There are weird plants where aridity spurs diversity

The Ocean Warming History of the Coral Sea: Impact on Coral Skeletons in the High-Temperature Period of January – March

Corals can stay bleached for a while and still survive, so until we are through the recovery phase, we won’t know the full impact. If this level of warming continues, the recoveryprocess will degrade very quickly.

The researchers think that evidence may force UNESCO to reconsider its decision not to include the Great Barrier Reef in the World Heritage list.

The latest Nature study focuses on annual temperatures from January through March, when ocean temperatures at the reef are at their peak. This year, according to the new coral-skeleton record, the Coral Sea’s surface temperature during this period reached an average of 1.73 °C above the 1618–1899 average. Henley and his colleagues modelled Earth’s climate both with and without historical greenhouse-gas emissions and determined that the ocean warming trend in their record would not have been possible without human activity.

Corals usually ‘bleach’ when they are stressed by high temperatures: they expel the colourful algae that live inside them and provide them with energy through photosynthesis. Depending on the severity and duration of the bleaching event, the corals might recover, or they might die, threatening the biodiverse ecosystems that provide habitat for fisheries, attract tourists and protect coastlines from storms.

Publish or Perish: A board game to encourage species conservation in the drier climate, but not necessarily in the temperate regions of the Earth

Never miss an episode. Subscribe to the Nature Podcast on

  Apple Podcasts



,



  Spotify



,



  YouTube Music



 or your favourite podcast app. An RSS feed for the Nature Podcast



 is available too.

In a new board game, the phrase ‘Publish or Perish’ can be played for laughs, as it is known in the scientific community as the main currency of a scientist’s career. Created as a way to help researchers “bond over shared trauma”, the game features many mishaps familiar to academics, scrambles for funding and scathing comments, all while players must compete to get the most citations on their publications. Max went to avoid dying and published a story about the game for the Nature Podcast.

A study reveals that, unexpectedly, plants display a greater diversity of traits in drier environments. Trait diversity is a measure of an organism’s performance in an environment and can include things like the size of a plant or its photosynthetic rate. There is good data on the kind of diversity in temperate regions, but there is no assessment of the drylands. Contrary to expectations, the new study shows that trait diversity can be doubled at a certain level of aridity. The team behind the work hopes that it can help us protect our species as the planet warms.