Scientists successfully breed corals to improve their heat tolerance
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Re: Scientists successfully breed corals to improve their heat tolerance
#2Not sure this is a good idea. What if the disappearance of corals at higher temps is part of a natural regulation system for Earth, where if they are artificially preserved, homeostasis will be perturbed?
In general I am against these ecosystem engineering type projects: because the systems are so complex, we do not understand them, and we cannot test in isolation.
Re: Scientists successfully breed corals to improve their heat tolerance
#3Perhaps 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?
Re: Scientists successfully breed corals to improve their heat tolerance
#4Perhaps 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?
It's rising way too fast https://xkcd.com/1732/
Re: Scientists successfully breed corals to improve their heat tolerance
#5Not sure this is a good idea. What if the disappearance of corals at higher temps is part of a natural regulation system for Earth, where if they are artificially preserved, homeostasis will be perturbed? In general I am against these ecosystem engineering type projects: because the systems are so complex, we do not understand them, and we cannot test in isolation.
There is no natural regulation system for the earth, and the earth makes no attempt at homeostasis. It has been tipped over into states almost completely inhospitable for then-existing life more than once.
Re: Scientists successfully breed corals to improve their heat tolerance
#6Perhaps 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?
Probably not quickly enough. Ecosystems can adapt if given enough time, but the recent rise in ocean temperatures has happened very quickly by evolutionary standards.
There was a good episode of PBS Weathered on this recently if you want an idea of how quickly this has happened: https://youtu.be/YEH9nX5sudk?si=iCivRPwK8AI4sjKU
Re: Scientists successfully breed corals to improve their heat tolerance
#7Not sure this is a good idea. What if the disappearance of corals at higher temps is part of a natural regulation system for Earth, where if they are artificially preserved, homeostasis will be perturbed? In general I am against these ecosystem engineering type projects: because the systems are so complex, we do not understand them, and we cannot test in isolation.
> I am against these ecosystem engineering type projects: because the systems are so complex, we do not understand them
How about humans pumping tens of billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year? Are you against that ecosystem engineering type project? Because it's happening. And it's having severe consequences. And it seems it's not going to stop. So people are trying to look into ways to attempt to mitigate its effects and you end up with one engineering type project to mitigate another. Doing nothing isn't going to work. We know that. So a lot of people are willing to accept less than fully understood solutions.
Re: Scientists successfully breed corals to improve their heat tolerance
#8So while I 100% agree we have man-made climate change, there are two principles to live by:
1. Not everything is climate change. This has come up a lot with Hurricanes Helene and Milton recently, saying they're "unprecedented" or similar superlatives. Consider the 1916 flood of Asheville [1], also caused by a hurricane. Also, hurricanes aren't more frequent [2] but there's an argument to be made for intensity. A moving statistical distribution takes a lot of data points to quantify, however; and
2. We really have no idea of how the EArth will respond to climate change. This comes up when people talk about "runaway climate change" a la Venus. My argument is that if that was going to happen, it would've happened at some point in the last 4 billion years. That's a really long time.
So in relation to coral and the seas, the argument is made that warming is a lot more rapid than what naturally occurs. It turns out that's not true either. Consider abrupt climate change in the last Ice AGe (~100K years) [3]:
> One of the most surprising findings was that the shifts from cold stadials to the warm interstadial intervals occurred in a matter of decades, with air temperatures over Greenland rapidly warming 8 to 15°C (Huber et al. 2006)
That's a massive change and it's happened many times in the last 100,000 years. So what's happened over 4 billion years?
This is likely associated with sea changes too so what happened to all the coral? Did it die and regrow? Did it adapt?
I understand the motivation here but fearmongering (even if justified) just doesn't work to educate people and ultimately change policy [4]. Psychologically, catastrophic predictions will tend to get ignored because hey, there's nothing you can do.
[1]: https://www.frenchbroadrafting.com/blog/remembering-the-floo...
[2]: https://www.npr.org/2024/10/09/nx-s1-5146477/how-climate-cha...
[3]: https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-cli...
[4]: https://heartland.org/opinion/climate-change-fearmongering-i...
Re: Scientists successfully breed corals to improve their heat tolerance
#9I’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 to engineer a solution. That biodiversity will be lost and will take millions of years to recover.
A great doc about this: https://youtu.be/aGGBGcjdjXA?si=fnYuvjTDqAkRE3Ad
Re: Scientists successfully breed corals to improve their heat tolerance
#10Perhaps 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?
Are you willing to wait a few thousand years for a new coral to appear and spread? Maybe tens of thousands of years?
Evolution does tend to fill open niches, but not all that instantly.