As the outlook for coral reefs across a warming planet grows grimmer, scientists in Israel have discovered a rare glimmer of hope: The corals of the northern Red Sea might survive, and even thrive, into the next century.
There is broad scientific consensus that the effects of climate change have devastated the world’s reefs, ravaging large swaths of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.
The carbon dioxide that humans pump into the atmosphere spikes the temperature and acidity of seawater, which both poisons the marine invertebrates and hampers their growth at alarming rates, according to studies published last year in the journal Science.
Experts estimate that half of the corals that existed in the early 20th century have died.
However, the corals at the northernmost tip of the Red Sea are exhibiting remarkable resistance to the rising water temperatures and acidification, according to research conducted by the Interuniversity Institute for Marine Sciences based in Eilat, Israel. Experts hope the lessons learned in the Red Sea can help coral reefs elsewhere in the world.
“Corals worldwide are dying and suffering at a rapid pace, but we have not witnessed a single bleaching event in the Gulf of Aqaba,” said Maoz Fine, an expert on coral reefs at Bar-Ilan University and director of the research.
Warmer water causes corals to eject the brightly colored plants that serve as their primary food and oxygen source. This causes reefs to “bleach,” or take on a bone-white pallor that often portends mass mortality.
While other hardy coral species can be found in the Indian and Pacific oceans, “there’s nowhere else in the world that reefs are this far away from their bleaching thresholds,” Fine said.
Plenty of other refuges remain unknown, but “this is the only spot we know of with a warranty ensuring these reefs stay safe for the next several decades,” he said.
On a recent day at the lab, Fine examined coral fragments in water treated to simulate global warming scenarios, pointing to their ruddy color as a sign of good health.
The Gulf of Aqaba has become a refuge for tough corals that are projected to outlast far worse conditions.
Fine’s latest study, published this month in the Journal of Experimental Biology, found further cause for optimism: The coral species’ thermal resistance carries over to their offspring, indicating that future generations will also remain immune to bleaching, with implications that could extend beyond this spot of the Red Sea.
Fine’s research credits northern Red Sea coral resilience to a giant natural selection event that occurred about 18,000 years ago. As glaciers retreated at the end of the last ice age, reefs moved in to recolonize the southern part of the sea, where temperatures ran exceedingly high.
Only corals that could bear the heat managed to reach maturity and migrate north, where they resettled in conditions several degrees cooler than their thermal threshold. Further research is under way to determine how existing in temperatures below their tolerance levels might lend corals physiological benefits.
“All corals were obliterated except for the best genotypes, the winners of the climate change lottery,” Fine said.
Today, these hardy corals continue to survive as Red Sea waters warm, only showing signs of heat stress at six degrees above the maximum sea temperature.
“Not only does this give us an incentive to protect this special refuge as much as possible, but also allows us to find hints as to the most important genes for thermal resistance,” he added.
Picking out winning genes can contribute to an urgent worldwide push to restore and repopulate dead reefs. Some cutting-edge labs in Hawaii and Australia have even started crossbreeding the corals that survived or recovered from the mass bleaching of their reefs to create gene banks of “super-corals” that they hope can survive elevated temperatures.
“If corals are surviving and reproducing in the Gulf of Aqaba under stressful conditions, and in the central and southern Red Sea they’re not, we can reseed the hardy corals in nearby bleached areas,” said Jacqueline De La Cour, operations manager for the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coral Reef Watch, who was not a part of the study. “Entirely new ecosystems that can withstand climate change would be established.”
The US agency has honed such restoration techniques in Florida, where reefs play a critical role in softening the blow of hurricanes.
Jessica Bellworthy, a doctoral student in Fine’s lab, said that while it is too soon to tell whether Gulf of Aqaba corals would retain their resilience if multiplied and transplanted to other environments, it is a “direction we could eventually take our data.”
Fine likened transplanting corals to “playing God,” saying that although such human intervention has become well-established, it carries ecological risks and raises ethical questions.
However, some scientists contend that only a hands-on response can address accelerating reef mortality rates.
From 2014 to 2017, corals experienced the most widespread and damaging “bleaching event” in global history, De La Cour said.
Experts often compare reefs to rainforests when trying to convey their stunning diversity of life.
“If you lose reefs, you lose everything that depends on them,” said Michael Webster, executive director of Coral Reef Alliance, a San Francisco-based conservation group.
Reef death not only carries dire consequences for wildlife, but also for the homes, health and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people: those who fish, work in tourism, dwell on islands made of coral or rely on reef protection from coastal erosion.
“The survivors in the Gulf of Aqaba are only going to become even more essential to us over the next 100 years,” De La Cour said. “Coral refuges show us that species can adapt. It gives us hope.”
A series of strong earthquakes in Hualien County not only caused severe damage in Taiwan, but also revealed that China’s power has permeated everywhere. A Taiwanese woman posted on the Internet that she found clips of the earthquake — which were recorded by the security camera in her home — on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu. It is spine-chilling that the problem might be because the security camera was manufactured in China. China has widely collected information, infringed upon public privacy and raised information security threats through various social media platforms, as well as telecommunication and security equipment. Several former TikTok employees revealed
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
At the same time as more than 30 military aircraft were detected near Taiwan — one of the highest daily incursions this year — with some flying as close as 37 nautical miles (69kms) from the northern city of Keelung, China announced a limited and selected relaxation of restrictions on Taiwanese agricultural exports and tourism, upon receiving a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) delegation led by KMT legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅崑萁). This demonstrates the two-faced gimmick of China’s “united front” strategy. Despite the strongest earthquake to hit the nation in 25 years striking Hualien on April 3, which caused
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past