The Weekly Anthropocene, October 5 2022
Dispatches from the Wild, Weird World of Humanity and its Biosphere
Florida
As previously chronicled in this newsletter, the Australian Institute of Marine Science recently achieved a historic breakthrough for coral conservation: successfully inducing Great Barrier Reef corals to spawn out of season, allowing much more coral to be bred in captivity. On the other side of the world, the Florida Aquarium has now succeeded in a completely different coral breeding “moonshot.”
Elkhorn coral populations in Florida waters, once the dominant species of Florida Keys reefs, have declined by 95% due to coastal development, diseases from humans' wastewater and bleaching from climate change-induced heat waves. The scattered remnants left aren’t managing to breed: annual mass spawning events aren’t happening while warming and pollution are preventing new baby corals from settling. Faced with the imminent disappearance of Florida Keys reefs, a team of coral conservationists decided to try an unprecedented gambit: using experimental cryopreservation technology to try t…
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