SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 3, Informative) by CortoMaltese on Saturday June 27 2015, @12:27AM
Now the title is a bit misleading, the corals aren't adapting or evolving per se, they had already adapted to a warmer climate before anthropogenic climate change, what scientists are doing are crossing this stronger strains to give corals another chance at survival.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Saturday June 27 2015, @01:42AM
So meddling in other words.....
Still, natural selection would have done this by itself, because its not the first time that ocean temperatures have swung wildly higher. That's what diversity is for.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 28 2015, @12:31AM
Yes, I had trouble thinking of the correct term for this. It is meddling.
Which is easier when it comes to complex, poorly-understood systems?
A) Breaking it
B) Fixing it
They apparently think that "humans being humans and disregarding nature" will break the system, but "humans being humans and purposefully meddling" will fix it. I think the answer is A in both cases and would require evidence for B. Does this evidence exist?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 27 2015, @12:41AM
This human-directed breeding has been going on for a while. [nature.com] It is a drop in the bucket and will take many orders of magnitude more money to have an impact, plus monoculture problems.
(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
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Gravis on Saturday June 27 2015, @01:35AM
Will this give rise to "Laissez-Faire Climatology," wherein humans need do nothing since the Invisible Hand of Evolution will meet all needs?
the "Invisible Hand of Evolution" isn't always favorable to humans.
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 27 2015, @04:20PM
Neither is the "Invisible Hand of the Market". It might be favorable to a single person while simultaneously quite destructive to 300 million others.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 27 2015, @06:27AM
Which figure from the paper shows the data leading to this conclusion:
(Score: 4, Interesting) by richtopia on Saturday June 27 2015, @05:30PM
for the oceans I thought that Ocean Acidification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification [wikipedia.org] is the larger issue in relation to global climate change. More CO2 in the air results in more carbonic acid in the ocean - and coral cannot survive in those conditions.
It looks like the article is only looking at water temperature. So we are still DOOOMED!