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Coral reefs are old. Really<\/em> old. Scientists believe corals have lived in the shallows of Earth\u2019s oceans for 160 million years, predating dinosaurs. They owe their longevity in large part to a symbiotic relationship with microscopic algae that live inside their tissues, absorbing sunlight and passing along vital nutrients that both feed corals and give them their vibrant coloration.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s kind of like our microbiome inside of our gut,\u201d says Sarah Davies<\/a>, who researches coral adaptation. \u201cOur body\u2019s immune system allows it to persist, and it performs functional goodies for us. The algal symbiont does the same thing, and together, the symbiotic relationship fuels the ability for a coral to build that rock structure.\u201d<\/p>\n The partnership keeps coral reefs healthy, vibrant, and teeming with marine life\u2014not unlike massive underwater cities. \u201cEveryone has their little duty in the city,\u201d says Davies, an associate professor of biology and primary investigator of the Davies Marine Population Genomics Lab<\/a>. \u201cThere are city workers that take care of the [problematic] turf algae\u2014those are the damselfish. Maybe the sharks are the police. You can imagine that once you remove enough pieces, the whole city starts to break down and eventually leads to a cascade of degradation and loss of life.\u201d<\/p>\n Davies, a seasoned diver who has been studying reefs for two decades, is still amazed by the \u201cbeauty of evolution\u201d that caused coral and algae to team up and help each other grow quickly in shallow marine environments.<\/p>\n But reefs across the globe are under threat from warming oceans because of anthropogenic climate change. Davies researches<\/a> how corals are evolving to survive\u2014and sees lessons for humans in their tactics. She\u2019s not the only CAS researcher learning about the ways some organisms and animals are responding to all kinds of changes in their environments. Researchers are gleaning lessons from orangutans\u2019 adapting to the loss of their treetop habitats in Borneo, from vervet monkeys\u2019 response to increased and prolonged droughts in South Africa, and from yellow-tailed woolly monkeys\u2019 adjusting to living at higher elevations in Peru\u2014all with the hope that these organisms can teach us how we can weather our own ecological storms.<\/p>\n \u201cI think there are a lot of answers to problems that we have as humans\u2014reducing fossil fuels, or reducing our impacts, or efficiency\u2014that can come from studying how it was done by millions of years of evolution, Davies says. \u201cWe just need to listen to nature.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere are a lot of answers to problems that we have as humans\u2026that can come from studying how it was done by millions of years of evolution.\u201d<\/p>\n Human-caused climate change has affected virtually every square inch of the planet. Consider, again, coral. Warmer ocean temperatures mixing with the symbiotic algae inside corals produce a poisonous reactive oxygen species that forces an end to the partnership. Without its algae, the coral no longer gets the sugars it needs, and it loses its color. This bleaching is happening in every ocean on Earth, Davies says. Notably, in 2023, water temperatures in the Caribbean, southern Atlantic, and Gulf of Mexico reached record highs, resulting in bleaching conditions on nearly every reef and complete local extinctions of certain species of coral.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you get these years where there\u2019s not a lot of hurricane activity, and you couple it with El Ni\u00f1o, where the winds lay off and the water temperatures are like a hot tub, we see bleaching of corals that we don\u2019t tend to see bleach in normal years\u2014the ones we think of as being really resilient,\u201d Davies says. \u201cA lot of them have recovered, but everybody took a hit.\u201d<\/p>\n Human encroachment and exploitation also harm delicate ecosystems. Cheryl Knott<\/a> has studied orangutans in Indonesia\u2019s Gunung Palung National Park, on the island of Borneo, since 1992. She\u2019s watched illegal logging operations reduce the number of orangutans to critically endangered levels, requiring massive conservation efforts, including her own, the Gunung Palung Orangutan Conservation Program\/Yayasan Palung<\/a>.<\/p>\n At the same time, Bornean orangutans are responding to a warming planet. The apes depend on an occurrence called mast fruiting, which happens unpredictably, every few years, when a large percentage of trees and plants fruit simultaneously throughout the rain forest. Knott, a professor of anthropology, biology, and women\u2019s, gender and sexuality studies, says orangutan researchers are concerned that climate change may cause these mast fruiting events\u2014which seem to be triggered by a drop in nighttime temperature\u2014to occur less frequently or stop altogether.<\/p>\n \u201cIf we\u2019re messing up the climate, then that could really have an impact on the flowering patterns of these forests,\u201d she says. \u201cThat\u2019s super important for orangutans and other species that live in these Southeast Asian rain forests, which have lower food availability than African or South American rain forests.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"\/cas\/files\/2024\/10\/24-1407-CASDAVIES-003-1-424x636.jpg\")
Delicate Ecosystems, Changing Behaviors<\/strong><\/h5>\n
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