A bit of pre-emptive tinkering by people might help to save them
news that coral reefs are in hot water. Corals, which are sessile animals related to sea anemones, host within their tissues algae that provide them with both food and their tourist-attracting colours. But as temperatures rise, the photosynthetic mechanisms of these algae go haywire. Instead of molecular oxygen, the normal waste product of photosynthesis, they start generating highly reactive and therefore toxic oxygen-rich compounds, such as peroxides.
Locally, things can be yet more dramatic. In just three years Australia’s Great Barrier Reef lost more than 30% of its corals to death-by-bleaching. Surveys conducted this March showed that another Barrier Reef bleaching event is now under way. This instance is particularly worrying because it is the first to take place during a Pacific cooling event called La Niña—rather than during either its warming opposite, El Niño, or an intermediate period between the two.
Similar pockets of heat resistance might be expected to have evolved elsewhere, too. Anne Cohen of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in Massachusetts, is responsible for a newly launched project which sets out to identify “super reefs” of this sort around the world. Using a mix of genetic analysis and hydrologic modelling, she aims to find reefs that are heat-resistant and genetically diverse, and therefore potentially able to restore neighbouring bleached sites to their former glory.
Further evidence points in that direction, too. In 2020 Phillip Cleves of Stanford University published work which showed that knocking out one particular gene in a species calledsignificantly reduces its ability to withstand heat. If resilience genes like these could be catalogued, and their presence identified in the field, that would allow researchers to identify resilient corals much more quickly thancan.
Even if the algae cannot be pressed into service in this way, though, other microscopic organisms living within a coral might be. Microbiomes—the collectives of bacteria, fungi and viruses that cohabit with most animals, especially in their guts—are now taken seriously as physiological influencers.
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