Researchers Discover How To Lead Dying Coral Reefs To a 'Fast And Full Recovery' (gizmodo.com) 19
Gizmodo reports:
Roughly 84.4% of the world's coral reefs suffered bleaching-levels of heat stress during the last major marine heat wave from January 2023 to September 2025, with over half already lost compared to coral coverage in the 1950s... But there's some good news, thanks to a new study published this Wednesday in the journal Science Advances: Marine ecologists at Stanford have discovered that bleached corals can be revived via contact with a healthy coral neighbor, who (like a good neighbor) shares their photosynthetic, symbiotic algae (Symbiodiniaceae) with their peers.
"This incredible new result — that fast and full recovery is possible in bleached coral — can inspire solutions that eventually may be scalable," [Fiorenza Micheli, a marine ecologist with Stanford's Center for Ocean Solutions and study co-author, told the journal Nature]... Unlike their controls, bleached coral in contact with healthy coral recovered in just eight weeks... [T]he surprise discovery of this method alongside the other techniques that marine conservationists are now actively pursuing — including the successful deep-freezing and revival of at-risk coral sampled from Hawaii — could offer threatened reefs the lifeline they need. Coral contact could super-charge other efforts, like the selective breeding of heat-tolerant corals and the cultivation of protected coral nurseries
"This incredible new result — that fast and full recovery is possible in bleached coral — can inspire solutions that eventually may be scalable," [Fiorenza Micheli, a marine ecologist with Stanford's Center for Ocean Solutions and study co-author, told the journal Nature]... Unlike their controls, bleached coral in contact with healthy coral recovered in just eight weeks... [T]he surprise discovery of this method alongside the other techniques that marine conservationists are now actively pursuing — including the successful deep-freezing and revival of at-risk coral sampled from Hawaii — could offer threatened reefs the lifeline they need. Coral contact could super-charge other efforts, like the selective breeding of heat-tolerant corals and the cultivation of protected coral nurseries
Rear guard action? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Rear guard action? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why the fuck can't we root out this sort of ignorance? It's dumbasses like you voting for dumbass policies that has landed us here. You should not be allowed to vote.
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Trilobites have existed for far longer than most species, and now they are extinct. The same can happen to corals as well.
Corals have never been dying at the rate they do now. It is possible that they will recover eventually, after humanity is extinct, which does not help humanity. And there is no guarantee that they will.
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Corals are literally one of the oldest lifeforms on the planet. They evolved >500m years ago, when the earth was vastly warmer. (It's about 15-16C now, 500m yr ago it was 30C or higher).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
They survived even warmer times - 36C in the mesozoic - and cooler, as low as 11C.
And - contrary to the "but it's changing FASTER!" meme, that's not true: global temps have changed occasionally **much** more rapidly than what we see today. Chicxulub caused 20-30C drops that lasted for d
Re: Rear guard action? (Score:1)
manual intervention? (Score:2)
The study appears to show that if you extract some healthy fragments from nearby coral that weren't bleached out for some reason, and implant them into the bleached areas, the symbionts will spread out and repopulate the coral hosts.
Not feasible to do manually, you won't have divers out there prospecting for good coral chunks and transplanting them, but it is an interesting piece of information.
It makes me think that if the original symbionts get expelled they will die pretty quick. I wonder if there could
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This is a job for robots, and maybe even AI.
Like they are solving the lionfish problem with robots that scoop them up.
Except in this case, it's break off a piece of coral, take it someplace useful, drop it again.
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They could breed the algae separately and load up a UAV with "bath bombs" buoyant at the correct depth to deploy them where it sees bleaching. One of the large solar powered planes wirh giant wings would suffice. Speed isn't valuable, just range and payload. Payload can be multiplied with increased numbers of aircraft.
With polarized lenses and sufficient ML cameras it should be quite precise.
Some work would need to be done to work out dispersants and adhesives.
It wouldn't be conceptually different than the
Re: It's hogwash -- they survived comets and worse (Score:1)
Yes, the planet will eventually recover from our damage. That doesn't help us if that process takes a million years. We need working biosystems now, not in a million years.
Also, you're a fucking retard.
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I mean...the people who have for decades fought long and hard to inform people about the catastrophic threats facing corals should be DELIGHTED that there is a serious, significant prospect of improving their survival.
Indeed, I am delighted. Though I might question the scalability and costs of the process. It's one thing to demonstrate that something works on a 'lab-scale', but there are inevitably complications in moving up to the real world. Still, let's take the win...
Because if they're not delighted then one might question whether they really were that concerned about the corals themselves in the first place. One might even speculate that 'teh coRalz are DyIng!" was really about just a useful poster-child for an ideology or something less salutary....
So, now all we have to do is tackle the issues of drought; flooding; food insecurity (pfft, shortages); unliveable temperatures; habitat and species loss; rising sea levels; more powerful storms; and (that's not to mention) a host of other issues and unc