El Niño, Heat Waves & the Future of Coral Reefs

Coral reefs cover less than 1% of the ocean floor, yet they support a quarter of all marine life on Earth. So what happens when the water around them gets too hot to survive?

This year's strong El Niño is pushing already-stressed reefs past their limits. In this episode of Atmosphere, host Emily Gracey sits down with Dr. Tracy Fanara, an environmental engineer and ocean scientist, to break down what's actually happening inside a bleaching coral, why El Niño and climate change are attacking reefs from two directions at once, and a striking theory she's developed linking the 2023 bleaching event to a mysterious die-off of endangered small tooth sawfish.

Then Emily talks with Shachar Damari, co-founder of V-Corals, a Red Sea-based biotech company rethinking how reefs get rebuilt. Instead of the industry-standard method of cutting coral into genetically identical clones, his team works with a rare natural fusion event that combines multiple coral genotypes into a single, hardier colony.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:

• The Bleaching Process: Why a "bleached" coral isn't a dead one, and what determines whether it bounces back.
• A Two-Front Attack: How long-term climate change and short-term El Niño patterns are compounding to hit reefs from both sides at once.
• The Sawfish Mystery: Tracy's leading hypothesis connecting reef collapse to a mass die-off of a critically endangered species.
• The Restoration Problem: Why most reef restoration doesn't hold up long-term, and what "resilience" actually requires.
• A Different Approach: How V-Corals uses a rare natural phenomenon, not genetic editing, to build coral that can survive future heat waves.

Connect with the Show:

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• Listen to the Weekly Weather Brief: Catch Emily and meteorologist Kerrin Jeromin every Friday for a quick rundown of the week's biggest science stories.

Links:

Follow Dr. Tracy Fanara on Instagram- @InspectorPlanet

V-Corals: https://www.v-corals.com/