The world's corals are fading fast and the Red Sea is no exception. In an article posted by The Times of Israel, it has been announced that an alliance with all the countries that border the Red Sea: Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea, Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen will come together to protect the corals from bleaching and dying.
"In the last 30 years we have lost 50% of the coral around the world," says Maoz Fine, Israeli researcher Professor, from the Mina and Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences at Bar-Ilan University.
The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, will act as a "neutral umbrella" as they oversee liaison between all the countries and research as to how the Red Sea has managed to resist the bleaching effects that have caused the collapse of so many other reefs around the world.
Fine continues to tell The Times of Israel, "Now in French Polynesia and Sri Lanka and other places there are huge bleaching events, it's really happening in a very small time frame that we're losing the corals."
The sea has acted as a type of "thermal refuge," and the corals are able to withstand experiments of what future summer conditions would feel like, high temperatures and acidification. Fine and his Swiss teammates want to determine exactly which gene allows the coral to be able to survive in higher temperatures, in hopes to help save other reefs that are fading. Unfortunately, the data for other parts of the Red Sea was severely lacking in quantity and quality, due to the fact of the countries separation.
Hopefully, the coming together of these countries can help save our oceans and lead to future unity in other major world-saving efforts.
You can read more about it at The Times of Israel
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