#warm waters

Fishies - it’s been so cold and rainy this winter, I wanted to draw something warm and beachy. So have these fishies!

“Everywhere I go in the world, I see corals surviving where you would not expect them to,” Suggett says. “This gives me hope that there are coral communities that can cope with the stresses we’re throwing at reefs. Perhaps corals have been given less credit than they deserve in terms of their ability to tolerate and adapt to stress.”

One of the surprises at Low Isles, he says, was what happened when his team transplanted corals from the offshore reef into the mangrove lagoons—that is, from relatively benign conditions into hot, acidic ones. “We expected those corals to die,” Suggett says. “But after four months in the mangroves they have all done very well.”

That jibes with an observation by Palumbi’s team. The Stanford researchers found that the heat-tolerance genes they identified in corals in American Samoa are also present in corals in the cooler waters of the Cook Islands, 800 miles southeast. Researcher Rachael Bray, now at the University of California at Davis, found that these genes are rare in the Cook Islands today, but could spread as the waters warm.

At the rate humankind is emitting carbon, the researchers calculate, that spread probably won’t happen fast enough to ensure the survival of the reef. A slower emissions rate would help—but transplanting a few heat-tolerant corals from warmer climes could also speed the process along.

“What we’re trying to do with this work is understand what would happen in a situation where we had to rely on human intervention in order to keep reefs viable,” Suggett says. “That’s not what we want, of course. Plan A is to reduce emissions, solve climate change and take away the threat to reefs. But we have to prepare for the possibility of Plan F—dealing with global reef meltdown.