Seeding Reefs With Bacteria Might Help Them Survive Climate Change

As reports of coral reef die-offs rolled in year after year, marine biologist Raquel Peixoto couldn’t help but feel inundated. Mass reef bleaching events were already five times more common by 2016 than they’d been in the 1980s — a pace that has continued with ocean warming trends, which only exacerbate the die-offs. That’s a big problem for the larger ocean ecosystem, since coral reefs support thousands of fish and invertebrate species — more than any other undersea environment.