Latest news with #bleaching
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
‘Super corals' and supplements: Inside the lab trying to save the Great Barrier Reef
Editor's Note: Call to Earth is a CNN editorial series committed to reporting on the environmental challenges facing our planet, together with the solutions. Rolex's Perpetual Planet Initiative has partnered with CNN to drive awareness and education around key sustainability issues and to inspire positive action. Australia's iconic Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on the planet and home to a vast array of species. But in recent years it has been hit by a series of devastating mass bleaching events, turning the vibrant colors of parts of the reef a bright white. Across the world, corals are suffering a similar fate, with more than 80% of the ocean's reefs hit by an ongoing global bleaching event that began in 2023, due to record high marine temperatures. Bleaching can be deadly, as the corals are depleted of the algae that live inside them and act as a food source. The effects can be catastrophic; while coral reefs occupy just 0.01% of the ocean floor, they support a quarter of all marine life, as well as providing people with food and livelihoods, and helping to reduce storm surge and protect against erosion. At the UN Ocean Conference this month, 11 countries signed a pledge to protect climate-resilient reefs, and, separately, governments and partners pledged $25 million to a global fund for coral reefs. Ultimately, if coral reefs are to be saved, efforts to curb ocean warming by reducing carbon emissions need to be stepped up, but scientists are also searching for other solutions to keep coral reefs alive in a warming world. At the University of Technology Sydney, scientists from the Future Reefs team are searching for 'super corals' — species that are naturally more resilient to environmental changes, such as high temperatures, acidity or low oxygen levels. One of the program's goals is to identify these corals, discover what methods they are using to survive, and use them as a blueprint to support other corals in the harsher environments of the future. 'We have a focus on trying to understand reef resilience in a changing environment,' says Dr. Emma Camp, marine biologist and leader of the Future Reefs team. 'How do we build coral resilience to survive the stresses they're going to inevitably face? But also, how can we as humans use technology and science to support corals to make them more resilient?' Camp first discovered 'super coral' species growing in mangrove lagoons, which are naturally hot and acidic. Since then, she says the team has found up to 40 of these hardy species growing in different environments across the globe. Now, their focus is on finding them within the Great Barrier Reef. '(We want) to identify coral species with greater heat tolerance, but that are still able to maintain other traits that are really critical: we want them to be fast growers, we want them to provide good habitat for other organisms living on the reef,' says Christine Roper, a postdoctoral researcher on the team. During expeditions to the Great Barrier Reef, the team collects and analyzes specific coral species. They carry out real-time heat tolerance testing on the samples using a special phenotyping machine that helps to predict which coral has the best chance of survival as water temperatures rise. They also take fragments of coral back to the lab, where they can extract DNA and conduct more extensive tests. Once they've identified a stress-tolerant species, the Coral Nurture Program — a project co-founded by Camp that works with local tourism operators and indigenous communities to replant corals at scale — propagates it on coral nurseries which they have established at different locations across the Great Barrier Reef, before 'outplanting' them on the reef to help restore areas that have been affected by bleaching. Since the program's inception in 2018, over 125,000 corals have been outplanted across the Great Barrier Reef — off Cairns, Port Douglas and the Whitsundays — with a survival rate of 85%. But restoring areas of the Great Barrier Reef is no easy task. It has almost 3,000 individual reefs and covers 344,400 square kilometers (133,000 square miles), and as of April 2024, as much as 60% of its reefs had recently been exposed to potential bleaching. The team is hopeful that areas where outplanting has taken place are already showing visible signs of recovery. Other labs around the world are developing similar solutions, also with promising results. The Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) has been using artificial selection and selective breeding to grow heat-tolerant corals, reporting that genetic interventions can work, but with varying success between species. The UK's University of Newcastle has also selectively bred corals that it says can better survive marine heatwaves, although it is yet to conduct large-scale trials in the wild. Studies have shown that traditional coral restoration efforts can be undone within a few years if there is a bleaching event, but by planting heat-resilient corals the Coral Nurture Program hopes the restoration will be able to withstand future events. 'By focusing our efforts on identifying and increasing the abundance of heat-tolerant corals in the population, we optimize our efforts by ensuring those populations will be more resilient to future heat stress events,' says Roper. The major challenge — be it with naturally or selectively bred corals — is how to scale up the process of planting, which is labor-intensive and costly, requiring people to dive down to the reef and plant the corals by hand. That's why the focus of the Coral Nurture Program has been to engage tourism operators and local communities. 