CORAL reefs are one of the world’s richest environments for marine wildlife, but they live on the edge. Coral thrives in warm water but quickly dies if temperatures rise just a single degree above the average summer maximum for their region. As climate change warms the world’s oceans this is a precarious situation. But not all corals suffer at the same temperatures. While most perish in water above 31°C, those in the Persian Gulf can withstand a punishing 35°C. Now a new study suggests that the way these corals survive could help corals elsewhere adapt to changing conditions.
Corals get their brilliant colours from tiny algae that live in their tissue in a symbiotic relationship—the coral provides a home and the algae food produced during photosynthesis. If it gets too hot the algae leave, turning coral into a “bleached” white skeleton. Last year, Jörg Wiedenmann, a marine biologist, and his colleagues at the University of Southampton in Britain discovered that the algae inside the Persian Gulf corals were in fact a different species from that commonly found in other parts of the world. It was this species’ ability to tolerate extreme heat...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology http://ift.tt/25NeKnF
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