Scientists successfully breed corals to improve their heat tolerance
phys.org
phys.org
I understand the issue is complex, fraught with incentive, and has disparity between the developed and undeveloped world. But if the outcome is a clear collective benefit, why don’t we do it?
More practically. What will it take to create a world where humanity can align to help ourselves?
Ask yourself why you (apparently) prefer degrowth to this.
I have no idea what the solution is, I've already admitted it's complex. But it's frightening that the conversation immediately devolves into assumptions about one's stance, and immediate disagreement with that stance. Even on a website like HN. That's a big problem, no?
To f with nature and believe the full impact is understood in advance is human hubris.
Scientists "performing miracles" is one of the ways humanity is caring for the planet.
I'm not saying we shouldn't do research like this. But it is not an automatic good, and it must go hand in hand with proper biological field work looked at from an evolutionary lens. Or we risk making things worse with our good intentions.
We don't know the future impact of these modified corals, but we know it will be catastrophic if they disappear. IMO it would be worse to let the corals simply die.
I'm not saying this is you alone. We all do this, but this comment is particularly egregious for it.
We can only do this if humanity disincentivize getting stuck at local maxima. Another confounding factor is how humans make decisions: the highest level decision-makers are national governments and the respective administrations typically last 5-10 years at a time.
It needs to be top down action. Government regulation. Technological advancements. Influencial business people choosing to forgo profit for the sake of sustainability.
Unfortunately only a few greedy people are necessary to derail such efforts...
I'm painfully aware that the home office is much more harder to secure than regular office, but it seems like efforts to improve it have stalled since de pandemic.
The second part of the title is more problematic. The real meat in the article is that the results, the increase in heat tolerance, were minor. Even the authors say that will be unable to cope with the changes coming. Is interesting and relevant to know that the larvae could grow, but we don't even know if this changes are permanent or will have consequences later on a species able to live for 3000 ears. And sadly half of the coral reefs in the planet present in 1950 were lost in just a generation of humans.
Corals grow so slowly, this might improve things 100-200 years from now, which is not nothing, but no one should delude themselves into thinking this is a solution. The fish that depend on these reefs will not be able to wait 100 generations for us to engineer a solution. That biodiversity will be lost and will take millions of years to recover.
A great doc about this: https://youtu.be/aGGBGcjdjXA?si=fnYuvjTDqAkRE3Ad
All corals are broadcast spawners. The polyp will start growing where ever conditions are right. It may not be the same place it was growing before but the coral doesn't go extinct.
Zooxanthellae provide 90% of a coral's energy. Bleached coral has a few weeks where recovery is indeed possible, but if stresses last longer than that the coral dies.
https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/coral-recovery-...
That said, there is a factor for people that if something is out of sight, it's out of mind. Being involved with the ecosystem really is the only way I've seen protection of it happen, people just tend not to try to protect something they aren't engaged with. I'd rather everyone dove, even if that brought traffic to certain sites up, because I think they'd make the macro changes we need to make to preserve things while accepting the micro change in boat fuel use or reef traffic, or whatever risks you're thinking of. Seeing a fish trying to escape from a plastic bag is a sobering experience, you only need to see it once.
There's plenty of nature reserves that have tourism limitations for the very reason that high traffic has negative effects.
The best thing for the reefs in Thailand was Covid (ie, the absence of people)
1) Boat's anchor doing physical damage, which is why popular dive spots have mooring buoys.
2) Many popular sun screen lotions are really bad for coral.
3) Physically touching the coral can do damage, even if gently.
Are there any other factors of which I am unaware?
My primary function for diving is to protect the kelp forest where I usually dive by removing sea urchins, whose population has exploded, killing the kelp. This is done in conjunction with the department of fish and wildlife.
Any scuba diver knows never to touch the coral, the ground, or anything like that. Fairly simple
It seems that the Sea Star Wasting Syndrome, which killed off most sea stars along the western North American coastline, might have been exacerbated by unusually warm water in 2014-2016 which stressed those animals. The death of those predators caused the purple sea urchin population to explode and they ate up most of the kelp. So it's all connected. (I'm sure your aware of this, just providing a little more context for others.)
