Warming seas threaten to turn coral reefs from kaleidoscopes of color into bleached fields of rubble. To stop this degradation, some scientists are exploring a surprising salve: probiotics.
Dosing corals with a mix of beneficial bacteria staved off death in a heat wave simulated in an aquarium, researchers report August 13 in Science Advances. In comparison, nearly half of corals given a benign saline solution instead did not survive those same conditions. The research offers a proof of concept that probiotics could help some corals survive heat stress.
“The results are incredibly promising,” says Blake Ushijima, a microbiologist at the University of North Carolina Wilmington who wasn’t involved in
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