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Great Barrier Reef is experiencing its worst mass bleaching event on record

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An underwater photo shows bleached and dead coral around Lizard Island on the Great Barrier Reef.

The Great Barrier Reef in Australia is undergoing its worst coral-bleaching event on record.Credit: David Gray/AFP via Getty

Australia’s iconic Great Barrier Reef is experiencing its fifth mass bleaching event in eight years — and this one is the worst on record. A report by the Australian government’s reef management agency analysed aerial surveys of 1,080 of the reef’s estimated 3,000 individual reefs, and some in-water surveys. Corals ‘bleach’ when stressed by warming waters brought on by climate change, expelling their colourful resident zooxanthellae. Marine biologist Terry Hughes says the solution to the bleaching problem is clear: “Reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Full stop.”

Nature | 4 min read

The laboratory stalwart Caenorhabditis elegans forgets new information a couple of hours after learning it — unless it is quickly put on ice. Worms trained to dislike a smell retained their aversion while chilled for many hours. Worms given lithium also hung onto their memories for longer than normal. “Why do they forget, when the worms are perfectly capable of maintaining the memories longer?” ponders geneticist and study co-author Oded Rechavi. “Perhaps there’s a reason for holding memories for the particular duration that they do.”

Nature | 4 min read

Reference: bioRxiv preprint (not peer reviewed)

Hopes that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) would finally settle the debate over how fast the Universe is expanding were dashed after two teams that used JWST data calculated different values. Observations of the current Universe typically find the expansion rate — the Hubble constant — to be about 9% faster than predictions based on early-Universe data. Multiple techniques will need to agree before the disparity is resolved, says astronomer Wendy Freedman.

Nature | 5 min read

The top ten papers most-cited in policy documents worldwide are dominated by economics research: the number one most-referenced, with around 1,300 citations, is a 2003 study about the impact of trade. A list that excludes economics is topped by a 1990 book on the evolution of institutions by Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom and a 1997 paper about Earth’s natural capital. Paediatrician Peter Gluckman, former chief science adviser to New Zealand’s prime minister, is not surprised that the list includes broad-brush papers rather than those reporting incremental advances. “The thing that worries me most is the age of the papers that are involved,” he says — more recent work on climate change, food security and similar areas hasn’t made it onto the list.

Nature | 7 min read

Features & opinion

A coalition of scientists has published a declaration that there is “a realistic possibility of conscious experience” in all vertebrates and in many invertebrates, such as octopuses and insects. The group focuses on sentience — an aspect of consciousness often defined as being able to have subjective experiences — pointing to research suggesting that octopuses feel pain and that bees show play behaviour. “When there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal,” says the declaration.

Nature | 5 min read

Reference: The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness

Some people experience intense visual imagery, called hyperphantasia, that means they can replay memories or imagine scenes that are as vivid as real life. Once thought to be rare, research now suggests as many as 1 in 30 people have such vivid imaginations. At the other end of the spectrum are people with ‘aphantasia’, who have no visual imagery at all. Science is just catching up with this neurodiversity and how it influences memory, childhood, and even mental health.

The Guardian | 10 min read

To identify where you lie on the hyperphantasia/aphantasia spectrum, try the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire.

Physicists are finally getting to grips with the mysterious strong force, which binds quarks into protons and neutrons and holds the nucleus together. The physicists who made the first measurements in the range of distances where the strong force becomes especially strong and difficult to calculate, and came up with theoretical predictions to match, describe their breakthrough. We at last have the ability to calculate aspects of quantum chromodynamics — the fiendishly complex theory that describes how the force works — from first principles, write Alexandre Deur, Stanley Brodsky and Craig Roberts. It could lead to progress on a unifying theory of the universe and help us discover how many dimensions exist.

Scientific American | 12 min read

Infographic of the week

A map showing the European countries that formed CERN in the 1950s, In the decades since other nations have joined the alliance.

