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Scientists successfully breed corals to improve their heat tolerance

phys.org

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Re: Scientists successfully breed corals to improve their heat tolerance

#111

Post by blindriver »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #50
andrewmutz wrote: post #3

Perhaps a dumb question, but wouldn't we expect the rise in ocean temperatures to be cause nature to be doing this selective breeding right now?

Nature doesn't do selective breeding. "Survival of the fittest" means "whatever doesn't die, wins." First you need things capable of not dying in x circumstances. After adversity kills everything else, you have the "winners." This will incline species to develop tolerance over time, usually several generations. Human caused climate change is happening on a timescale that isn't very supportive of that process.

Wrong. This is not how evolution works.

RIGHT NOW there are coral that are already heat resistant. When the ocean temperature rises, the corals that can’t tolerate it will die off and the ones that can tolerate will survive. Then because of less resources being used by those that died, the coral with heat tolerance will thrive. This is how evolution works.

Re: Scientists successfully breed corals to improve their heat tolerance

#112

Post by uulu »

slibhb wrote: post #109
joshtbradley wrote: post #106

I find it tragic that it’s easier for scientists to perform miracles than it is for humanity to care for the planet. I understand the issue is complex, fraught with incentive, and has disparity between the developed and undeveloped world. But if the outcome is a clear collective benefit, why don’t we do it? More practically. What will it take to create a world where humanity can align to help ourselves?

Scientists "performing miracles" is humanity caring for the planet. Ask yourself why you (apparently) prefer degrowth to this.

> Scientists "performing miracles" is humanity caring for the planet.

Scientists "performing miracles" is one of the ways humanity is caring for the planet.

Re: Scientists successfully breed corals to improve their heat tolerance

#114

Post by tastyfreeze »

MarkMarine wrote: post #9

I’ve been scuba diving for 20 years and I’ve seen the devastation first hand. Once healthy eco systems, teeming with life, just completely wiped out. It’s heartbreaking. Corals grow so slowly, this might improve things 100-200 years from now, which is not nothing, but no one should delude themselves into thinking this is a solution. The fish that depend on these reefs will not be able to wait 100 generations for us t…

You've witnessed actually dead coral or just "bleached" coral? Bleached coral isn't dead. It has just expelled its symbiotic algae. When the water cools it gets its algae back.

All corals are broadcast spawners. The polyp will start growing where ever conditions are right. It may not be the same place it was growing before but the coral doesn't go extinct.

Re: Scientists successfully breed corals to improve their heat tolerance

#115

Post by michaelteter »

slibhb wrote: post #109
joshtbradley wrote: post #106

I find it tragic that it’s easier for scientists to perform miracles than it is for humanity to care for the planet. I understand the issue is complex, fraught with incentive, and has disparity between the developed and undeveloped world. But if the outcome is a clear collective benefit, why don’t we do it? More practically. What will it take to create a world where humanity can align to help ourselves?

Scientists "performing miracles" is humanity caring for the planet. Ask yourself why you (apparently) prefer degrowth to this.

Scientists have been doing things (with good intentions) which initially look like great ideas but ultimately cause new/greater problems in the future for ages.

To f with nature and believe the full impact is understood in advance is human hubris.

Re: Scientists successfully breed corals to improve their heat tolerance

#116

Post by goda90 »

joshtbradley wrote: post #106

I find it tragic that it’s easier for scientists to perform miracles than it is for humanity to care for the planet. I understand the issue is complex, fraught with incentive, and has disparity between the developed and undeveloped world. But if the outcome is a clear collective benefit, why don’t we do it? More practically. What will it take to create a world where humanity can align to help ourselves?

Lots of people care. But 1 person caring usually doesn't do much. That person might be able to make some choices that reduce their impact on the planet, but the effect is miniscule and the effort they have to put in might be immense. Asking billions of people to consciously choose a harder life to hopefully prevent an issue they might not be seeing in front of their eyes on a daily basis, is a really big ask.