The best way not to effect nature is to not interact with it.
Obviously that's not 100% possible nor pleasurable, but for more sensitive systems, it's more necessary.
Even then, you could see the difference in the John Pennekamp State Park reefs from when I first snorkeled them in the 1970's.
What active contributions are you making to the wellbeing of our reefs?
There was a good episode of PBS Weathered on this recently if you want an idea of how quickly this has happened: https://youtu.be/YEH9nX5sudk?si=iCivRPwK8AI4sjKU
Exactly, which I think is always the key point at issue that needs to be raised any time someone says "well earth has been this hot before." Never at this velocity, at least not without extinction events.
Which holds that rather than a slow gradual change, species under go a rapid change and then are stable after that change.
If that hold true, then the driver would be that you have low impact changes going on all the time that do not take hold but once a beneficial change is introduced it spreads rapidly.
I agree with the criticisms that Gould, unfortunately, spent much of his career attempting to position himself as an intellectual revolutionary, overstating the primacy of PE and was in many important respects an intellectual fraud. Gifted as he was as a critic of intelligent design, I think he set back our understanding of evolution almost as much as he helped.
It seems such hybris to believe that mere humans have a better handle on what 'nature' needs, than, er, nature.
The embedded idea is both guilt-ridden and egotistic. Amazing destructive humans are harming 'nature' (antropomorphised) but other, good humans are here to redress the balance by doing this or that. At which point, whatever is there is no longer 'nature' but some sort of themed garden.
(Corals can also reproduce asexually via fragmentation, but that won't help with genetic diversity in the wild I'd imagine. Researchers seem to take advantage of this for selective breeding though.)
Something will live on coral reefs in a thousand years. We’ll have still lost something beautiful.
The great barrier reef living system is only about 6k-8k years old. Much of that was land not too long ago.
The sea level rose there about 20k years ago (coinciding with the Last Glacial Maximum) and slowed to a near halt 6k years ago allowing coral to grow there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_ex...
"Survival of the fittest" means "whatever doesn't die, wins."
First you need things capable of not dying in x circumstances. After adversity kills everything else, you have the "winners."
This will incline species to develop tolerance over time, usually several generations. Human caused climate change is happening on a timescale that isn't very supportive of that process.
RIGHT NOW there are coral that are already heat resistant. When the ocean temperature rises, the corals that can’t tolerate it will die off and the ones that can tolerate will survive. Then because of less resources being used by those that died, the coral with heat tolerance will thrive. This is how evolution works.
Dragonflies used to have like two foot or four foot wings spans. Now their relatively small and presumably play a very different role in the ecosystem.
Mother Nature isn't some Christian God that loves you and looks out for you. The fact that nature isn't looking out for our welfare is likely why things like Christianity are popular: Because actual reality scares the hell out of people and they need some kind of emotional opiate so they can go "La la la not listening!" and get through the damn day.
Evolution does tend to fill open niches, but not all that instantly.
Coral systems live, spread, and die. That's what they do.
These processes happen over thousands of years.
but to play that game, you also learn about adaptation in high school
The fundamental confusion here is the notion that, absent one's own personal expert credentials, we have no access to any expertise or authority of any kind that can be brought to bear on this question (funny that that requirement applies only one way).
The vital role of coral in supporting marine ecosystems is a general and well understood phenomenon. So much so that our ordinary access to expertise through science communication in the media, our summary of this understanding as reflected in high school education, and, if needed, in major reports from NGOs is sufficient to address the question and indeed is central to the purpose of those respective institutions. Those are access to pertinent expertise for this kind of question.
I promise you, that this consensus has not overlooked the possibility of everything being made right by adaptations later on as you seem to be implying, and I promise that no version of explanations of evolutionary adaptation has ever taught that adaptation guarantees, as a cosmic law, compensation for the destruction of ecosystems. The same resources noted above are sufficient to dismiss this as an ordinary biology 101 confusion.
I think you need to be more careful about what your unqualified promises are.
