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The Australian iconic Great Barrier Reef is the largest residential structure in the world and houses a variety of species. In recent years, however, it has been affected by a series of devastating mass bleed events that turned the lively colors of the parts of the reef a light white.
Corals suffer a similar fate all over the world, with more than 80% of the reefs of the ocean affected by a persistent global blade event that began in 2023 due to record temperatures on record temperatures. The bleach can be fatal because the corals are exhausted from the algae that live in them and act as a source of food.
The effects can be catastrophic; While coral reefs only take 0.01% of the sea floor, support a quarter of all marine life data as well as food and livelihood and help to reduce the storm surge and protect against erosion.
At the UN Ocean Conference this month, 11 countries signed a promise to protect climatic reefs, and separately agreed with governments and partners $ 25 million to a global fund for coral reefs.
If coral reefs are to be saved, the efforts to contain ocean heating must ultimately be increased by reducing carbon emissions, but scientists are also looking for other solutions to keep coral reefs alive in a warming world.
Coral bleached white from a marine heat wave. – Christine Roper
At the University of Technology Sydney, scientists from the Future Reefs team are looking for “super corals” – species that are naturally more resistant to environmental changes such as high temperatures, acidity or low oxygen content. One of the programs of the program is to identify these corals, find out which methods they use to survive and use them as a blueprint to support other corals in the tougher environments of the future.
“We focus on understanding the resilience of the reefs in a changing environment,” says Dr. Emma Camp, Marine biologist and director of the future reef team. “How do we build coral resilience to survive the stress that you are inevitably exposed to?
Looking for Super Corals
Camp discovered first “Super Coral” pecies that grow in mangrove lagons, which are naturally hot and acidic. Since then she has said that the team has found up to 40 of these robust species in various environments around the world. Her focus is now on finding them within the Great Barrier Reef.
“(We want) identify coral species with greater heat tolerance, but they still maintain other features that are really critical: we want you to be quick producers. We want you to offer a good living space for other organisms that live on the reef,” says Christine Roper, a postdoctoral researcher in the team.
During expeditions to Great Barrier Reef, the team collects and analyzes certain coral species. They carry out real-time heat tolerance tests on the samples with a special phenotyping machine, which predicts which coral has the best chance of survival when the water temperatures rise. They also take fragments of the corals back to the laboratory, where they can extract DNA and carry out more extensive tests.
As soon as you have identified a stress-tolerant way, the Coral Nurure Program from Camp, which works together with local tourism operators and indigenous communities, consumes Coral schools together in different places via the Great barrier reef in different places before they are affected by Bloach, which are affected by Bloach Were to blood through bumps that were affected by Bloach to blossom through bumps.
Since the program was founded in 2018, over 125,000 corals have been equipped with a survival rate of 85%via the Great Barrier Reef from Cairns, Port Douglas and the Whitsundays.
The Great Barrier Reef covers a huge area in the Pacific Ocean to Northeastern Australia. – Tom Booth/CNN
However, the restoration of areas of Great Barrier Reef is not an easy task. It has almost 3,000 individual reefs and covers 344,400 square kilometers (133,000 square kilometers), and by April 2024 up to 60% of his reefs were recently exposed to a potential bleach. The team is confident that areas in which the planting has taken place already have visible signs of recovery.
Other laboratories all over the world develop similar solutions, even with promising results. The Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) has used artificial selection and selective breeding to grow heat -tolerant corals and reports that genetic interventions can work, but with different success between species. The British University of Newcastle has also selectively bred corals, of which it says that they can survive the Marine Heatwaves better, even though it does not have to carry out great attempts in the wild yet.
Studies have shown that traditional efforts to produce coral recovery can be reversed within a few years if there is a blade event. By planting heat -resistant corals, however, the restoration of future events can withstand. “By concentrating our efforts to identify and increase the abundance of heat -tolerant corals in the population, we optimize our efforts by ensuring that these population groups will be more resistant to future heating resources,” says Roper.
Scalate
The biggest challenge with natural or selectively bred coral insists in scaling the planting process, which is labor-intensive and expensive and obliges people to dive on the reef and to plant the corals by hand.
For this reason, the focus of the Coral Nurure program was on the inclusion of tourism operators and local communities. “We can build up scales by performing these actions from communities,” says Camp.
It works with seven tourism operators at the Great Barrier Reef, including wave length reef cruises, so that snorkeling to the reef that was paid by tourists double doubles. On these trips, the crew members, who are all trained divers and marine biologists – tend to carry out kindergartens to childhoods and issues of the area. The Wavelength team contributed to building the program with Camp, and was also an essential part of the operation of coral schools along the reef and collecting data on coral health.
Nevertheless, there is a limit for how much hard coral species can be achieved. The future Reefs team also examines other solutions, including the question of whether feeding corals can change their heat tolerance different foods or vitamins.
Corals feed by expanding tentacles out of their body to catch microscopic food feed particles. Earlier examinations have shown that feeding zooplankton – tiny animals that float near the water surface – can help to increase the resilience after a blade event, as well as the growth of corals on substrates that can be infused with metal nutrients such as manganese and zinc. However, such methods have not yet been tried to a large scale.
“Although we know a lot about corals, we know relatively little about coral nutrition,” says Camp. “For me, this is an area in which research and science can really help us to promote restoration practice by understanding more about what the corals need fundamentally to survive through stress.”
A scientist collects coral samples for testing. – Jake Crosby
Although the team in the laboratory in Sydney in the early stages with feeding foods such as microscopic brine shrimps with different types of algae and the adding of certain metals or vitamins has experimented with the water that absorb the corals.
The aim is to develop a supplement that gives corals additional nutrients when stressed and helps them to survive or to recover from mass bleeding events.
“It is like us as humans: If we have come down, we may take a supplement to give ourselves a thrust. It is the same with the corals,” says Camp and adds that this type of solution may be easy to scale and be globally applying to reefs.
“It is this kind of new ideas that we have to research, and nothing can be off the table, because if we do nothing, the end result will be a loss of reefs around the world,” she says.
Although the hope that scientific innovations and scalable solutions for coral reefs can offer a kind of stop -fold, Camp warns that the protection of the long -term protects the cause of the mass coral bleaching, which means that greenhouse gas emissions are reduced and global warming is reduced.
“We can only do so much to buy time for the reef,” she says. “We have to tackle climate change, because if the temperatures increase, we will ask too much of the corals to survive through the surroundings with which they are confronted.”
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