[Coral-List] corals can eat their zooxanthellae

Alina Szmant alina at cisme-instruments.com
Fri Aug 25 12:44:40 UTC 2023


I know that I am on opiods due to my recent surgery, but this message makes me feel that I must be living in an alternative universe that is informationally separated from previous century. We knew that corals can digest and assimilate their zooxanthellae since Muscatine, Trench,  Yonge and other researchers work many decades ago. So your message makes we wonder if people simply just don't bother to read the literature,  or younger researchers are caught up in the "Breaking News" mindset.  I haven't looked at the papers yet, but my guess is that the new work is just adding details to a fact and process that has been long known.  So maybe just modify the messaging, such as "new information about the harvesting of zooxanthellae by their anthozoan hosts" would be more appropriate.  Nice to kearn new details about how nature works, but the sensationalism should left for cable news coverage of plane crashes and celebrity arrests.

Alina Szmant



Dr. Alina M. Szmant,  CEO
CISME Instruments LLC



-------- Original message --------
From: Douglas Fenner via Coral-List <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>
Date: 8/24/23 11:06 PM (GMT-05:00)
To: coral list <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>
Subject: [Coral-List] corals can eat their zooxanthellae

Like hard-working farmers, corals cultivate and eat their resident algae

https://www.science.org/content/article/hard-working-farmers-corals-cultivate-and-eat-their-resident-algae

Corals have algal friends for dinner

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02593-7

Note author contact

Reef-building corals farm and feed on their photosynthetic symbionts

 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06442-5

open-access

It sounded like from the popular accounts that the corals only did that
when the water they were in had zero nutrients in it, they didn't do it in
low-nutrient water that is typical of tropical reefs in oligotrophic
waters.  That's what it sounded like at least.

Cheers, Doug

--
Douglas Fenner
Lynker Technologies, LLC, Contractor
NOAA Fisheries Service
Pacific Islands Regional Office
Honolulu
and:
Coral Reef Consulting
PO Box 997390
Pago Pago, American Samoa 96799-6298  USA

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