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  • Too much carbon emissions in the water from dirty chinese shipping container ships. It’s killing all the sea life and endangering our water supply. Their exhaust doesn’t go into the air, it goes straight into the water.
    by krylonmae
  • Some good news :) anything to bring back coral reefs
    by fosterfriends
  • Of note: This only occurred for fragments taken from an individual of the same genetic makeup(genet: basic meaning is they are a colony). Presumably, it would be difficult to recreate this at scale in the wild. I did not read past the free to read portion of the article that mentions scaling this is possible. I am curious about the methodology of that.

    I find it strange that the first observance of this was a year ago, especially given how rapidly it occurs. Coral bleaching has probably been studied since the 80s when major events started being noticed. If Stephen Palumbi is reading this, I would love to read why you think it took so long.

    edit: I would wager this is only the first published observance.

    by ghastmaster
  • Only if they are clones - genetically identical. So not much use in practice, unfortunately.
    by Okkef
  • Having been a diver on the Great Barrier Reef numerous times, the scale of bleaching events means that there is often no non-bleached neighbour for vast distances. Healthy propagation rarely occurs before the brown sludge sets in, then its game over.
    by anakaine
  • Coral gets its color from algae called zooxanthellae, which it depends on for photosynthesis.

    Bleaching is actually due to the coral expelling those algae. Bleached corals are not dead, and remarkably they can not only let the algae in again but can also select a different algae species to cultivate (changing colour in the process)!.

    This is thought to be a deliberate survival strategy to optimize the species of algae under different conditions (Adaptive Bleaching Hypothesis).

    Bleaching is caused by the same stressors (like high temperature) which kill coral, but bleaching itself is not death of the coral.

    by skew-aberration

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