Four decades of coral research lead to an exciting discovery for tropical pacific corals
Caption: Ana Palacio-Castro collects coral samples to study their associated algal communities
Credit: Sean Mattson/STRI
A heat-tolerant algae found in some tropical Pacific corals can make reefs more resilient to heatwave events, according to an exciting new discovery reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers with University of Miami’s Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies (UM-CIMAS) and NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML) examined four decades of temperature, coral cover, bleaching, mortality data from three mass bleaching events, and symbiont community data from the last two. Scientists found that a symbiont algae helped corals better tolerate heat stress, increasing their resilience to warming ocean temperatures.
... Over the past 40 years, scientists from the University of Miami, NOAA, and partners have been monitoring reefs in the eastern tropical Pacific region, culminating in an interesting discovery.
To assess how different coral species responded to all three heat stress events, researchers collected coral bleaching and mortality data using health assessments of individual coral colonies before and during the heatwaves. Scientists discovered that the most important and a dominant reef building coral in the region, Pocillopora, was among the most heat-susceptible corals during the 1982-83 El Niño, but among the most resistant corals during the 1997-98 and 2015-16 heatwaves.
I chopped the article up some to lose the "new science" climate propaganda, feel free to go read it all. See my next post about the true impact of man on CO2.
https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/an-exciting-d ... ic-corals/