Coral sex: How lab reproduction could restore wild reefs

Coral reefs host a quarter of all sea species, but climate change, overfishing, and pollution could drive these ecosystems to extinction within a matter of decades. Marine biologists have been racing to restore degraded reefs by collecting corals from the wild and breaking them into fragments. This encourages them to grow fast and quickly produces hundreds of smaller corals that can be raised in nurseries and eventually transplanted back onto the reef. But if each fragment is an identical copy with one common parent, any resulting colony is likely to be genetically identical to the rest of the population. This…

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