After seven years of experimentation, a team of researchers at the Coralassist Lab at Newcastle University, in the United Kingdom, finally achieved its goals.
After seven years of experimentation, a team of researchers at the Coralassist Lab at Newcastle University, in the United Kingdom, finally achieved its goals. Through selective breeding, they had for the first time ever produced adult corals capable of resisting marine heat waves — a potentially useful trait in an ever-warming world. Their work, published in October in Nature Communications, showed that corals can become better adapted to warming within a single generation.
The rise in tolerance that they achieved was not large compared with how fast the ocean is warming. “But it’s not an inconsequential jump,” says Stephen Palumbi, a marine biologist at Stanford University who also works on heat tolerance in corals but was not involved in this study. “[It’s] not a small benefit.”
The Coralassist Lab lab is one of several coral restoration projects worldwide that are looking for ways to help corals acclimatize to increasingly common heat waves through assisted evolution — the practice of using human interventions to amp up natural processes. Some scientists are helping corals evolve more quickly by lab-breeding the symbiotic organisms that live inside them to be heat resistant. Others are gardening coral reefs in the wild so heat-resistant species can find each other and mate more easily.
Read more at: Yale Environment 360
Researchers Liam Lachs and Adriana Humanes of Coralassist study selectively bred corals growing at an ocean nursery. (Photo Credit: James Guest)
