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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) 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.