- Updated (13/07) – See Dr van Oppen’s response below.
So said a headline in The Australian this morning.
Based on a study coming from the lab of Dr Madeleine van Oppen, the article made the amazing leap from a study in which scientists have found that many corals have several varieties of symbionts to saying that the Great Barrier Reef can adapt to climate change.
And it wasn’t the papers fault (which was published in the peer-reviewed journal, Coral Reefs – doi 10.1007/s00338-007-0244-8). This is actually what the senior investigator on the paper, Dr van Oppen, said “”This flexibility discovered in our research is important in understanding the past evolutionary success of these coral species and their future survival capacity in the face of changing climate,”
Yes, that is true to some extent. However, estimating the survival capacity of coral species involves a lot more than simply looking at the genetic identity of their symbiotic algae. The authors, for example, have not shown that the different algae do better or worse under climate change. Secondly, the fact that the authors have shown variability does not imply the flexibility needed if corals are to respond to the rapid changes in climate. We need to remember that the rate of change over the past 50 years is 100-200 times faster than the very rapid shifts in climate seen as our planet warmed out of ice ages. The ability to deal with the new conditions imposed by climate change requires that novel not pre-existing symbioses form. Alas – the authors cannot and do not claim this.
I also have an issue with the belief attributed to the research team that ‘bleaching, widely associated with the death of coral, is part of coral’s natural cycle of life.’ Given that natural is good – the implication to the uninitiated is that bleaching is OK. Given that the world lost 16% of its corals in a single cycle of global bleaching in 1998, this ‘belief’ is a stretch – see Dr Paul Marshall’s comment from a few days ago.
At the end of the day, we need to respond to these sorts of data sets logically. Yes, it is interesting that there is variability in the genetics of the symbiotic algae. However, given the complexity of potential climate change impacts on coral reefs, it does not prove that coral reefs will sail on into a warming world without problems as is implied by this rather poor newspaper article.