Professor Olivier Thomas

So all of this put together, the scale of it is more than sufficient to actually disturb the balance that has been established over millions of years between the zooxanthellae and the coral.

And this balance is very delicate.

And if you change now with the amount of change that we have in terms of pH and temperature, it's more than sufficient.

to actually disturb this balance and make this association not functioning anymore.

And that's why actually this is acute at the moment.

And this is kind of unique in the human history, I would say.

It's a long chain.

You're absolutely right.

It's a long chain of events.

And the key element of that is chlorophyll, right?

We know that on land.

Well, it's the same in the coral reef.

And that's why this association with this zooxanthellae is absolutely essential.

The zooxanthellae will transform the chlorophyll into energy and the energy will be needed to

for the transformation of molecules into nutrients indeed in the organism so that that's a chain of events if you want leading to actually providing the nutrients to all the the coral but also the rest of the environment

That's a very good question, and that's exactly the purpose of our next trip to the Pacific in a couple of months, actually.

We investigated first with Tara Pacific, we investigated the whole diversity of three species of coral in the Pacific, right?

And we observed actually the effect of climate change is much more acute, let's say in the eastern side of the Pacific than the western side of the Pacific, where we call that the coral triangle.

And if you go to the coral triangle, indeed, the species of coral there seem to be much more resilient.

So that means they recover much easier from an increase of temperature, what we call marine heat waves.