'We can build scale by having pockets of communities undertaking these actions,' says Camp. It collaborates with seven tourism operators on the Great Barrier Reef, including Wavelength Reef Cruises, so that snorkelling trips to the reef paid for by tourists double up as outplanting expeditions. On these trips, members of the crew — who are all trained divers and marine biologists — outplant coral, tend to nurseries and conduct surveys of the area. The team at Wavelength helped to establish the program with Camp and has also been integral in operating coral nurseries along the reef and collecting data on coral health. Even so, there is a limit to how much can be achieved just through outplanting tough coral species. The Future Reefs team is also exploring other solutions, including whether feeding corals different food or vitamins could change their heat tolerance. Corals feed by extending tentacles out from their body to catch microscopic food particles. Past research has shown that feeding corals zooplankton — tiny animals that float near the surface of the water — after a bleaching event can help to boost resilience, as can growing corals on substrates infused with metal nutrients such as manganese and zinc. But such methods have not yet been tried on a large scale. 'Despite knowing a lot about corals, we know relatively little about coral nutrition,' says Camp. 'This, to me, is an area where research and science can really help us advance restoration practice by understanding more about what the corals fundamentally need to survive through stress.' Though in its early stages, the team back in the laboratory in Sydney has experimented with feeding corals foods such as microscopic brine shrimp fed with different types of algae, and adding certain metals or vitamins to the water that the corals will absorb. The goal is to develop a supplement that could give corals extra nutrients when stressed, helping them survive or recover from mass bleaching events. 'It's like us as humans: when we are run down, we might take a supplement to give us a boost. It's the same with the corals,' says Camp, adding that this kind of solution would potentially be easy to scale and apply to reefs globally. 'It's these sorts of new ideas that we have to explore, and nothing can be off the table, because if we don't do something, the end result is going to be a loss of reefs around the world,' she says. While hopeful that scientific innovation and scalable solutions can provide some sort of stopgap for coral reefs, Camp warns that protecting them long-term comes down to tackling the cause of mass coral bleaching, which means reducing greenhouse gas emissions and mitigating global warming. 'There's only so much we can do to buy time for the reef,' she says. 'We have to tackle climate change, because if the temperatures keep increasing, we're going to be asking too much of the corals to survive through the environment that they're being faced with.'
CNN
4 days ago
- Science
- CNN
‘Super corals' and supplements: Inside the lab trying to save the Great Barrier Reef
Australia's iconic Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on the planet and home to a vast array of species. But in recent years it has been hit by a series of devastating mass bleaching events, turning the vibrant colors of parts of the reef a bright white. Across the world, corals are suffering a similar fate, with more than 80% of the ocean's reefs hit by an ongoing global bleaching event that began in 2023, due to record high marine temperatures. Bleaching can be deadly, as the corals are depleted of the algae that live inside them and act as a food source. The effects can be catastrophic; while coral reefs occupy just 0.01% of the ocean floor, they support a quarter of all marine life, as well as providing people with food and livelihoods, and helping to reduce storm surge and protect against erosion. At the UN Ocean Conference this month, 11 countries signed a pledge to protect climate-resilient reefs, and, separately, governments and partners pledged $25 million to a global fund for coral reefs. Ultimately, if coral reefs are to be saved, efforts to curb ocean warming by reducing carbon emissions need to be stepped up, but scientists are also searching for other solutions to keep coral reefs alive in a warming world. At the University of Technology Sydney, scientists from the Future Reefs team are searching for 'super corals' — species that are naturally more resilient to environmental changes, such as high temperatures, acidity or low oxygen levels. One of the program's goals is to identify these corals, discover what methods they are using to survive, and use them as a blueprint to support other corals in the harsher environments of the future. 'We have a focus on trying to understand reef resilience in a changing environment,' says Dr. Emma Camp, marine biologist and leader of the Future Reefs team. 