As for the effect of coral bleaching on fish, you can google it and I've definitely read about it before, seen ecologists talk about it, etc. The expectation is that it will reduce the number of fish significantly.
https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/central-pacific-coral-reef-sho...
I think that temptation to stand in awe before a cosmic mystery is a common one and, in many cases a laudable one. In this case, that temptation is getting in the way of some very-knowable facts which are spelling out doom. "Not playing god" in this context seems to amount to standing by as an extinction event unfolds, and I don't think the desire to get lost in existential ditherings is an acceptable reason to stand by and let that happen.
That is still unknown and constantly shifting in predictions.
Yes we should minimize our effects on the environment as much as possible, and we are doing a lot better in that goal, but we still need to live.
I wouldn't say living our lives is playing God.
No, it's not an unknown. Please stop with this cowardly delusion. Human activity is changing the Earth's climate at unbelievable rates compared to the historical norm. XKCD for scale: https://xkcd.com/1732/
What is "fast enough" is in the eye of the beholder, life doesn't really care about boom and bust cycles or extinctions, but people really don't like change so we can do it faster and do a bit of reef gardening.
... But, if you transplant them they get outcompeted immediately. Corals are constantly engaged in a WW1-style trench warfare for space, so spending metabolic energy on something other than eradicating one's neighbor is not a great strategy.
(I work in a tangential area)
1. 1985-2013. Climatologists report global warming during this period, but it had no impact on the corals. This fact is already a major problem for the claim that corals are hurt by global warming - if it were true, there should have been declines in this period.
2. 2010-2017. A big drop. This triggered lots of stories about how humanity is killing the corals. In 2019 they were saying the outlook had moved from "poor" to "very poor". [2]
3. 2020-2024. Robust growth to the highest levels ever seen, more than a third larger than the prior stable period.
This time series is incompatible with the idea of a link between CO2 and coral health. Whatever caused this set of changes is unlikely to be human driven, given that the huge growth spurt caught self-proclaimed coral experts completely off guard and they still lack any explanation for what drives these changes. But we can safely say that corals are already heat tolerant. They exist in a wide range of temperatures across the world, which vary by far wider ranges than climate change is predicted to generate, and they have existed throughout history in which natural climate change has created vastly greater differences than seen in the last 100 years.
Unfortunately AIMS don't seem interested in a true understanding of the corals. They are only interested in coral doom. Doom = a call to action = money and social status, whereas corals doing fine reduces them to mere observation of natural cycles, which doesn't have much potential for career growth. From the peak of "the Great Barrier Reef is going from poor to very poor" now they are reduced to saying "recent increases in hard coral cover can be quickly undone" and "The high coral cover reported this year is good news but does not mean all is fine". Their reports give the strong impression that they really wish the corals would do badly, but nature is feeling uncooperative right now. Their next best strategy is apparently to just ignore it and pretend scientists have to save the day anyway.
[1] https://www.aims.gov.au/monitoring-great-barrier-reef/gbr-co...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/30/great-ba...
edit: only goes back to 1985, error on my part, but still relatively stable from 1985-late 00s
It may be possible that this recent spike in growth indicates that there is a strong recovery, but looking at the data it also seems inarguable the ecosystem has become highly unstable as well over the past 20 years, with drastic increases and decreases in all 3 populations that are much greater variance than from the mid 60s to early 00s.
While I agree with you that it's possible that this coral death is overhyped, your own conclusions don't seem to be evidence-based themselves.
Could you expand on how the recent explosive growth is unstable and fits with the predictions that the coral is dying?
And GPs post was evidence based, your interpretations were not, they were subjective and a bit handwaving, which is why I would like clarfication on your above view.
From an ecosystem perspective, simple "coral coverage" is not a good enough metric to indicate that the coral reef is healthy. We also need to understand the biodiversity, is one coral taking over because it is better adapted and creating a monoculture? It's not clear. I made a point to not jump to conclusions, simply stating that explosive growth does not indicate a healthy ecosystem.
Could you answer the second part of my question:
> "How does explosive growth fit with the predictions that the coral is dying?"
