Symbiont shuffling and thermal tolerance

Assembled from 33 blocks · 2 evidence · 22 related

1. Story
2. The observed capacity of some corals to change the relative abundance of symbiont types in their tissue, typically after a bleaching event, toward more heat-tolerant lineages — most often the genus now called Durusdinium, formerly clade D. Transplant work published in 2006 showed colonies of Acropora millepora that had shifted toward the tolerant type withstood roughly a degree to a degree and a half more heat than colonies that had not. That sounds like a solution and is not, for two reasons a reader should hold together. The gain is a fraction of the warming projected this century, so it buys years rather than decades. And it is paid for: colonies dominated by the tolerant symbiont have been shown to grow more slowly, so a reef that shuffles its way through a heatwave accretes less afterwards. Tolerance and growth are traded against each other, which is exactly the shape of a constraint rather than an escape.
3. Knowledge
4. Coral bleaching
5. Coral calcification
6. Symbiont shuffling and thermal tolerance
7. Connections
8. Coral bleaching
9. Coral calcification
10. The coral symbionts are reclassified into a family of genera
11. Reef-building corals (Scleractinia)
12. Marine heatwave
13. Degree Heating Weeks (DHW)
14. Symbiont shuffling and thermal tolerance
15. The first global mass bleaching event
16. A published projection that reefs would bleach faster than they could recover
17. The second global bleaching event
18. The third global bleaching event
19. Mass bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef
20. A second consecutive year of mass bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef
21. The interval between severe bleaching events is measured, and it has collapsed
22. Mass bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef during a La Nina
23. The fourth global bleaching event is confirmed
24. The fifth mass bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef since 2016
25. The current state of the fourth global bleaching event is not established in this package
26. Zooxanthellae (Symbiodiniaceae)
27. Ocean acidification
28. Reef carbonate budget
29. Symbiont shuffling and thermal tolerance
30. A measured decline in Great Barrier Reef coral calcification is published
31. Evidence
32. Colonies of Acropora millepora dominated by the heat-tolerant symbiont lineage (then clade D, now Durusdinium) tolerated roughly one to one and a half degrees Celsius more heat than colonies dominated by other lineages. V55 verification basis: not consulted; the experiment and the approximate magnitude are stated from the producing model's knowledge, and the confidence interval is deliberately not quoted.
33. The coral endosymbionts formerly assigned to the single genus Symbiodinium and to clades A-I constitute a family of several genera, including Cladocopium and the thermally tolerant Durusdinium, separated by deep evolutionary distances. V55 verification basis: not consulted; the revision and the genus names are stated from the producing model's knowledge, and the family's estimated age of origin is not quoted precisely because it could not be checked.