In a groundbreaking achievement, an international team of researchers spearheaded by the Minderoo Foundation, has accomplished selective breeding of Ningaloo corals on Australia's North-West coast in response to mass coral bleaching.
This accomplishment will provide hope for the survival of these vital marine organisms amidst the looming threat of mass coral bleaching, caused by rising sea temperatures.
The Minderoo Foundation is one of Australasia's largest philanthropies, with AUD$2.6 billion funds invested in philanthropic causes. These causes range from eliminating childhood cancer to improving early childhood education, ending modern slavery and driving accountability in and responsibility for global overfishing, plastic pollution, global warming and the tech ecosystem.
Dr Kate Quigley, Principal Researcher at Minderoo Exmouth Research Laboratory, led a team of 10 scientists for selectrive breeding of Ningaloo corals during the annual mass spawning event at Ningaloo.
As a molecular ecologist with prior experience in breeding coral that can thrive 26-times better under elevated temperatures, Dr Quigley hopes to cross-breed Ningaloo corals that possess a greater likelihood of survival in warmer temperatures.
"This technique is known as assisted gene flow," Dr Quigley said.
"It's basically selective breeding, choosing the mums and dads of the same coral species during the mass spawning event that happens on Ningaloo and we're able to identify the tough mums and tough dads to try to get tough babies that can survive better under warming conditions."
"We try to find sites that are really warm and highly variable and that's where we find our heat tolerant corals and then we also go to coral sites that have lower temperatures, that have potentially less resilient corals," Dr Quigley said.
"We collected corals that are ready to release their egg sperm bundles and bring them back to the Minderoo Exmouth Research Lab, a bespoke facility with a full team, where we are able to replicate the natural conditions and keep them comfortable so they will breed.
"After the spawning we've had baby corals, or larvae, in high-tech tanks and put them through a series of temperature experiments to see, of these individuals we've bred, who are the elite athletes – who are the ones that can really perform under high temperature and then we can use genetic techniques over the coming months to query what genes are responsible for these elite athletes," Dr Quigley explained.
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Dr Marie Strader, the head of the Marine Molecular Ecology Strader lab Texas A&M University in the US, is partnering with Dr Quigley in Exmouth to explore the genetic factors that contribute to thermal tolerance in larvae adult in Ningaloo reef corals.
"We can actually look at the genome and look at how genes are turned on and off and particular patterns to give us clues about how these larvae are actually thermal tolerant at the molecular level," Dr Strader said.
Masters student Alex Lago from Germany's University of Bremen is also working with Dr Quigley on this world-leading research.
"The Ningaloo reef is the largest fringing reef system in the world and it harbours really high biodiversity and just as a unique ecosystem, we want to try and understand as much as we can so we can preserve that for future generations," Ms Lago said.
Over the next year the researchers hope to understand if the assisted gene flow conservation technique could help to future-proof Ningaloo reef against mass bleaching events which are predicted to increase in frequency.
