Researchers have discovered that food access can greatly improve stressed coral reef recovery.
The study by researchers at Ohio State University looked at two species of coral in the waters off Hawaii.
The new study found that access to food is one of the biggest indicators of whether corals will bounce back in the wake of heat stress events. This has led the researchers to conclude that feeding coral zooplankton could be a potential option for helping them recover.
Commenting on the finding, Kerri Dobson, the lead author who now teaches marine biology at the University of Southampton in the UK stated:
“Each coral species responds differently to stress and employs different methods to recover from that stress. Now we know that those responses depend on several factors.This is one of the first studies, to our knowledge, that has been able to capture the impact of natural thermal stress on coral in two consecutive years. Heat stress affected the corals’ health much more than the simulated ocean acidification. These heat-stress events function as selection forces, leaving only the more thermally tolerant coral that might be able to survive the stresses that we’re subjecting them to.”
While Andrea Grottoli, the study’s senior author and professor in earth sciences at Ohio State, said:
“This paper adds to our body of knowledge about coral resilience. It gives us more leverage in following up on evaluating how we can protect corals and manage bleaching events by manipulating the environment to their favor. When you do experiments with living animals in a natural setting, there’s always some degree of unpredictability, as we saw with the unexpected second heat-stress event we studied. Ultimately, you have to roll with it because the work matters, and sometimes the things you didn’t plan to learn are the parts that are the most interesting.”
You can find the original research here.