Source: CERN

As CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory, celebrates its 70th anniversary this year, researchers argue that its impact goes beyond its 23 member states and discoveries in particle physics. Advances made at CERN, including the development of the World Wide Web, have affected society as a whole. “I think it is a great model for international collaboration,” says physicist Rainer Wallny. “It has a lot of facilities available that are beyond the scope of individual user groups. No one has a particle accelerator in their backyard.” (Nature | 9 min read)

QUOTE OF THE DAY

Psychologist Naa Oyo Kwate reviews two new books — physician-scientist Uché Blackstock’s memoir Legacy and evolutionary historian Constance Hilliard’s Ancestral Genomics — and explores how racism steals time from Black people in the United States, harming their health and well-being. (Los Angeles Review of Books | 14 min read)

On Friday, Leif Penguinson was visiting the ‘Where I Work’ photography exhibition near the Nature offices in London. Did you find the penguin? When you’re ready, here’s the answer.

Thanks for reading,

Flora Graham, senior editor, Nature Briefing

With contributions by Katrina Krämer, Smriti Mallapaty and Sarah Tomlin

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Politics

Good news for coral reef restoration efforts: Study finds ‘full recovery’ of reef growth within four years

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While the majority of the world’s reefs are now under threat or even damaged potentially beyond repair, a new study reported in the journal Current Biology on March 8 offers some encouraging news: efforts to restore coral reefs not only increase coral cover, but they can also bring back important ecosystem functions, and surprisingly fast.

“We found that restored coral reefs can grow at the same speed as healthy coral reefs just four years after coral transplantation,” says Ines Lange of University of Exeter, UK. “This means that they provide lots of habitat for marine life and efficiently protect the adjacent island from wave energy and erosion.”

“The speed of recovery that we saw was incredible,” she says. “We did not expect a full recovery of reef framework production after only four years.”

The work by Lange and her international colleagues represents the first reef carbonate budget trajectories at any coral restoration sites. The study was conducted at the Mars Coral Reef Restoration Programme in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, one of the largest restoration projects in the world. The project relies on transplanting corals and adding substrate to restore reefs badly damaged by blast fishing 30 or 40 years ago. Without human intervention, those reefs had shown no signs of recovering due to the presence of loose coral rubble that prevents young coral larvae from surviving.

The restoration effort has added a continuous network of sand-coated steel structures to consolidate the rubble and offer a structure for transplanting coral fragments. The question was whether and how quickly such restored sites would recover. To find out, the researchers measured the carbonate budgets of 12 sites that had been restored at different times, up to four years ago.

“Corals constantly add calcium carbonate to the reef framework while some fishes and sea urchins erode it away, so calculating the overall carbonate budget basically tells you if the reef as a whole is growing or shrinking,” Lange says. “Positive reef growth is important to keep up with sea-level rise, protect coastlines from storms and erosion, and provide habitat for reef animals.”

They wanted to know how long it takes to bring back healthy reef growth and its associated functions. Their data show that rapid growth of transplanted corals supports the recovery of coral cover and carbonate production. In fact, just four years in, the net carbonate budget had tripled such that it matched that at healthy control sites.

There were some important differences, however. Because branched corals had been transplanted preferentially over other corals, the makeup of the restored reef communities differs. The researchers say those differences “may affect habitat provision for some marine species and resilience to future heatwaves, as branching corals are more sensitive to bleaching.”

While longer-term study is necessary to see what happens over time and under stress, the findings show that active management actions can help to boost the resilience of reefs and bring back important ecosystem functions that are critical for marine life and local communities in relatively short periods of time, according to the researchers. They’re hopeful that, over time, restored reefs will naturally recruit a more diverse mix of coral species. However, they note that what will happen in any given location around the world will depend on many factors, including environmental conditions and restoration techniques.

“As is so often the case, there is no one-size-fits-all solution, but we hope that this positive example can be used as inspiration for other reef restoration projects around the world,” Lange says.

“These results give us the encouragement that if we can rapidly reduce emissions and stabilize the climate, we have effective tools to help regrow functioning coral reefs,” says Tim Lamont, a study co-author at the Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, UK.

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