Surviving bleached Barrier Reef coral ‘more resilient to heat’

But Professor Terry Hughes of James Cook University, who has been leading the surveys of bleached corals, found in the latest study, published in Nature Climate Change, that the response of the reef was different between the two years.

“We were astonished to find less bleaching in 2017, because the temperatures were even more extreme than the year before,” Hughes said.

The northern part of the reef, which was worst-affected in 2016, bleached “much less” in 2017 even though some of the reefs underwent similar levels of heat stress in both summers.

In the central regions, the levels of bleaching for both years were observed to be the same, even though the heat exposure was higher in 2017, the researchers said.

Meanwhile, in the southern region – the least-affected – corals that suffered minor bleaching in the first year showed no bleaching in the second.

“That surprised us, because if the southern corals had behaved the same way in year two as in year one, we should have seen 20 or 30 percent of them bleach, and they didn’t,” Hughes told AFP.

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