https://e360.yale.edu/features/selective-breeding-coral-climate-change
"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.
The field has been growing over the past 10 years. But big questions remain
about whether scientists can identify the various genes linked with heat
resistance, whether it’s logistically possible to scale up these assisted
evolution efforts, and whether they will make a difference, considering the
pace of global warming."
Via
Reasons to be Cheerful:
<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/what-were-reading-heat-resistant-corals/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
