Guest essay by Eric Worrall
CSIRO Scientists have subjected coral symbiont algae to heat stress over four years, and produces a strain of algae which can help coral thrive in temperatures which normally cause coral bleaching. They hope the new heat resistant algae can be useful for inoculating reefs suffering heat stress.
Scientists successfully develop heat resistant coral to fight bleaching
14 May 2020
A team of scientists has successfully produced in a laboratory setting a coral that is more resistant to increased seawater temperatures.
The team included researchers from CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) and the University of Melbourne.
Corals with increased heat tolerance have the potential to reduce the impact of reef bleaching from marine heat waves, which are becoming more common under climate change.
“Coral reefs are in decline worldwide,” CSIRO Synthetic Biology Future Science Platform (SynBio FSP) science lead Dr Patrick Buerger said.
“Climate change has reduced coral cover, and surviving corals are under increasing pressure as water temperatures rise and the frequency and severity of coral bleaching events increase.”
The team made the coral more tolerant to temperature-induced bleaching by bolstering the heat tolerance of its microalgal symbionts – tiny cells of algae that live inside the coral tissue.
“Our novel approach strengthens the heat resistance of coral by manipulating its microalgae, which is a key factor in the coral’s heat tolerance,” Dr Buerger said.
The team isolated the microalgae from coral and cultured them in the specialist symbiont lab at AIMS. Using a technique called “directed evolution”, they then exposed the cultured microalgae to increasingly warmer temperatures over a period of four years.
This assisted them to adapt and survive hotter conditions.
“Once the microalgae were reintroduced into coral larvae, the newly established coral-algal symbiosis was more heat tolerant compared to the original one,” Dr Buerger said.
The microalgae were exposed to temperatures that are comparable to the ocean temperatures during current summer marine heat waves causing coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef.
The researchers then unveiled some of the mechanisms responsible for the enhanced coral bleaching tolerance.
“We found that the heat tolerant microalgae are better at photosynthesis and improve the heat response of the coral animal,” Professor Madeleine van Oppen, of AIMS and the University of Melbourne, said.
“These exciting findings show that the microalgae and the coral are in direct communication with each other.”
The next step is to further test the algal strains in adult colonies across a range of coral species.
“This breakthrough provides a promising and novel tool to increase the heat tolerance of corals and is a great win for Australian science,” SynBio FSP Director Associate Professor Claudia Vickers said.
This research was conducted by CSIRO in partnership with AIMS and the University of Melbourne. It was funded by CSIRO, Paul G. Allen Family Foundation (U.S.A.), AIMS and the University of Melbourne
Source: CSIRO
Its great news that scientists have developed heat resistant algae, which could be used to inoculate reefs suffering heat stress.
But do coral reefs really need human help?
My question, and I know it might seem radical; do you think it is possible that if the entire ocean warms up, natural selection on a global scale might rapidly replicate what scientists managed to achieve by heat stressing algae in their lab tank?
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Gosh! How did nature adapt before we came along?
I’m sure they will soon receive certain directions from James Cook University to cease and desist this code of conduct breach into coral reef science.
It would appear that most coral bleaching is occurring in areas that are out of the water at low tide.
Surely, the coming catastrophic rise in sea level will correct this ?
The Flower Gardens, now a marine sanctuary near the shelf edge off the Louisiana-Texas border is an example of a marginal reef, minimum T around 20C. It was a delta during the Pleistocene, so is rather young. A special issue came out in the now defunct Gulf of Mexico Science (1998, 16,2) but is now available through Gulf and Caribbean Research. https://aquila.usm.edu/gcr/all_issues.html
There has been a lot of research since.
The Red Sea has some of the hottest ocean waters and finest corals on earth.
This is ignored by climate scientists that “know” coral bleaching is caused by global warming.
It is strange that Australia with its colder ocean temperatures has more coral bleaching than Indonesia with much warmer ocean temperatures.
I would have thought that if global warming was the cause of bleaching, then those countries right on the equator would see the most bleaching.
But that doesn’t appear to be the case. Could it be that climate science assumed cause and effect without actually doing any science?
CSIRO = Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, yes?
Well, the abbreviated letters for “Scientific” and “Research” are definitely debatable.
Yes?
This is geo engineering.
. . . but nothing that nature hasn’t been doing for billions of years, and often with much larger consequences, such as when cyanobacteria converted Earth’s entire atmosphere from weakly reducing to oxidizing. Ref: “Great Oxidation Event (GOE)”, “Oxygen Holocaust”, or “Oxygen Revolution”.
Yep where the earth literally rusted.
Corals have survived periods that have been far warmer than now. They must have adapted as they are still here. Both, the Medieval Climate Optimum and the Roman Climate Optimum have been warmer than the one we go through now. They were not caused by humans so corals evidently dealt with them and the many others before them. If corals died from warmer water, there could not be a coral in the seas for millions of years now. But they are. Its time we got real.