UH alumna Jamie Foster sent more than 120 baby Hawaiian bobtail squid born from a mother squid collected at Maunalua Bay to the International Space Station.
HIMB) are using selective breeding in corals to speed up natural evolutionary processes and better understand if heat tolerant coral colonies produce offspring better suited to dealing with climate change.
Researchers will identify thermally tolerant corals in the field, breed them in the lab and expose them to anticipated future climate conditions to see how they cope with the increasingly stressful environments they will face. The most resilient corals will then be out-planted and the results of this selective breeding process will be monitored in the field.
Bleached corals lose the algal symbionts living within their cells and can die if they do not recover quickly enough. This process is becoming increasingly frequent and severe, challenging ecosystems everywhere to keep up.
Diver with coral. (Photo credit: Robert Richmond)
Coral reefs could be almost extinct in 30 to 50 years, under the worst-case scenario, according to an international group of scientific experts, including University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa research professor
Robert H. Richmond, who identified and discussed the requirements for coral reef survival in an article in
More than 500 million people rely on coral reefs for the protection they confer against coastal damage from waves, the fisheries resources they offer, the cultural practices they support and the tourism they help attract. Yet these ecosystems are among the most threatened by global climate change. Since the 1980s, there has been a rise in the number of mass bleaching episodes, during which corals expel the microscopic algae that keep them alive.