Sunday, 10 March 2013

How do Gulf corals beat the heat?


The waters in the Gulf are hot and it is strange when you think about the corals and how they beat the heat. In fact, the corals live in symbiosis with a type of algae that lives inside the coral’s tissue and the algae provides sugars to the coral and this is one of the reasons which let the corals beat the heat in the GCC countries. There is a problem: when anyone of them dies the others cannot live for a long time and without the green of the algae the coral can live for one week only. The skeleton in the coral is made of calcium carbonate that is the same as the people so carbonic acid affects on it but there are some kinds of enzymes that beat the oxidative stress and the heat stress. Corals reproduce in two ways through fragmentation or larval production.  After spawning events the small larvae take one week until they develop the ability to attach themselves to a rocky surface.

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