Climate change is heating oceans faster than the world's coral reefs can handle. So scientists are breeding corals that can withstand hotter temperatures – but only to a point.Record levels of heat in the ocean are causing a worldwide mass bleaching event on coral reefs, as seen here on the Great Barrier Reef. Scientists are working on creating more heat-resistant coral to help restore reefs.Record levels of heat in the ocean are causing a worldwide mass bleaching event on coral reefs.
"I think anyone who wasn't worried, needs to be worried now," says Kate Quigley, coral biologist at James Cook University in Australia and the Minderoo Foundation."Nature has time to make mistakes and then adjust. We don't have that time." "What we're really doing is natural selection in a bottle," he says."We're really excited about the possibility for that to help corals persist into the future."
Corals bleach, turning ghostly white, when they're under stress from hotter temperatures. If the heat subsides, they can recover. But long periods of heat and repeated marine heat waves cause corals to die, wreaking havoc on one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet.If the heat subsides, corals can recover, slowly building back their algae population. But if the heat persists, or if there are too many marine heat waves back-to-back, the corals die.
"Assisted evolution is an umbrella term for many things we've been doing in many other systems: agriculture, for pets." Nitschke says."We're really only just starting to understand what we can do in the coral space."
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