To your statement:
> "We also need to understand the biodiversity, is one coral taking over because it is better adapted and creating a monoculture"
I'd say that we should not assume one way or another. It very may well be, or not. That data is probably out there and I'd be interested to know the answer. If the answer is yes, it's very healthy.
I'd also like to know what species these scientists are breeding. If it's only a select few species, is that healthier than the species that have adapted naturally and are growing fine?
Given that there is no history of a pre-existing boom and bust cycle in the data, I think we can rule that out. So clearly something is happening that wasn't happening before. The question you want answered is one-dimensional and ill-posed in this situation to allow you to better understand the dynamics at work.
We really don't have enough data to rule anything out as we weren't tracking it that long relatively to say for sure. We also don't know all the variables.
It is automatically true that in an ecosystem that experiences a population decline, when the population starts growing again the subtypes that grow fastest will become more common than those which grow slower, and thus there will be a temporary decline in biodiversity. That doesn't indicate a problem of any kind. It's just the natural state of affairs.
> it also seems inarguable the ecosystem has become highly unstable as well over the past 20 years
That's extremely arguable! Extrapolating from a tiny number of data points is how AIMS managed to screw up previously. There's really very little data on which to build predictions about long term trends. We have no idea how stable or unstable coral sizes are because it's just not been monitored for long enough to say. We're zoomed in to a tiny, tiny part of the coral's history, which is far longer than humanities own.
Edit: Ah I see that it is 1985, that certainly is a significantly shorter cycle of data.
I can’t help but wonder what effect tourism (and lockdowns) has had on corals. For example, It is common among scuba divers to only use mineral sunscreens because standard off-the-shelf sunscreen floats on the top of the water and blocks UV from the corals
https://ocean.si.edu/ecosystems/coral-reefs/truth-about-cora...
Maybe a more charitable interpretation is that nobody really understood why there was such a massive drop and climate change was the most likely explanation so they went about warning about it given how important they are to their ecosystem ?
Also I think you are wawing off climate change too quickly. Isn't it possible that we were lucky enough that the coral just adapted quickly to environmental change ?
Climate change wasn't the most likely explanation for the big drop. To make that explanation work you have to hypothesize a lot of hidden variables and/or unknown processes, because CO2 emission is a slow steady process. If you want to posit some sort of cliff-edge response in the absence of evidence, fine, but at that point anyone can make up any explanation they like and it's just as compelling. There's no reason a-priori to believe that climate change kills corals given that they've survived hundreds of millions of years. There are probably natural cycles at work here which might be interesting to investigate, or there might even be some sort of human cause that's not climate related (chemicals being washed into the sea or whatever). AIMS is supposed to figure that out but they don't seem to be doing that, they just keep crying wolf. So it's reasonable to point out their incentives.
> Isn't it possible that we were lucky enough that the coral just adapted quickly to environmental change ?
Anything is possible in principle, but that doesn't help us much.
That part left unconvinced though:
> If you want to posit some sort of cliff-edge response [...] There's no reason a-priori to believe that climate change kills corals given that they've survived hundreds of millions of years
I am actually realizing that you are probably talking about the effects of C02 levels in the oceans while I was actually thinking about the global rise in temperature which IIUC has seen a kind of cliff-edge change. And IIRC, ocean warmth is what I have read is threatening coral reefs, so I am bit lost here.
It was actually warmer even in the recent past. There's archaeological evidence that it was warmer in the Roman and middle ages than it is now. This was once uncontroversial and if you read archaeology papers you can still sometimes see discussion of this fact. But they don't highlight this because they don't want to pick fights with climatologists.
There's hasn't been any cliff edge rise in temperature. Look at graphs of global temperature but be aware they're heavily manipulated. A graph of 20th C temperatures published in 1999 looks very different to the same graph published today.
It's also worth noting the Great Barrier Reef is fairly new (6-8k years old). It came to be from the sea rise of the Last Glacial Maximum 20k years ago.
Just because the mechanism of resurgence is unknown does not mean that all previous science on the topic is invalidated.
