The corals we find in the world's reefs have their own cultures and scientists are trying to save them for future generations.
A baby coral is floating in the ocean. If it's lucky, the larva sinks and secures itself to the bottom of the ocean. It clones itself once settled.
Shallow-water corals are colonies of tiny animals collaborating with a marinealga called zooxanthellae, which feeds the coral and helps produce the calcium carbonate that forms reefs over thousands of years.
Scientists are just beginning to understand the extent to which corals rely on other types of microbes.
Climate change and other human activity can disrupt the delicate balance of microbes in coral.
While climate action is needed to stop the damage caused by fossil fuel use, biologists are looking at ways to make up for it.
In the waters of the Great Barrier Reef, stressors are getting more intense, while on land in nearby Townsville, tanks full of young corals are being raised to protect the reef's future.
The hope is that one day, this process will enable researchers to grow millions of healthy corals using aquaculture, to potentially enable large scale restoration efforts on the GBR that are currently beyond our scope.
Lone Hj is a researcher at the Australian Institute for Marine Science's'Sea Simulator'lab.
Hj and her team have isolated 850 strains ofbacteria from coral.
Hj told ScienceAlert that the coral bacterial culture collection has a lot of different types.
The lab is used for simulations of the sea. The Great Barrier Reef Foundation provided Christian Miller with the picture.
The health and development of human-reared coral is dependent on the health and development of the bacterium in this collection.
At the moment, they're looking for a number of characteristics in probioticbacteria. The coral is expected to retain its health after the course is over. The analysis of last year's studies is still going on.
The scientists at the Sea Simulator lab have the chance to run experiments on coral during coral spawning season. The coral species A. tenuis and P. daedalea were the first to be trialed.
After fertilization, the new'recruits' settled on the bottom of the tanks and were exposed to individual strains ofbacteria. The team studied their growth, the density of their symbionts, their immune responses, and their gut flora in the long run.
corals are being worked with The Great Barrier Reef Foundation provided this picture.
The coming season of coral spawning will allow scientists to repeat the experiment. They will use the same coral species and keep all other conditions the same.
Hj says that the next experiment will look at the long-term effects of the probiotic on lab-grown corals as they mature, and what it can do to improve their resilience under stress. It's not as simple as swallowing a capsule with breakfast to deliver the probiotic to young corals, according to the team.
According to Hj, this research may one day lead to the use of probiotics for the benefit of the natural reef environment. The probiotics in development are only intended to be used in GBR species.
Climate change is the most important factor in the survival of coral reefs, but there are other creatures that look out for them.
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