Red Sea corals that can take the heat
eilat ( israel): In the azure waters of the Red Sea, Maoz Fine and his team dive to study what may be the planet’s most unique coral: one that can survive global warming, at least for now.
The corals, striking in their red, orange and green colours, grow on tables some eight metres underwater, put there by the Israeli scientists to unlock their secrets to survival.
They are of the same species that grows elsewhere in the northern Red Sea and are resistant to high temperatures.
Fine’s team dives in scuba gear to monitor the corals, taking notes on waterresistant pads.
“We’re looking here at a population of corals on a reef that is very resilient to high temperature changes, and is most likely going to be the last to survive in a world undergoing very significant warming and acidification of sea water,” Fine said at his nearby office ahead of the dive.
Global warming has in recent years caused colourful coral reefs to bleach and die around the world – but not in the Gulf of Eilat, or Aqaba, part of the northern Red Sea.
That is what has prompted Fine’s work, both in the Red Sea and on its shores.
At the Interuniversity Institute for Marine Sciences in the southern Israeli resort city of Eilat, dozens of aquariums have been lined up in rows just off the Red Sea shore con taining samples of local corals.
A robot slowly dips its arms into each glass container, taking measurements and uploading them to a database.
“We exposed corals to high temperatures over long periods of time, beyond the current peak summer temperatures and even beyond the modelbased temperatures we pre dict for the end of the century,” said Fine, a marine biology professor from Bar Ilan University in central Israel.
He explained: “They didn’t undergo bleaching.”
According to Fine, the Gulf of Eilat corals fare well in heat thanks to their slow journey from the Indian Ocean through the Bab alMandab strait, between Djibouti and Yemen, where water temperatures are much higher.
“Over the past 6,000 years they underwent a form of selection through a very, very hot body of water, and only those that could pass through that hot water body reached here, the northern Red Sea and Gulf of Eilat,” he said.