Some coral populations already have genetic variants necessary to tolerate warm ocean waters, and humans can help to spread these genes, a team of scientists from The University of Texas at Austin, the Australian Institute of Marine Science and Oregon State University have found. The discovery has implications for many reefs now threatened by global warming and shows for the first time that mixing and matching corals from different latitudes may boost reef survival.
The findings were published this week in the journal Science.
The researchers crossed corals from naturally warmer areas of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia with corals from a cooler latitude nearly 300 miles to the south. The scientists found that coral larvae with parents from the north, where waters were about 2 degrees Celsius warmer, were up to 10 times as likely to survive heat stress, compared with those with parents from the south. Using genomic tools, the researchers identified the biological processes responsible for heat tolerance and demonstrated that heat tolerance could evolve rapidly based on existing genetic variation.
Will this give rise to "Laissez-Faire Climatology," wherein humans need do nothing since the Invisible Hand of Evolution will meet all needs?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 27 2015, @01:30AM
You can kill out a very well adapted species to a particular local environment by introducing a few members of another population and polluting the gene pool.
And, when you start mixing all these small populations, while producing conditions that kill off their progenitors, you end up reducing diversity, and making it less likely for that species to survive any future threats.
Too bad humans are so bad at modifying their own behaviors which are the root cause of the stress on these corals, and everything else.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 27 2015, @09:02AM
Humans are bad, mmmkay