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from the now-if-everything-else-can-do-the-same dept.
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?
Original Submission
(Score: 2, Interesting) by KBentley57 on Saturday June 27 2015, @03:14AM
I may be reading it incorrectly, so feel free to comment on it. I think that sentence is asking the question "Do humans need to get involved, or will nature work itself out?". Nature will do what nature does. Either these coral survive the "filter" of global warming, or something will take their place, eventually. Human intervention on the other hand can try to manage the existing species so that they do not perish. Which is best? if only we had infinitely many parallel universes/time from which to gather the statistics.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday June 27 2015, @03:35AM
Humans ARE simply another mechanism of natrual selection.
In the grand scheme of things what we do in this case probably doesn't matter. We just don't have te attention spam to worry about a coral which we don't eat. Cattle and chickens, on the other hand, have their continued existence assured as long as there are humans around. (Much to the displeasure of those that think we need to depopulate the earth of humans in order to save it).
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by tathra on Saturday June 27 2015, @04:30PM
technically you're right, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't regulate and limit human activity. unregulated, unlimited destruction and consumption happens in nature too, like when predators kill off all of their prey and then starve and die off, or when there's no predators and prey species eat all of the resources in their area and then starve and die off. regulating and limiting activities is a good thing. there's plenty of examples of predators having to be reintroduced into an area (thus limiting the actions of the prey species) to keep everything in the area from dying, and plenty of examples of culling predators in an area (limiting the actions of the predators) to keep everything in the area from dying. similarly we must limit human activities to keep everything from being killed off and destroyed.