It can simultaneously be true that ocean warming is devastating the Great Barrier Reef corals and that the GBR has the ability to rebound on its own. Here's a question the parent comment didn't address: Are we seeing the same species in this resurgence that we saw before mass bleaching, or is biodiversity reduced?
And GP's main point was that the data from the experts monitoring the reef did not line up with the climate change predictions of the reef.
He didn't say HE knew the truth, he's saying the truth from scientific reports are not matching the predictions.
If anything, he's pointing out the real "experts" data. The opposite of what you are accusing him of.
I get that but I stand by all of it though.
> data from the experts monitoring the reef did not line up with the climate change predictions of the reef.
That's normal.
> He didn't say HE knew the truth,
Well, that was a paraphrase of the unwarranted confidence in each of these statements, which I find extremely dubious:
> This fact is already a major problem for the claim that corals are hurt by global warming - if it were true, there should have been declines in this period
It's easy to imagine that warming would not have any effect up until reaching a certain tipping point, so this is overstated as evidence-against.
> This time series is incompatible with the idea of a link between CO2 and coral health.
Basically a restatement of the above. They're not incompatible.
> Whatever caused this set of changes is unlikely to be human driven
"Unlikely" is also an overstatement. These data can cast doubt but aren't strong enough to say that anthropogenic causes are unlikely, given how likely it frankly is due to the scale of changes in the ocean.
> But we can safely say that corals are already heat tolerant.
No, we can't say this. Some corals are heat-tolerant.
> they have existed throughout history in which natural climate change has created vastly greater differences than seen in the last 100 years.
This is... borderline misinformation. It ignores the rate of change, which is just not really a credible way to discuss climate change. Also, specifically, which changes has coral survived? I don't actually know how old coral is or which mass extinctions it has survived which is actually pretty important for making a comparison.
Etc. Not really worth going over every point, you get the idea.
This is really the core of the problem. It's why the downvoters are wrong and why it's worth debating the topic here, because it's really a much wider problem than corals or climate.
What government employees have done so far wasn't actually science and they aren't really experts. It was presented to the public as science, it was funded from science budgets, it has the superficial look of science, but it wasn't science. It was merely data collection, followed by wild theorizing based on nothing, followed by political lobbying. It wasn't even extrapolation, as there was no trend to extrapolate!
That isn't how the scientific method is supposed to work. Scientists are supposed to form a hypothesis, gather data that could falsify the hypothesis, publish it, then let others replicate it and so on, until we are certain enough we understand the underlying system to proclaim it a theory. Then you can go to politicians and demand money or changes to laws.
The complete lack of scientific method here is why reef ... people ... I don't want to give them the title of "scientist" ... have managed to not only seriously embarrass themselves but undermine confidence in all ecology and climatology. They had no basis on which to claim that CO2 induced warming was killing corals. The data simply did not fit that hypothesis at any point. Yet by tying their field to climate change they unlocked media interest and a much greater flow of money. They took the easy, tempting path instead of the right path and it is not only completely legitimate but a moral imperative to point out their dishonesty. Their own colleagues and institutional supervisors aren't doing it, so other people have to. If nobody does then this is how science dies, people! When anyone can call themselves a scientist despite not doing science, then eventually the whole concept of science itself will be seen as a discredited joke. That's how dark ages happen. Everyone should be calling out those who claim high confidence in their predictions whilst not having done the work to deserve that confidence.
(But I think that public access to hallucinogens is a step in the right direction, actually)
"The Real Reason Jaywalking Is A Crime" (Adam Ruins Everything) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM
"Street Rivals: Jaywalking and the Invention of the Motor Age Street", Peter D. Norton https://www.jstor.org/stable/40061474
If we can convince people that it's their own fault for getting hit by cars, we can do anything.
"Why take vaccines ? Can't we just be well-behaved, wear a mask, air spaces correctly or put air filters everywhere ?" The answer is no.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biolo...
The choice isn't between a mildly worse life -or- a better life.
The choice is between a mildly worse life -or- a horrible life as the planetary life-support system reconfigures itself into a radical new climate regime.
