Can 'super-corals' save the reefs?

They should have all died. At least that’s what the worst-case-scenario predictions suggested.

But when Andréa Grottoli peered at the corals growing in tanks on Hawaii’s Coconut Island earlier this month, she breathed a sigh of relief. Some still lived.

For the past two years, Professor Grottoli and her colleagues had subjected these corals to some truly harsh conditions, the kind that climate models suggest could become the new normal by the end of the 21st century. When she harvested them from reefs around the Hawaiian island of Oahu, Grottoli had hoped that some would acclimate to the excessively warm and acidic waters of the tank, but “there was a real risk that they were all going to die after two years,” the Ohio State University coral researcher says.

Indeed, some of the corals had bleached under

Super-corals to the rescue?A persistent glimmer of hope