Professor Olivier Thomas

Absolutely not.

No, no, no.

It's exactly the same aspect.

And you're totally right to mention that, that the holobion concept is present everywhere, right?

We're making indeed a huge focus on the corals because obviously of the beauty of the coral reefs in the ocean and how they actually allow all these fishes to survive, etc.

And this is underestimated and understudied.

But the coral reefs are so important for all these little islands in the Pacific or in the warm regions of the Indian Ocean and others.

But actually indeed we focus mainly on that today, but very soon we actually have programs already on kelps in Ireland where we are studying as well this close association between the host and the microbiome.

And this is something ongoing.

This is just because we need to start somewhere.

I would say that we start with the most emblematic coral reefs, which is certainly the most important because they're suffering.

deeply from climate change, where the others certainly will come after.

But this is just a question of time.

But this is present everywhere, absolutely.

Yeah, listen, that's millions of years of evolution where the host actually has developed a close association with these microbiota, including these auxanthellae,

that actually transform the light into nutrients.

After a million years of quite stable pH and temperature of the ocean, we are now observing some changes of pH and temperature, which is not huge, and you are right.

But if we look at the evolution, the million years, this is becoming really acute in terms of change, right?

So the temperature has not evolved for the last thousands of years.

And now we're going to see with the industrial revolution and everything we know about climate change, a clear increase of temperature that leads also to a decrease of pH in the ocean.