Algae may help corals withstand warmer waters HONG KONG
(Reuters) - Certain types of algae can help corals withstand
higher sea temperatures and prevent them from bleaching,
scientists in Australia have found. Coral reefs are vulnera"le
to climate change and without rapid genetic adaptation, they
will not survive projected sea temperature increases over the
next 50 years, experts say. But in an article published in
latest issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B:
Biological Sciences, the researchers said they may have found an
answer to why some corals continue to thrive in warmer waters
when others die. The answer appears to lie in a heat-tolerant
single-celled algae which lives in coral tissue, said Ray
Berkelmans at the Australian Institute of Marine Science. In the
study, the researchers tagged and analyzed some 480 coral
colonies in the Keppel Islands of the Great Barrier Reef and
found that some 94 percent of them contained a heat-sensitive
strain of the algae, named C2. But after a natural bleac