For the past five years, researchers in Hawaii and Australia have been engineering corals (珊瑚) inside a lab to see if they could better resist the effects of climate change.
The scientists say climate change linked to human causes has led to warming oceans that can harm sea life. The team tested three methods for making corals that would be strong and healthy in nature. One was selective breeding. It involves scientists choosing parents with desirable characteristics for reproductive purposes. The goal is to produce babies with the same desirable characteristics. A second method subjected the corals to increasing temperatures to condition them to be able to survive in warm ocean environments. The third involved making changes to the algae (藻类) that provides corals with necessary nutrients.
The leader of the project, University of Hawaii researcher Kira Hughes, said all the methods proved successful in the lab. She told The Associated Press that some scientists might worry such methods go against the natural processes of nature. But with the planet continuing to warm, she does not see any better options."We have to intervene in order to make a change for coral reefs to survive into the future," Hughes said.
When ocean temperatures rise, corals release algae that supplies nutrients and gives them color. This causes them to turn white, a process called bleaching. When his happens, corals can quickly become sick and die. But for years, scientists have been observing corals that have survived bleaching, even when others have died on the same reef. They are now centering on those healthy survivors and hoping to further increase their resistance to heat. Those corals were used as the parents for the newly created kinds.
"Corals are threatened worldwide by a lot of stressors but increasing temperature are probably the most severe." said Crawford Drury, chier scientist al Hawaii's Coral Resilience Lab
Rather than editing genes or creating anything unnatural, the researchers are just attempting to begin what could already happen in the ocean, Madeleine van Oppen added. In this way, she said, the team can center on a small area to keep and "enhance" what is already there.
