Sydney, June 9 Selectively breeding corals can significantly boost their heat tolerance, offering a short-term lifeline for the world's endangered reef systems as ocean temperatures rise due to climate change, new research said on Monday.
Researchers successfully bred heat-tolerant corals at Ningaloo Reef, a World Heritage site off Australia's northwest coast. Like many others globally, the reef faces increasing threats from marine heatwaves and mass bleaching events, according to a release from Minderoo Foundation in Western Australia that supported the research project.
Coral offspring with at least one parent from warmer reef zones had double the survival rate under extreme heat stress compared to those from cooler regions, said the team at Minderoo Foundation, alongside partners from the University of Western Australia, James Cook University in Queensland, the University of Bremen in Germany, and Texas A&M University in the United States.
"Coral babies with at least one parent from the warmer reef exhibited significantly higher survival rates under heat stress," said Kate Quigley, Principal Research Scientist at Minderoo Foundation.
"This marks the first successful demonstration of how selectively breeding Indian Ocean corals can boost heat tolerance and signals a crucial tool to aid reef survival in the short term," said Australian businessman Andrew Forrest, co-founder of the Minderoo Foundation.
"The world must arrest warming ocean temperatures urgently or face the very real prospect of the death of a majority of coral reefs globally within 50 years," Forrest said.
The findings come as mass bleaching events have affected 84 per cent of the world's reefs across at least 82 countries and territories since 2023, Xinhua news agency reported. In March 2025, both Ningaloo and the Great Barrier Reef on either side of Australia experienced simultaneous bleaching for the first time.
These findings are vital for shaping coral reef protection strategies as marine heatwaves intensify, potentially buying time for reefs while the world shifts away from fossil fuels, the main driver of extreme climate impacts, Quigley said.
Coral reefs are vital to the livelihoods of millions, protect coastlines, and support over a quarter of marine biodiversity, but have suffered steep global declines.
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