Obviously, I wouldn't be doing it. But, I think, what's so important about what we're doing specifically is not only are we focusing on the regeneration of corals, but also on the education. The prevention, right. Teaching people if we don't change the way that we live that's causing these problems in the ocean, then, we're not going be able to make a big difference. You know, so I think you have to have that two pronged approach of, yes we're restoring but also we're teaching to try to prevent.
00:13:58 Pam Ferris-Olson For those of us who don't live in or adjacent to the ocean, how can you generate interest in folks like me so that we want to take action: like writing letters or donating money, or coming down and taking one of your, I don’t what we’ll call them, camps or workshops on coral restoration.
00:14:21 Krista Shoe Yeah. I mean, I think there's a lot that people can do inland. You know, a lot of what we associate with being near the ocean, like oh let's use reef safe sunscreen or let's be careful with what we put into the water. [It] applies anywhere. Just because runoff happens, you know, inland. And so inland runoff goes in the streams and streams go into rivers and rivers go into oceans. So I think it's just as important to talk to people about day-to-day living and the importance at how coral impacts you even if you don’t live near the ocean: for instance, you know the ocean produces quite a high percentage of oxygen. And so that's something that we all love. We all love to breathe oxygen.
00:15:10 (laughter) Pam Ferris-Olson We all need to do it too. What are your plans for the future?
00:15:17 Krista Shoe Well, I would. I hope you know. I really think that we have a really a great model here. So, you know, having the five steps of the coral restoration process into a course that can be taken by both snorkelers and divers. There's a one-day option or a five-day option and then having that money that comes in from that. Those activities go back into the program and teaching the local youth here: #1. how to scuba dive and #2. to come through the course so that funds you. Those fund each other. And I really think that, you know, it's a provable model to have in other places in the world. I would love to be able to share this model with other communities and help them get started doing the same.
00:16:04 Pam Ferris-Olson So Krista before I ask you the last question I'd like to tell you: I don't know where your organization Mother of Corals is listed as a 501(c)(3), but should you or any of my listeners have a 501(c)(3) registered in the US, it could do work anywhere besides running this podcast and the Wo(men) Mind the Water dot com website, I am President of the Ferris Olson Family Foundation for Ocean Stewardship, or foffos.org. And every year we award grants and they're very simple grants. They're four pages [long]. They're straight forward and we give out money for research. Both pilot and ongoing to help you get your work done. So it might be something that you want to look into for next year or for 2025. So I encourage you and others to look into it. It’s FOFFOS.ORG.
00:17:12 Pam Ferris-Olson As we close I'd like to ask you what you might advise listeners to do to help preserve our ocean as a place of wonder and remain a highly productive ecosystem.
00:17:23 Krista Shoe There are a lot of things to say and what I really’d like to say is very important in this day and age is to reduce. So we have the triangle of reduce, recycle, reuse. But I think reducing our, you know, what we're buying, to use plastics [less]. Just in general taking a look at your life and going what do I need versus what I want and cutting back, like everything that all ties back to fossil fuels. That's the only way that we're really going to stop the sort of avalanche that's happening right now.
00:18:02 Pam Ferris-Olson I'd like to remind listeners that I've been speaking with Krista Shoe, an advocate for coral restoration and founder of Mother of Corals. Krista offers courses so others can learn about and be involved in coral restoration. Krista is the latest guest on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast. The series can be viewed on womenmindthewater.com, Museum on Main Street, and YouTube. An audio-only version of this podcast is available on womenmindthewater.com, on iTunes, and Spotify. Wo(men) Mind the Water is grateful to Jaine Rice for the use of her song Women of Water. All rights for the Wo(men) Mind the Water name and logo belong to Pam Ferris-Olson. This is Pam Ferris-Olson.
