Some corals like it hotter

The heat-tolerant algae that live symbiotically within some corals may enable their hosts to adapt to the warmer water temperatures projected to accompany long-term climate change, field studies suggest.

Many coral polyps that make up shallow reefs draw much of their nourishment from algae that live within the polyps. Those algae, all from the genus Symbiodinium, capture the energy of sunlight and pass along some stored energy to their hosts, says marine biologist Andrew C.