Heat-tolerant corals found across Great Barrier Reef

I thought, the Great Barrier Reef was long bleached and dead due to Global Warming/Climate change? Caution: irony.

Nature is a lot more resilient and capable to adopt than all this daily alarmism and hysteria wants us to believe!

"Australian scientists studying coral have identified heat-tolerant individuals at sites spanning the entire Great Barrier Reef. This good news suggests that some corals already have naturally occurring variation that could help them adapt to a warming climate. ...

Australian researchers measured the bleaching thresholds of more than 500 colonies of table coral at 17 different reefs across the Great Barrier Reef. ...

On the Great Barrier Reef alone, there have been five mass coral bleaching events since 2016. Recently researchers have calculated that the Great Barrier Reef has sustained the highest ocean heat in four centuries [???]. ..."

From the abstract:

"Reef-building coral populations face unprecedented threats from climate warming. Standing variation in heat tolerance is crucial for evolutionary processes necessary for corals to persist. Yet, the spatial distribution of heat-tolerant corals and the underlying factors that determine heat tolerance are poorly understood from individual to ecosystem scales. Here, we show extensive variation in the heat tolerance of a foundational coral species complex across the Great Barrier Reef. Thermal thresholds of 569 individuals differed by up to 7.3 °C across scales from meters to >1250 km. Variation in thresholds among reefs was consistent with local adaptation and acclimatization to historical and recent thermal history. However, variation within reefs was sometimes greater than among reefs and largely unexplained by environmental predictors, putative host species, or symbiont communities. This indicates that within-reef heat tolerance differences may be informed primarily by other factors, such as adaptive genomic variation. We anticipate our findings will inform conservation and restoration actions, including targeting individuals for selective breeding of enhanced heat tolerance."

Heat-tolerant corals found across Great Barrier Reef

How remarkable diversity in heat tolerance can help protect coral reefs (original news release) "New research out of Southern Cross University has found previously undocumented variation in coral heat tolerance on the Great Barrier Reef, giving hope that corals’ own genetic resources may hold the key for us to help in its recovery and adaptation."

Heat tolerance varies considerably within a reef-building coral species on the Great Barrier Reef (open access; I presume this is the research article mentioned in the article above, but without link)

Fig. 1: Assessment of coral heat tolerance traits using acute stress experiments.

Fig. 2: Variation in heat tolerance trait metrics in Acropora hyacinthus colonies across sites on the Great Barrier Reef organized from north to south