Professor Olivier Thomas

That's exactly the same principle.

If the microbiome of the coral is not actually well maintained and in a good balance, then the coral won't survive in this environment.

So this is absolutely essential.

This is totally understudied.

And what we revealed here is that 90% of this microbiome has been actually not described yet, has been not understood yet.

So I think that's the main message, certainly, of this article indeed.

That's a very good question.

And this is actually a very beautiful aspect of nature in the ocean, is that in this extremely poor environment in terms of nutrients, you have these coral reefs that are actually able to host all this diversity of fishes.

And this is actually incredible.

And mainly it's related to the presence of this auxanthellae inside the coral, right?

Obviously, this auxanthellae will transform the light into nutrients that are absent in the water.

That's what the coral needs to actually thrive.

Once you have coral, you have a loop of nutrients and all these different types of chemicals that the other organisms need to actually thrive and develop themselves.

Indeed, this is happening mainly in the coral reefs, but we can't forget that this is also the case in the kelp forest that we have in front of our eyes here in Ireland.

This allows all this diversity of species to thrive, the parrotfish, as you say, but all the type of fishes, and this is absolutely essential for the communities who live from these fishes, right?

So if you remove the zooxanthellae, if you change the temperature and the pH, as you were mentioning,

then these auxanthellae won't be able to survive in these difficult changes, and then the coral will be affected.

And that's the effect that we call the bleaching, right?

And then if the coral can't work and provide actually the nutrients that are necessary for the other organisms to thrive, then of course you will see a disappearance of these fishes around the coral reefs.

And this will affect actually all the population as well.