How does a coral adapt to its environment?

Question

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Answer 1

For corals to survive the projected increases in seawater temperatures this century, they would need to adjust to the higher temperatures. There are two ways that they might do this.

Firstly, corals could alter their physiology in a process known as acclimatisation. Corals found in warmer waters are more tolerant of high temperatures than corals found in cooler waters, so some changes in coral physiology seem possible. There is no evidence that corals have acclimatised to resist bleaching in the last 20 years, because many corals have bleached two or three times. If global temperatures rise in the predicted way, water temperatures in a hundred years will be much greater than those that trigger bleaching now, so corals would need to continue to acclimatise to survive.