Way to heal bleached corals is discovered

“Stanford researchers have found that corals can rapidly recover from bleaching by touching healthy, genetically identical clones. When healthy corals touch damaged coral, their tissues fuse, allowing the microscopic algae that provide them with food to pass from the healthy coral into the bleached one. In laboratory experiments, all five bleached coral fragments placed in contact with healthy clones recovered within eight weeks, while five fragments kept slightly apart failed to recover,” notes The Doomslayer.

Science reports:

“When coral bleaches during a heat wave and ejects its symbiotic algae, it usually means either a death sentence or a slow recovery over months or years. But scientists working separately at two labs an ocean apart have found a faster acting shortcut, one that has scientists hoping it could eventually help coral recover from bleaching and endure future heat waves.

The approach, reported in a 2 October paper in Environmental Microbiology Reports and one published today in Science Advances, is deceptively simple. By touching a piece of bleached coral to a healthy piece, a kind of algal transfusion can occur. Symbionts flow through a bridge of tissue and then rapidly reproduce, repopulating the bleached piece in as little as 4 weeks.”

Meanwhile, “Scientists have found some remarkably heat-resistant corals near the Houtman Abrolhos archipelago off Western Australia. During an extreme 2025 marine heatwave and in lab tests, the corals showed little bleaching or mortality at temperatures that are typically deadly to coral. The researchers are still trying to explain the source of that resilience.”

A study found that corals recover faster on artificial structures than on natural reefs.

A very healthy coral reef is nestled among offshore oil platforms. A multivitamin could save some coral reefs.

The world’s coral reefs are more plentiful than previously thought. “High-resolution satellite maps show that coral reefs cover an area of ocean larger than New Mexico,” reported Bloomberg News. That’s about twice the size of some prior estimates.