Professor Olivier Thomas

So this is something we're going to investigate now.

And what we believe, and that's certainly why this study is so relevant, is that actually the microbiota is definitely involved into this performance, I would say, of some coral species and areas to be more resilient than others.

So, yes, we have now described in this paper the genetic diversity of the microbiome of different species of corals.

And now we're going to study what there is a huge variation about the diversity of microbiome indeed among the same species of coral.

Right.

So you will have a core of microbiota that is more or less common across the Pacific.

But then you would have maybe more than 50% of the microbiome that's totally dependent on the environment, right?

So on the islands where you are, the temperature, the different composition of the water, etc.

And in some particular places, this microbiota is certainly much more important to prepare the corals to be resilient to marine heat waves.

And that's what we're going to study in the next couple of months, is what is this microbiota that makes these corals more resilient than others indeed?

Yeah, so we are going really to focus on the coral triangle in a couple of months.

So we'll start with Papua New Guinea and then we're going to Malaysia, the Philippines and all these nice places.

The reason for that is that we really observed clearly that the resilience of these corals, the same species of coral that you can find anywhere else, the resilience is much higher, but significantly higher.

They recover much easier.

about a heat wave, and that's unique, let's say, in the whole coral reefs that we have visited.

So we want to understand what makes this so unique in terms of resilience, and certainly we'll again study in depth the microbiome of these corals that are more resilient.

So that region is called the coral triangle.

This is really where you have the most diversity of coral species in the planet underwater.

That's just the start, actually.

The idea is really to give some evidence, obviously, that there are some parts of the planet where there is more resilience in terms in front of climate change.