Chimerism as a strategy to improve the resilience of boulder corals
Sandra Mendoza-Quiroz, Margaret W. Miller, Raúl Tecalco-Rentería, Gandhi Germán Ramírez-Tapia, Anastazia T. Banaszak · 2025
Read Chimerism as a strategy to improve the resilience of boulder corals by Sandra Mendoza-Quiroz, Margaret W. Miller, Raúl Tecalco-Rentería, Gandhi Germán Ramírez-Tapia, Anastazia T. Banaszak (2025) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-12796442.txt.
Description
Sandra Mendoza-Quiroz and four co-authors test whether fused coral colonies survive reef stress better than single ones. A chimera forms when two or more distinct young corals merge into one body. The team paired young Orbicella faveolata and Orbicella annularis corals in tanks at six and eighteen months of age. Fusion worked within each species, best in the younger group of the first species at seventy percent, and never across species.
Fused and single colonies were then planted out and watched for two years. Chimeras lost about half their members in year one but none after, and they kept growing even through the severe 2023 heatwave. Single colonies of both sizes kept dying through the whole study and shrank during the heat. The authors read this as strong support for using chimeras in reef restoration.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Sandra Mendoza-Quiroz, Margaret W. Miller, Raúl Tecalco-Rentería, Gandhi Germán Ramírez-Tapia, Anastazia T. Banaszak |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2025 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 32 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |