[Coral-List] Coral chimerism as an evolutionary rescue mechanism for reef restoration

[Dor Shefy]

Hello to all coral list

I would like to pay your attention to a new paper (by Buki Rinkevich)
offering the idea of coral chimerism as an evolutionary rescue mechanism to
mitigate global climate change impacts.
Climate change and anthropogenic pressures inflict a wide range of profound
damages on coral reef ecosystems, reshaping coral reef communities due to
their physiological and ecological intolerance to the newly developing
environmental conditions. Here, we present coral chimerism as an
evolutionary rescue tool for accelerating adaptive responses to global
climate change impacts. The “evolutionary rescue” power is contingent on
the premise that coral chimerism counters the erosion of genetic and
phenotypic diversity. Further benefits are gained when flexible chimeric
entities alter their somatic constituents following changes in
environmental conditions, synergistically presenting the best‐fitting
combination of their genetic components to endure in a capricious
environment, exhibiting always their environmentally matched physiological
characteristics. Chimerism should be considered as an integral part of the
ecological engineering toolbox being developed for active reef restoration.

link to the paper:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gcb.14576

best
Dor Shefy