Symbiont shuffling and thermal tolerance

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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.

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