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Corals struggle to adapt to changing environment
14/Sep/2006: Nearly 70% of coral reefs around the world will find it difficult to adapt to warming oceans, according to Tamar Goulet, Assistant Professor of Biology at University of Mississippi.
She reviewed two research papers published in 2004, which said corals can adapt to increasing water temperatures by hosting a new type of algae and 41 other research papers to analyze how many coral species possess the ability to adapt to climate change.
Goulet found from her study that only coral species that can host multiple algae can adapt to warming oceans by hosting new clade or type of algae, while those species that can host only one type or clade of algae cannot make such switches and hence will find it difficult to adapt to the warming waters. Of the 442 species reviewed by Goulet only 23% of species possessed the ability to harbor a new type of algae to escape increasing water temperatures.
The findings of Tamar Goulet was published in the journal ‘Marine Ecology Progress Series’, in which she says that if the findings of this study is generalized then only one-quarter of the coral species around the world can successfully adapt to climate change, while the others may become bleached and perish. But, only a fraction of the 93,000 coral species known to exist in this planet was reviewed in this study, which makes it extremely difficult to generalize the findings of this study, as coral species that could adapt to warmer oceans could be more prevalent in some regions.
Earlier, scientists had predicted that 95% of the Australian Great Barrier reef could loose its living corals by 2050. But in 2004 two studies showed that corals along the Panama coast were able to adapt to warmer environment by hosting a new clade of Symbiodinium algae (Clade D) instead of another clade (Clade C) of the same species. This study had brought some relief to scientists worldwide, as many had then believed that most of the corals would perish even with 1 degree centigrade increase in water temperature. But the recent study carried out by Tamar Goulet has put an end to this relief.
Kesavan Siva
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