New genetic tools mark another step on the road to industrial-scale coral farming

Photo retrieved from anthropocenemagazine.org

For eons, farmers have bred plants and animals for specific qualities: to thrive in hotter climates or colder; wetter or drier; to produce more food.

Now there is growing pressure to do that with wild creatures in order to help them endure life in the Anthropocene. Nowhere is this more evident than with coral, the cornerstone of the ocean’s most productive and imperiled ecosystems.

New research offers the hope that genetic tools might help identify coral strains that can best weather a devastating disease afflicting Caribbean reefs. It also underscores the sobering fact that humanity is on a path toward needing to choose between turning an ecosystem-building animal into a domesticated crop, or watching it disappear.

Some of the most emblematic corals are already dangerously close to vanishing from the Caribbean, courtesy of a mysterious illness known as white band disease. First identified in the 1970s, the illness afflicts several species of Acropora, coral that build spiky antler-like carbonate structures in which colonies of coral polyps live. The disease can destroy coral tissue and kill entire colonies, destroying up to 95% of Acropora corals in the Caribbean. While scientists suspect a bacteria is to blame (antibiotics can combat an infection), no one has fingered the specific culprit.

Coral conservation groups have responded in part by growing Acropora corals on a massive scale. They collect corals, break them into tiny fragments, then grow those fragments into new corals. By one estimate, it could take millions of small corals to rebuild a coral reef covering less than half a square kilometer.