Natural Features of Samoa

Baha'i House of Worship of Samoa

"The primordial function of the temple and temple is just that of oneness - places of encounter where different nations, different races as well as different kinds of soul can come together to reveal charity and harmony between them.... so that all faiths, race and sect come together in their universaal protection...."

Wellcome to the Baha'i House of Worship of Samoa website. The Baha'i' House of Worship of Samoa (also known as Baha'i Temple), ONE OF ONLY EIGHT IN THE WORLD, is a place of prayers and contemplation open to people from all walks of life. The striking House of Worship design with nine balanced sides and entries represents charm and elegance.

Worship House consists of 20 hectares of well-kept worship garden with more than 60 kinds of flower, plant and tree habitats, all of which are located in Samoa. Interwoven with hiking trails and footbridges, the garden can be the setting for your own contemplation, or just a walk through the natural beauties of Samoa.

There is also a visitor information centre for those who want to learn more about the house of worship or the Baha'i Faith, a bookshop, souvenir store and toilets. Worship House is open every morning for personal contemplation and prayers for the people.

Every Sunday at 10:00 a.m. a publicly open interreligious worship in the church is open to all, regardless of their religion, spirit, ethnicity or culture. The Sunday worship celebrations include worship and scriptures from a variety of worlds faiths, performed in English, Samoan and sometimes in other major tongues, as well as a Samoan voice-chor.

Now, look.

Reforms flourish in the warm water of Samoa, which would destroy other types of algae. But Palumbi is just beginning to realize how these Samoan algae are thriving under such harsh environments. He believes he can use this capability to build a hard winter hard core wall with the opportunity to survive the warm oceans that will arise from climatic changes.

The Palumbi is part of a small group of reef explorers all over the globe who are dealing with such problems in order to save endangered cliffs. Its final goal is to start a human-assisted evolving program that creates resilient reef sharks in managed gardens and plants them in areas that have been or will be severely affected by the changed circumstances.

"It' s a beautiful new way to work with coral," says Ruth Gates, sea life scientist at the University of Hawaii in Manoa, who pioneered it together with Australian Institute of Marine Science in Townsville based genetics expert Madeleine van Oppen. In recent years, the reef has been under siege by everything from water heating and oceans becoming acidified to diseases, over-fishing, and contamination.

The Status of Correal Refs of the World: 2008, a summary1 report by several hundred researchers and conservationists, shows that 19% of the world's marine corals have been destroyed since 1950 and another 35% are under threat or in crisis. The Caribbean, for example, has been losing 80% of its marine life since the 1970' (see 2).

Until the end of this millennium, scientists are expecting seawater to sink from a pH of 8.1 to 7.9 or lower and heat up by at least 2°C, on average around the world. "It' s like pulling the bath connector and the sound of seawater - that's the state of the coral," says Palumbi.

They are stresstested in coolers that have been set to withstand high laboratory temperature. In Palau in the west Pacific, however, scientists have found 4 large and more varied in relatively acidic waterways than the Pacific mean.

A further research5 found that the incidence of prospective whitening processes - massive deaths when stress laden receding seaweeds loose their symmetrical alga - is 20-80% lower if the model takes into consideration the adaptability of the reefs after pre-bleach. Up to now, the scientists have only a few indications of what makes some of them resistant.

Palumbi and his co-workers, among them Daniel Barshis, Stanford oceanologist, conducted a survey6 in 2013 comparing two species of the reef-forming Acropora hyacinthus at their site off Ofu Island in American Samoa. They placed the specimens in checked containers and shock them for four whole day at a temperature almost 3°C above the norm.

The coral is whitened until the end of the 4th da. However, those from the hottest swimming pools lasted longer and had a higher level of gene activity, with 60 known thermotolerant families producing thermoshock protein and antioxidative-enzyme. The Palumbi and Barshis believe that genetics and acclimatisation are important in promoting tolerancemen.

Her analysis suggests that coral can "harden" in the course of its life in reaction to ambient factors. People in the heated pelvis are prepared for extra thermal stresses, "like an athletes who has been working out every single working day since very young years," says Barshis. When Palumbi and his crew replanted about 400 specimens from the two areas of the coral riffs back into the two swimming pools, they found that the coral from the hottest swimming pool was planted more effectively and growing over time.

In August this year Palumbi and his team are planning an exploratory conservation program at Sili Reef off Ofu Island. In order to choose the best coral, the scientists will draw on their comprehensive field observations, which include growing assays and transcriptome bluoprints of the part of the coral that is being active in protein transcription.