And really, living in harmony with Nature is fun and fulfilling, so the choice is between a mildly inconvenient transitional period to a hip, swinging, easy living, eco-friendly life -or- a horrible life as the planetary life-support system reconfigures itself into a radical new climate regime.
1. Not everything is climate change. This has come up a lot with Hurricanes Helene and Milton recently, saying they're "unprecedented" or similar superlatives. Consider the 1916 flood of Asheville [1], also caused by a hurricane. Also, hurricanes aren't more frequent [2] but there's an argument to be made for intensity. A moving statistical distribution takes a lot of data points to quantify, however; and
2. We really have no idea of how the EArth will respond to climate change. This comes up when people talk about "runaway climate change" a la Venus. My argument is that if that was going to happen, it would've happened at some point in the last 4 billion years. That's a really long time.
So in relation to coral and the seas, the argument is made that warming is a lot more rapid than what naturally occurs. It turns out that's not true either. Consider abrupt climate change in the last Ice AGe (~100K years) [3]:
> One of the most surprising findings was that the shifts from cold stadials to the warm interstadial intervals occurred in a matter of decades, with air temperatures over Greenland rapidly warming 8 to 15°C (Huber et al. 2006)
That's a massive change and it's happened many times in the last 100,000 years. So what's happened over 4 billion years?
This is likely associated with sea changes too so what happened to all the coral? Did it die and regrow? Did it adapt?
I understand the motivation here but fearmongering (even if justified) just doesn't work to educate people and ultimately change policy [4]. Psychologically, catastrophic predictions will tend to get ignored because hey, there's nothing you can do.
[1]: https://www.frenchbroadrafting.com/blog/remembering-the-floo...
[2]: https://www.npr.org/2024/10/09/nx-s1-5146477/how-climate-cha...
[3]: https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-cli...
[4]: https://heartland.org/opinion/climate-change-fearmongering-i...
My understanding is that this was local to a region and not global, and constituted extinction or near extinction-level events for plant and animal populations that suffered through them. And even though those changes were fast, my understanding is that our present change is (1) even faster, (2) is not a back-and-forth oscillation controlled at the bounds by natural dynamics but a one-directional trend upward (3) from human activity stacked on top of the dynamics of natural systems.
We only have coal because trees grew and fell on each other for like 60 million years before anything figured out how to decompose lignin.
I still think we shouldn’t focus on climate change, since the majority of the population won’t understand, nor care.
Instead focus on environment, which is what you’re living in right now. The benefit is that doing what’s good for the environment year on year would also accomplish what’s good for climate
Well, before you pat yourself and feel safe, you'd better answer those questions instead of just asking them and deciding the answer will go on a direction you like.
Coral is a weird kind of organism, we can't expect it to adapt like insects. It changing can be quite bad.
But yeah, we won't have runaway warming. I don't know what the people that invented that risk were thinking.
I checked your source here, and the emphasis of the article is almost completely the inverse of how you presented it. The article is emphatic at the urgency of understanding how much more forceful the storms are, while noting there is not a larger total number of storms. In the article, that latter point is an aside to the urgency of understanding storms are becoming more intense.
It actually explicitly says that storms of greater intensity are indeed becoming more frequent. Your portrayal, however, is to reference the central point in passing while emphasizing a side point and implying something completely at odds with the article. And this isn't just tomayto-tomahto, one point is critical to understanding the intensity of storms and the other isn't.
In general I am against these ecosystem engineering type projects: because the systems are so complex, we do not understand them, and we cannot test in isolation.
How about humans pumping tens of billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year? Are you against that ecosystem engineering type project? Because it's happening. And it's having severe consequences. And it seems it's not going to stop. So people are trying to look into ways to attempt to mitigate its effects and you end up with one engineering type project to mitigate another. Doing nothing isn't going to work. We know that. So a lot of people are willing to accept less than fully understood solutions.
I'm not saying we shouldn't attempt to modulate our effects on the environment, I'm saying let's not make it worse doing so. So we should be strategic in the tactics we employ.
E.g. "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System"
How key are coral? Do you know? If you don't you probably shouldn't mess with it. Heh! :)