Professor Olivier Thomas

Yeah, that's absolutely true.

And that's certainly the main concern here.

It's not only for the animal itself, the coral, but if the coral dies, so all the marine life associated with this coral and fishes and all the lobsters and etc.

will indeed be totally affected and they won't be able to survive in this environment.

So the impact of climate change is absolutely huge, not only for the coral itself that can bleach with an increase of temperature, as we know,

but also for the other species that are present, associated with these corals.

Yeah, this is actually the main discovery of this paper is that we know, of course, that the concept of holobionts, so that's a big word, but that's just saying that there's a host, the coral animal, that lives in close association with a huge number of microbes, bacteria and others, microalgae among others.

And indeed, this is totally hidden from our naked eyes, right?

If we go diving and we take nice photos of underwater corals, we totally ignore and we don't see actually the population, the diversity of microbes that these corals are also hosting.

And of course, having corals endangered will mean this microbiome totally endangered as well.

So that's indeed the major message of this paper.

That's not only the invertebrates that are in danger and the fishes, but that's also everything that is associated with it.

That means also the microbiome, the bacteria associated with the corals.

Yeah, so that's actually absolutely essential to understand that.

And that's the concept that we are developing more and more.

It's what we call the ocean health, right?

So this is not only, again, what we see in front of our eyes that is clearly important.

It's the same as a human being.

If you want, you have a gut microbiome.

And if this gut microbiome doesn't work, then you are sick, right?