They' also intend to use coral fatigue test results from a handheld coral test that Palumbi is working on-'like a test of a heart rate on a man's treadmill,' he says. Both he and his crew have constructed fuel cells from 7. 5-litre coolers equipped with light, heating and coolers that can dispense coral with a high level of control and physical strain.

They should be able to forecast how the whitening and chloride levels could react to possible whitening situations by controlling the whitening and chloride levels. Cultured in the laboratory from semen and egg, this sturdy young seaweed was then contaminated with symmetrical seaweed, which is used to cope with increased temperature. Other have found heartening indications that the acclimatisation related stresses and strains can be transmitted to the heirs.

Unreleased work by Gates, headed by Hollie Putnam of the University of Hawaii, shows that mature Pocillopora damicornis, which are under pressure during breeding, produces nymphs with enhanced resistance to oceans heating and acids. In particular, Gates and van Oppen will focus on areas that have already survive severe bleaches, such as Moorea in French Polynesia, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and the Seychelles, where 97% of coral on the inner island were killed in El Niño after the 1997-98 warm-up.

A tree farm has already been established from the Seychelles coral that survives, and reef plantations have been used to support their replot. It is Gates and van Oppen's goal to find coral that have managed to survive this strenuous bleach and to monitor their offspring's load-bearing capacity. Dependent on how much of this financing goes through, they also seek to use warmth and acid to emphasize coral before it multiplies, to see if and how tolerances are handed down to the people.

Starting in May, van Oppen and her crew will begin to collect Pocillopora accuta branched reef adult from the Great Barrier Reef and breed them in the huge National Sea Simulator at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, an open sea system that provides regulated aquariums to simulate the open sea environment. Finally, Gates and van Oppen are hoping to build a "seed bank" of gamete and fertilised foetuses from environments where corruption remains despite the opportunities - which include the shoals on Coconut Island, Hawaii, where both temperatures and pH vary dramatically and reach the levels similar to those in the open sea by 2050.

It would complement the Smithsonian Institution's effort in cooperation with Hawaiians and Australians who are already collecting embryo stem cell and semen. Madeline van Oppen gathers freshwater pearls for research and selected harvest. One last important part of the jigsaw consists of the symmetrical coralline algae: they have a short life span and develop more quickly than their organisms, and research has shown that they can transmit heat compatibility.

For example, a7 study found that the juveniles of seaweed vaccinated with stems of seaweed from a hot zone known for its thermal stability were growing well at a temperature of up to 32°C, while specimens of the same seaweed vaccinated with seaweed from a colder zone were suffering bleach and fabric deaths.

University of Miami, Florida, oceanologist Andrew Baker and his colleagues8 discovered that symbiotes from a line named Cluster D have a tendency to become more frequent in some coral when exposed to high temperatures, indicating that the seaweed is better able than other tribes to withstand this condition and that they also help their owners to live.

Studies9 have since shown that cluster D1 and D1a in particular occur in a large number of coral that have survive extroversion. Putnam, Gates and their colleagues10 have found that another species, Cal15, dominates in heat-resistant coral near Moorea.

Scientists like Baker are considering the option of deliberately sowing hard algal trunks on the reef to help them withstand the dangers of CCS. However, it is still not clear whether it will be possible to efficiently control the symbiote population in the great outdoors, where the environment could lead to one species of seaweed being preferred to another.

Operators in established gardening and farming sites have sent specimens of corals and symbiotes to scientists for genetics, while at the same time observing which organism copes well with thermal shock or illnesses. Scientists have collected from the Caribbean several hundred transgenotyped tribes of a fistful of corals, among them Acropora corales (Acropora cervicornis), a rarely seen extinct predator corals, says Les Kaufman, a sea biology expert at Boston University in Massachusetts.

Attempts to construct a reef with design reefs are not over yet. The selection according to characteristics such as thermal stability or acidsification can, for example, result in a genetically defined shortage. "Selective rearing programs can actually decrease coral's ability to adjust to changing environments by reducing genetics," says David Miller, a reef genetics researcher at James Cook University in Townsville.

This is when selectively cultivating algae in the sea is working. It' still too early to say whether it is highly hereditary in terms of weathering and thermal stability, he says. For example, the choice of resistances to temperature and acids could theoretically result in a higher vulnerability to sickness. Approximately 500 million individuals are in some way reliant on the reef for sustenance and incomes, and another 30 million are completely reef dependent1.