It needs to be top down action. Government regulation. Technological advancements. Influencial business people choosing to forgo profit for the sake of sustainability.

Unfortunately only a few greedy people are necessary to derail such efforts...

Re: Scientists successfully breed corals to improve their heat tolerance

#117

Post by simianparrot »

slibhb wrote: post #109
joshtbradley wrote: post #106

I find it tragic that it’s easier for scientists to perform miracles than it is for humanity to care for the planet. I understand the issue is complex, fraught with incentive, and has disparity between the developed and undeveloped world. But if the outcome is a clear collective benefit, why don’t we do it? More practically. What will it take to create a world where humanity can align to help ourselves?

Scientists "performing miracles" is humanity caring for the planet. Ask yourself why you (apparently) prefer degrowth to this.

Depends. Do we know the ecosystem impact of corals that are more heat tolerant? Do we understand the evolutionary biological reasons why they aren't? Maybe it's not a problem, or maybe it is, like with so many other things we've messed with in the name of acceptable science (at the time) until we realize ecosystems are not that simple to model.

I'm not saying we shouldn't do research like this. But it is not an automatic good, and it must go hand in hand with proper biological field work looked at from an evolutionary lens. Or we risk making things worse with our good intentions.

Re: Scientists successfully breed corals to improve their heat tolerance

#118

Post by sangnoir »

joshtbradley wrote: post #106

I find it tragic that it’s easier for scientists to perform miracles than it is for humanity to care for the planet. I understand the issue is complex, fraught with incentive, and has disparity between the developed and undeveloped world. But if the outcome is a clear collective benefit, why don’t we do it? More practically. What will it take to create a world where humanity can align to help ourselves?

> More practically. What will it take to create a world where humanity can align to help ourselves

We can only do this if humanity disincentivize getting stuck at local maxima. Another confounding factor is how humans make decisions: the highest level decision-makers are national governments and the respective administrations typically last 5-10 years at a time.

Re: Scientists successfully breed corals to improve their heat tolerance

#119

Post by david38 »

consumer451 wrote: post #65
candiddevmike wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you stopped scuba diving? Aren't you concerned that your scuba diving contributes to the destruction?

I am aware of only three ways that diving could affect coral. 1) Boat's anchor doing physical damage, which is why popular dive spots have mooring buoys. 2) Many popular sun screen lotions are really bad for coral. 3) Physically touching the coral can do damage, even if gently. Are there any other factors of which I am unaware?

Spilling fuel into the water, dumping garbage into the water (nearby restaurants and hotels)

Re: Scientists successfully breed corals to improve their heat tolerance

#120

Post by mike_hearn »

cassepipe wrote: post #96
mike_hearn wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The incentives here are pretty straightforward and plenty of people within academic fields are willing to admit what kind of distortions they create. Look at any HN discussion on academic fraud and you'll find discussions from people who are or were scientists where they tell similar stories. Climate change wasn't the most likely explanation for the big drop. To make that explanation work you have to hypothesize a lo…

Thanks for the elaboration. That part left unconvinced though: > If you want to posit some sort of cliff-edge response [...] There's no reason a-priori to believe that climate change kills corals given that they've survived hundreds of millions of years I am actually realizing that you are probably talking about the effects of C02 levels in the oceans while I was actually thinking about the global rise in temperature…

It was much hotter in the past than it is now. Look at any attempt to reconstruct temperatures from proxies. The underlying science is unreliable but everyone agrees the distant past had average temperatures far hotter than today.

It was actually warmer even in the recent past. There's archaeological evidence that it was warmer in the Roman and middle ages than it is now. This was once uncontroversial and if you read archaeology papers you can still sometimes see discussion of this fact. But they don't highlight this because they don't want to pick fights with climatologists.

There's hasn't been any cliff edge rise in temperature. Look at graphs of global temperature but be aware they're heavily manipulated. A graph of 20th C temperatures published in 1999 looks very different to the same graph published today.

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