Like the heat waves on land we have all grown familiar with, marine heat waves are being amplified by climate change. These extreme warm water events have ushered in some of the most catastrophic impacts of climate change and are now a major threat to ocean life.
, losses of genetic diversity could make a bad problem even worse by limiting future adaptation to changing environments.
Two colonies of Porities growing side-by-side on Kiritimati during the 2015–16 marine heat wave. One colony appears healthy while the other is severely bleached. Credit: Kieran Cox, author providedOne hypothesis is that they house symbiotic partners with different heat sensitivities. Using metabarcoding, a technique that attempts to identify everything found living in the coral tissue, we identified which symbionts were partnered with which corals before, during and after the heat wave.
We found that the distinct Porites lineages had different partnerships before the heat wave. Porites species pass on their symbionts from, however, one of Porites' unique algal partners had been virtually eliminated. The survivors of all lineages had similar symbionts, suggesting specialized relationships between the partners had been lost under extreme temperatures.
Thus, not only was a cryptic coral lineage left teetering on the edge of local extinction, but its specialized symbiotic relationship had also been forcefully broken up.Due to climate change and other threats, we are currently experiencing aCryptic species often occupy. Discovering these hidden differences can enhance our understanding of how ecosystems function. But worryingly, we may be losing this critical diversity before it is even discovered.
Continued study of cryptic diversity could prove essential to building climate resilient ecosystems. Using heat tolerant cryptic lineages in
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