This is Scientific American's 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagliata.

A marine heat wave in 2016 killed off a full third of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, the largest coral reef system in the world.

That is terrible watching your favorite ecosystems

Lily die.

Carly Kankle is a marine biologist at the University of Southern California who's studied that coral bleaching event.

Bleaching occurs when the waters around corals become too cold or too salty or too hot, but mostly too hot.

And then the symbiotic algae that live in... or too hot, but mostly too hot.

And then the symbiotic algae that live inside corals,

which are photosynthetic food factories,

abandon the coral, which causes them to die.

Because they're losing their nutritional source, so they're essentially starving to die. Because they're losing their nutritional source so they're essentially starving to death.

But coral can house multiple species of algae, some more heat tolerant than others.

So sometimes in the face of stress, the heartier algae proliferate, and that change offsets the damage caused by the exodus of the more sensitive species.

A process is called shuffling.

Kankle and her colleagues studied shuffling in corals affected by the 2016 bleaching event on the Great barrier reef.

And they found that adult corals can actually pass those reshuffled algal residents along to their offspring in their eggs, pointing to a possible

way successive generations of coral could adapt to warmer waters.

If your mom can kind of prime you for the environment that you might be experiencing

that presumably would improve your fitness. The details are in the journal

Scientific reports. So can this help corals beat back bleaching?

The pace of climate change and the frequency and intensity of the stress events is such that I don't think this is enough.

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