CORAL HUG: Two polyps of the reef-building coral Pocillopora damicornis imaged with fluorescence microscopy, showing the coral’s GFP, the chlorophyll of its symbiotic algae (red) and cilia-driven motion of microscopic particles (blue)ORR SHAPIRO AND ASSAF VARDI, WEIZMANN INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE
Crucial habitats in underwater ecosystems, and harbingers of the damage inflicted by global warming on the world’s oceans, coral reefs epitomize the beauty—and the fragility—of marine life. But they’re also notoriously difficult to study.
“There are all these fascinating, basic biology questions that we don’t know the answer to,” says Virginia Weis, a marine physiologist at Oregon State University. How do corals respond mechanistically to bacterial infections, for example? What exactly happens during coral bleaching? “They’re hard questions to study, because we haven’t had the cell biology and imaging capabilities.”
Getting to the bottom of these questions is becoming increasingly urgent. Reports of the worst coral bleaching ever seen have peppered scientific journals this year; Justin Marshall of the University of Queensland told The New ...
