by Note of the editors: Call to Earth is a CNN editorial series that is committed to reporting on the environmental challenges that our planet is confronted with the solutions. Rolex’s Perpetual Planet Initiative works together with CNN to stimulate awareness and education on important sustainability issues and to inspire positive action.
The iconic Great Barrier Reef of Australia is the largest living structure on the planet and the home of a huge range of species. But in recent years it has been affected by a series of devastating mass -bleaching events, making the vibrant colors of the reef a clear white.
All over the world, corals suffer from a similar fate, with more than 80% of the reefs of the ocean affected by a constant worldwide pale event that started in 2023, due to the registration of high marine temperatures. Bleaching can be deadly because the corals are exhausted from the algae that live in and act as a food source.
The effects can be catastrophic; While coral reefs occupy only 0.01% of the ocean floor, they support a quarter of all marine life and offer people food and resources of existence and help reduce the flood and protect them against erosion.
During the UN Ocean Conference this month, 11 countries signed a promise to protect climate-resilient reefs, and individual governments and partners have assigned $ 25 million to a worldwide fund for coral reefs.
Ultimately, if coral reefs have to be saved, efforts to curb the global warming by reducing carbon emissions, but scientists are also looking for other solutions to keep coral reefs alive in a warming world.
Coral bleached white from a marine heat wave. – Christine Roper
At the University of Technology Sydney, scientists from the future Riffenteam are looking for “super oral” species that are naturally more resilient for changes in the environment, such as high temperatures, acidity or low oxygen levels. One of the goals of the program is to identify these corals, to discover what methods they use to survive and use them as a blueprint to support other corals in the heavier environments of the future.
“We have a focus on trying to understand reef fever in a changing environment,” says Dr. Emma Camp, marine biologist and leader of the future Riffenteam. “How do we build coral spring to survive the stress with which they are inevitably confronted? But also, how can we use technology and science to support corals to make them more resilient?”
Looking for Super Corals
Camp first discovered “Super Coral” species that grew in mangrove lagunes, which are naturally hot and sour. Since then she says that the team has found up to 40 of these hardy species that grow in various environments around the world. Now their focus is on finding them within the Great Barrier Reef.
“(We want to) identify coral species with a larger heat tolerance, but which are still able to retain other characteristics that are really critical: we want them to be fast growers, we want them to offer a good habitat for other organisms that live on the RIF,” says Christine Roper, a postdoctoral researcher in the team.
During expeditions to the Great Barrier Reef, the team collects and analyzes specific coral species. They perform real-time heat tolerance tests on the samples using a special phenotyping machine that helps to predict which coral has the best chance of survival as the water temperatures rise. They also take fragments from coral back to the lab, where they can extract DNA and perform more extensive tests.
Once they have identified a stress-tolerant species, the Coral Nurture program-a project is founded by Camp that works with local tourist operators and indigenous communities to replant corals on a scale of coral nurseries that they have established at various locations in the big barrier rif the reef.
Since the founding of the program in 2018, more than 125,000 corals have been planted over the Great Barrier Reef – Off Cairns, Port Douglas and the Whitsundays – with a chance of survival of 85%.
The Great Barrier Reef covers a vast area in the Pacific Ocean for northeastern Australia. – Tom Booth/CNN
But repairing areas of the Great Barrier Reef is not an easy task. It has nearly 3,000 individual reefs and covers 344,400 square kilometers (133,000 square miles), and from April 2024, 60% of his reefs had recently been exposed to potential. The team is hopeful that areas where planting has taken place already show visible signs of recovery.
Other laboratories around the world develop comparable solutions, also with promising results. The Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) has used artificial selection and selective breeding to grow heat -tolerant corals, reports that genetic interventions can work, but with a ranging success between species. The British University of Newcastle also has selectively grown corals that it says that the marine waves can survive better, although it still has to perform large -scale tests in the wild.
Studies have shown that traditional coral recovery efforts can be canceled within a few years if there is a bleaching event, but by planting Heatbelangse Korals, the Coral Nurture program hopes that the restoration will be able to resist future events. “By focusing our efforts on identifying and increasing the abundance of heat -tolerant corals in the population, we optimize our efforts by ensuring that those populations will be more resilient for future heat stress events,” says Roper.
Scale
The big challenge side with the natural or selectively cultivated coral-is how the plant process can be scaled up, that is labor-intensive and expensive, so that people have to dive to the reef and plant the corals by hand.
That is why the focus of the Coral Nurture program was to involve tourist operators and local communities. “We can build scale by having bags of communities that take these actions,” says Camp.
It works together with seven tourist operators on the Great Barrier Reef, including wavelength cruises, so that snorkeling to the reef paid by tourists, doubles as plants expeditions. During these journeys, members of the crew – all of whom trained divers and marine biologists – tend to carry out daycare centers and surveys of the area. The Wavelgth team has contributed to setting up the program with Camp and is also an integral part of the operation of coral farms along the Rif and collecting data on coral health.
Nevertheless, there is a limit how much can be achieved by the deplanting of sturdy coral species. The future Riffs team also investigates other solutions, including whether the feeding of Corals can change different food or vitamins their heat tolerance.
Feeding corals by expanding tentacles from their bodies to catch microscopic food particles. Earlier research has shown that feeding corals zooplankton – small animals that float near the water surface – can help to stimulate resilience after a bleaching event, just like the cultivation of corals on substrates that are penetrated with metal nutrients such as manganese and zinc. But such methods have not yet been tried on a large scale.
“Although we know a lot about corals, we know relatively little about coral food,” says Camp. “This is an area for me where research and science can really help us to promote restoration practice by understanding more about what the corals need fundamentally to survive due to stress.”
A scientist collects coral samples for testing. – Jake Crosby
Although at an early stage the team has experimented back in the laboratory in Sydney with feeding coral food such as microscopic brine shrimps that are fed with different types of algae, and adding certain metals or vitamins to the water that the corals will absorb.
The aim is to develop a supplement that can give corals extra nutrients when they are stressed, so that they are stressed, to survive or recover from mass bleaching events.
“It is just like us as people: when we are down, we can take a supplement to give us a boost. It is the same with the corals,” says Camp, adding that this kind of solution may be easy to scale and use it to reefs worldwide.
“It is these kinds of new ideas that we have to explore, and nothing can be off the table, because if we don’t do anything, the end result becomes a loss of reefs around the world,” she says.
Although hopeful that scientific innovation and scalable solutions can offer a kind of stopgap for coral reefs, Camp warns that protecting them in the long term comes down to tackling the cause of massive coral bleaches, which means that the emissions of greenhouse gases are reduced and the warming of greenhouse gases reduces.
“There is only so much that we can do to buy time for the reef,” she says. “We have to tackle climate change, because if the temperatures continue to rise, we will ask too many of the corals to survive through the environment with which they are confronted.”
Additional reporting by Alkira Reinfrank, CNN.
For more CNN news and newsletters create an account on CNN.com
