Sea Student

How an upcycled gift from a family friend helped Aidan Murphy discover his calling

From the Fall 2021 issue of Sacred Heart University Magazine

By Jen A. Miller

Aidan Murphy ’22 got into growing coral by accident. One December day, when Murphy was home sick from grade school, his mother’s former boss—also a family friend—showed up at the Murphys’ Walpole, MA, home with a 30-gallon freshwater fish tank he didn’t want anymore. “Merry Christmas,” he said. “Take it.” When Murphy’s mom protested, the family friend replied, “It’s a get-well gift ... and your problem.”

That problem became Murphy’s life’s work. By the time he was 13 years old, he’d turned that freshwater tank into a business, selling $100 of freshwater plants a month to aquarium stores. Outgrowing his original setup, he got a job as a restaurant host at Clyde’s Grill and Bar so he could upgrade to a 50-gallon salt-water tank—one that required its own custom plumbing system (and an additional 25-gallon filtration tank underneath).

A FaceTime tour of his current setup reveals a kaleidoscope of underwater color. He grows a range of corals to sell and trade, as well as to donate to aquariums and reef rebuilding projects. Most of his corals are small polyp and large polyp stony corals, but he also raises bounce mushroom corals, which are rare.

“I’ve known students who kept small salt-water tanks before,” says Murphy’s adviser, Associate Professor of Biology LaTina Steele, “but never on his scale and not SHU students. He’s obviously incredibly passionate about his reef tank and has a talent for keeping it healthy.”

That passion is immediately evident as he speaks of the processes and patience necessary for coral growth. He discusses water salinity and pH levels with the same enthusiasm others use to compare the career stats of Babe Ruth vs. Barry Bonds. And, much like sports banter that always ends in simple admiration of the artistry of the athlete, Murphy always seems to come around to the sense of wonder at the heart of his study. “It takes years for these organisms to grow,” he says, “and they never stop.

The Great Barrier Reef is millions of years old, and so is the coral that is still alive there to this day—which is amazing to me.”

In addition to saving the world one polyp at a time, Murphy is also the viola section leader for the Sacred Heart Orchestra and part of the Sacred Heart University String Quartet, as well as being a global ambassador for the University. And, as if that’s not enough, he continues to help out as a shift supervisor when he’s needed at Clyde’s Grill and Bar—the same place he began working to pay for his first saltwater fish tank.

Still, it’s obviously the water that is Murphy’s home. His senior year of high school, he spent two weeks in the Dominican Republic rebuilding rock barriers that had been disrupted by storms. If the group saw fragments of coral where they shouldn’t be, those fragments were collected, sorted and replanted in artificial reefs until they were strong enough to be moved to a larger, more established reef. “I knew then that this is what I wanted to do,” he says.

Murphy first learned about SHU because one of his cousins toured the school. He was drawn to the University because of the new custom reef tank being built there at the time, which was finished his junior year. In his first research project at SHU, he took his oldest piece of coral and grew it to “a massive colony of 70 polyps,” he says.

Fragments from that colony were split into two groups and fed differing proteins, phytoplankton (microalgae) or zooplankton (microscopic organisms), to see which food source prompted more coral growth. What he and his fellow researchers found is that the food source doesn’t really matter “on its own, but we think that there are other compounding factors that will affect the ability to intake food,” he says. Murphy’s question is whether or not the microalgae impacts the condition of the water, and if that has an impact on the coral’s ability to survive and thrive. In short, what the organism does to the environment of the coral “might be a little bit more important than the protein within the food.”

Between the work he’s done with his own tanks since childhood, that high school trip to the Dominican Republic, his time on campus in Fairfield and a semester abroad on the SHU in Dingle campus, Murphy has a remarkable firsthand understanding of the options before him in marine science. At the moment, his professional inclinations lean toward aquaculture, the breeding of ornamental fish for aquariums or breeding coral for aquariums or restoration, with the goal of cutting down on illegal and/or overharvesting of these organisms.

“We don’t think of the implications of pop culture on the world,” he says. “When a movie like Finding Nemo comes out, and Clown Fish go from $1 a fish to $25 a fish, they’re all being poached and overharvested,” he says. It was even worse when Finding Dory, the Finding Nemo sequel, was released in 2016. The main character is a Blue Tang fish, a variety that went from $50 a fish to “well over $200, and they can’t be bred in captivity like a Clown Fish can,” he says.

The Gemmatum Tang, which is in the same family as the Blue Tang, only lives off the coast of Madagascar and sells for $700 a fish. If someone can figure out how to breed a kind of Tang Fish in captivity, it eliminates the factors that endanger the fish and disrupt ecosystems, he says. “You bring the price down while also deterring poachers from harvesting from the wild.”

Whatever he does, Steele knows he’ll be an effective marine science advocate. “Getting people to care about marine science is half the battle when it comes to conservation of any marine species,” she says.

“I was watching documentaries and researching the world at a very young age,” Murphy says, noting that his parents and family, but especially his mom, have always engendered and encouraged that curiosity that drives his passion. “I always found learning about the different parts of the world—especially the oceans—fascinating.”

Jen A. Miller is a regular contributor to the New York Times and the author of Running: A Love Story.