Baby corals might give insight to global climate change resistance

There's this lady who's researching coral juveniles and how corals grow. She, Iliana Baums (that's her name - she's a professor at Penn State), hopes to find out how exactly do corals react to climate change. At the same time she's teaching an international workshop of 28 aquarium professionals in Puerto Rico to educate them so that they know how to participate in the protection of corals.

Her experiment requires her to collect particular populations of coral that can withstand high temperatures. It's pretty interesting reading about exactly what she has to do to collect the samples. It looks like everything has been thought out pretty well. The juvenile corals she collects will be subjected to a variety of higher-than-normal and lower-than-normal water temperatures in order to pinpoint those offspring whose parents can tolerate abnormal water conditions. After she figures out which ones can survive or not, she'll research their genomes for genetic information that will reveal how particular coral can resist abnormal water temperatures.

A NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) scientist, Margaret Miller, is also partnering with Baums for the experiment. She'll do the same experiment with corals from Florida, where water temperature is lower. Later the two will compare data and draw conclusions about the corals' abilities to tolerate global climate change.

The workshop Baums is doing with the aquarium professionals is also helping the coral reefs.
Poachers and a lot of fisherman capture their organisms in non ecologically safe ways like through the use of sodium chloride.

What Baums aims to do is to teach the aquarium professionals how to properly collect coral spawn, do fertilization experiments, raise larvae, and care for larvae so that the need to collect the animals from the wild will no longer be an issue.

posted by Sage @ 8/27/2008 08:45:00 PM Comments: 0