Probiotics help lab corals survive deadly heat stress

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

→ Continue reading at Science News

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