(9 Dec 2021) FOR CLEAN VERSION SEE STORY NUMBER: 4356622
VOICEOVER SCRIPT:
CHARLES DARWIN HAD A THEORY: CREATURES CAN EVOLVE TO SURVIVE CHANGING ENVIRONMENTS.
BUT IN THE FACE OF GLOBAL WARMING, MOST ANIMALS WON'T BE SPREADING THEIR HEAT TOLERANT GENES TO THE NEXT GENERATION - AT LEAST NOT ANYTIME SOON.
FOR THE WORLD'S VITAL CORAL REEFS, HOWEVER, THERE COULD BE A DIFFERENT STORY.
SOUNDBITE (English) Kira Hughes, University of Hawaii, Coral Resilience Lab:
"Yeah, assisted evolution started out as kind of this crazy idea that you could actually help something change and allow that to survive better because it is changing. And we really just set out to see if it would work if any of these crazy ideas could possibly help, and that the main reason we did that was because there was no other options. So we're starting to realize that we have to intervene in order to make a change for coral reefs to survive into the future."
SCIENTISTS BELIEVE A LAB-EVOLVED SUPER CORAL THAT IS MORE TOLERANT TO HEAT COULD HELP SAVE REEFS THAT ARE NOW DYING BECAUSE OF CLIMATE CHANGE.
WHILE THE IDEA OF INTERVENING WITH NATURE HAS LONG BEEN CONTROVERSIAL, THESE RESEARCHERS SAY THEY ARE NOT CREATING ANYTHING THAT COULDN'T HAPPEN NATURALLY. THEY'RE JUST GIVING IT A HELPING HAND.
SOUNDBITE (English) Madeleine van Oppen, Australian Institute of Marine Science:
"There was a lot of ethical comments like, Oh, you think you're playing gods by intervening with the reef. Well, you have already intervened with the reef for very long periods of time. All we're trying to do is to repair the damage. You know, people often don't see it that way. There's no part of the ocean where we cannot detect human influence. So. We are not proposing to introduce any genetic diversity from outside the region. We are really focusing first on as local a scale as possible to try and maintain and enhance what is already there and work with existing genetic variation that is already present on the reef."
SOUNDBITE (English) Crawford Drury, Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology:
"So what that looks like for us is a variety of experiments where we have corals that we know are super hardy and some that we know are more sensitive. We try to make crosses and rear those larvae and then understand how far into the future those corals can survive. Corals are threatened worldwide by a lot of stressors, but increasing temperatures are probably the most severe. And so that's what our focus is on, is working with parents that are really thermally tolerant."
AND AS THE OCEANS CONTINUE TO WARM, THOSE ARE PARENTS THAT COULD SPAWN A NEW GENERATION OF MORE RESILIENT REEFS.
CALEB JONES, ASSOCIATED PRESS, HAWAII
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