'How do we build coral resilience to survive the stresses they're going to inevitably face? But also, how can we as humans use technology and science to support corals to make them more resilient?' Camp first discovered 'super coral' species growing in mangrove lagoons, which are naturally hot and acidic. Since then, she says the team has found up to 40 of these hardy species growing in different environments across the globe. Now, their focus is on finding them within the Great Barrier Reef. '(We want) to identify coral species with greater heat tolerance, but that are still able to maintain other traits that are really critical: we want them to be fast growers, we want them to provide good habitat for other organisms living on the reef,' says Christine Roper, a postdoctoral researcher on the team. During expeditions to the Great Barrier Reef, the team collects and analyzes specific coral species. They carry out real-time heat tolerance testing on the samples using a special phenotyping machine that helps to predict which coral has the best chance of survival as water temperatures rise. They also take fragments of coral back to the lab, where they can extract DNA and conduct more extensive tests. Once they've identified a stress-tolerant species, the Coral Nurture Program — a project co-founded by Camp that works with local tourism operators and indigenous communities to replant corals at scale — propagates it on coral nurseries which they have established at different locations across the Great Barrier Reef, before 'outplanting' them on the reef to help restore areas that have been affected by bleaching. Since the program's inception in 2018, over 125,000 corals have been outplanted across the Great Barrier Reef — off Cairns, Port Douglas and the Whitsundays — with a survival rate of 85%. But restoring areas of the Great Barrier Reef is no easy task. It has almost 3,000 individual reefs and covers 344,400 square kilometers (133,000 square miles), and as of April 2024, as much as 60% of its reefs had recently been exposed to potential bleaching. The team is hopeful that areas where outplanting has taken place are already showing visible signs of recovery. Other labs around the world are developing similar solutions, also with promising results. The Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) has been using artificial selection and selective breeding to grow heat-tolerant corals, reporting that genetic interventions can work, but with varying success between species. The UK's University of Newcastle has also selectively bred corals that it says can better survive marine heatwaves, although it is yet to conduct large-scale trials in the wild. Studies have shown that traditional coral restoration efforts can be undone within a few years if there is a bleaching event, but by planting heat-resilient corals the Coral Nurture Program hopes the restoration will be able to withstand future events. 'By focusing our efforts on identifying and increasing the abundance of heat-tolerant corals in the population, we optimize our efforts by ensuring those populations will be more resilient to future heat stress events,' says Roper. The major challenge — be it with naturally or selectively bred corals — is how to scale up the process of planting, which is labor-intensive and costly, requiring people to dive down to the reef and plant the corals by hand. That's why the focus of the Coral Nurture Program has been to engage tourism operators and local communities. 'We can build scale by having pockets of communities undertaking these actions,' says Camp. It collaborates with seven tourism operators on the Great Barrier Reef, including Wavelength Reef Cruises, so that snorkelling trips to the reef paid for by tourists double up as outplanting expeditions. On these trips, members of the crew — who are all trained divers and marine biologists — outplant coral, tend to nurseries and conduct surveys of the area. The team at Wavelength helped to establish the program with Camp and has also been integral in operating coral nurseries along the reef and collecting data on coral health. Even so, there is a limit to how much can be achieved just through outplanting tough coral species. The Future Reefs team is also exploring other solutions, including whether feeding corals different food or vitamins could change their heat tolerance. Corals feed by extending tentacles out from their body to catch microscopic food particles. Past research has shown that feeding corals zooplankton — tiny animals that float near the surface of the water — after a bleaching event can help to boost resilience, as can growing corals on substrates infused with metal nutrients such as manganese and zinc. But such methods have not yet been tried on a large scale. 'Despite knowing a lot about corals, we know relatively little about coral nutrition,' says Camp. 'This, to me, is an area where research and science can really help us advance restoration practice by understanding more about what the corals fundamentally need to survive through stress.' Though in its early stages, the team back in the laboratory in Sydney has experimented with feeding corals foods such as microscopic brine shrimp fed with different types of algae, and adding certain metals or vitamins to the water that the corals will absorb. The goal is to develop a supplement that could give corals extra nutrients when stressed, helping them survive or recover from mass bleaching events. 'It's like us as humans: when we are run down, we might take a supplement to give us a boost. It's the same with the corals,' says Camp, adding that this kind of solution would potentially be easy to scale and apply to reefs globally. 'It's these sorts of new ideas that we have to explore, and nothing can be off the table, because if we don't do something, the end result is going to be a loss of reefs around the world,' she says. While hopeful that scientific innovation and scalable solutions can provide some sort of stopgap for coral reefs, Camp warns that protecting them long-term comes down to tackling the cause of mass coral bleaching, which means reducing greenhouse gas emissions and mitigating global warming. 'There's only so much we can do to buy time for the reef,' she says. 'We have to tackle climate change, because if the temperatures keep increasing, we're going to be asking too much of the corals to survive through the environment that they're being faced with.'
Free Malaysia Today
06-06-2025
- Health
- Free Malaysia Today
In a hotter future, what comes after coral reefs die?
When stressed in hotter ocean waters, corals expel the microscopic algae that provides their characteristic colour and food source. Without respite, bleached corals slowly starve. (AFP pic) PARIS : The fate of coral reefs has been written with a degree of certainty rare in climate science: at 1.5°C of global warming, most are expected to die. This is not a far-off scenario. Scientists predict that the rise of 1.5 Celsius will be reached within a decade and that beyond that point, many coral simply cannot survive. It is important to accept this and ask what next 'rather than trying to hold onto the past', said David Obura, chair of IPBES, the UN's expert scientific panel on biodiversity. 'I wish it were different,' Obura, a Kenyan reef scientist and founding director of CORDIO East Africa, a marine research organisation, told AFP. 'We need to be pragmatic about it and ask those questions, and face up to what the likely future will be.' And yet, it is a subject few marine scientists care to dwell on. 'We are having a hard time imagining that all coral reefs really could die off,' said Melanie McField, a Caribbean reef expert, who described a 'sort of pre-traumatic stress syndrome' among her colleagues. 'But it is likely in the two-degree world we are rapidly accelerating to,' McField, founding director of the Healthy Reefs for Healthy People Initiative, told AFP. When stressed in hotter ocean waters, corals expel the microscopic algae that provides their characteristic colour and food source. Without respite, bleached corals slowly starve. At 1.5°C of warming relative to pre-industrial times, between 70-90% of coral reefs are expected to perish, according to the IPCC, the global authority on climate science. At 2°C, that number rises to 99%. Even with warming as it stands today – about 1.4°C – mass coral death is occurring, and many scientists believe the global collapse of tropical reefs may already be underway. What comes next Obura said it was not pessimistic to imagine a world without coral reefs, but an urgent question that scientists were 'only just starting to grapple with'. 'I see no reason to not be clear about where we are at this point in time,' Obura said. 'Let's be honest about that, and deal with the consequences.' Rather than disappear completely, coral reefs as they exist today will likely evolve into something very different, marine scientists on four continents told AFP. This would happen as slow-growing hard corals – the primary reef builders that underpin the ecosystem – die off, leaving behind white skeletons without living tissue. Gradually, these would be covered by algae and colonised by simpler organisms better able to withstand hotter oceans, like sponges, mussels, and weedy soft corals like sea fans. 'There will be less winners than there are losers,' said Tom Dallison, a marine scientist and strategic advisor to the International Coral Reef Initiative. These species would dominate this new underwater world. The dead coral beneath – weakened by ocean acidification, and buffeted by waves and storms – would erode over time into rubble. 'They will still exist, but they will just look very different. It is our responsibility to ensure the services they provide, and those that depend on them, are protected,' Dallison said. Dark horizon One quarter of all ocean species live among the world's corals. Smaller, sparser, less biodiverse reefs simply means fewer fish and other marine life. The collapse of reefs threatens in particular the estimated one billion people who rely on them for food, tourism income, and protection from coastal erosion and storms. But if protected and managed properly, these post-coral reefs could still be healthy, productive, attractive ecosystems that provide some economic benefit, said Obura. So far, the picture is fuzzy – research into this future has been very limited. Stretched resources have been prioritised for protecting coral and exploring novel ways to make reefs more climate resilient. But climate change is not the only thing threatening corals. Tackling pollution, harmful subsidies, overfishing and other drivers of coral demise would give 'the remaining places the best possible chance of making it through whatever eventual warming we have', Obura said. Conservation and restoration efforts were 'absolutely essential' but alone were like 'pushing a really heavy ball up a hill, and that hill is getting steeper', he added. Trying to save coral reefs 'is going to be extremely difficult' as long as we keep pouring carbon into the atmosphere, said Jean-Pierre Gattuso, an oceans expert from France's flagship scientific research institute, CNRS. But some coral had developed a level of thermal tolerance, he said, and research into restoring small reef areas with these resilient strains held promise. 'How do we work in this space when you have this sort of big dark event on the horizon? It's to make that dark event a little brighter,' said Dallison.
ABC News
29-05-2025
- Politics
- ABC News
New warning over Great Barrier Reef
Earlier this week UNESCO'S World Heritage Centre - the committee charged with protecting the world's most precious and natural sites - sounded a dire warning to Australia's Great Barrier Reef. The centre's announced if the federal and Queensland governments don't take drastic measures to protect the site, it would be at risk of falling onto the 'in danger' list, after multiple bleaching events in the past decade.
