The idea of selective breeding comes from animal or plant husbandry where a captive population is the focus of selective "improvements" that help keep the flocks or crops growing in captive fields.
The crossover into captive corals is that there are a lot of corals in the hobby now are kept in aquaculture facilities and they can use these selective techniques ,(but not necessarily gene splicing) to find the best cultivars for captive reefs.
I get a lot of indigestion when I hear and see good intentioned people saying we are going to save wild reefs by manipulating them. Our manipulation often comes with unintended consequences and we tend to select for monocultures of cultivars that we find pleasant or deem "climax community" members. Natural reefs might be better off if we leave them to nature(?), imo. I gotta go to work now, Launch!!
Animals in the kingdom are facing challenges adapting to meet the world that is as changing faster than they can. Some will succeed (looking at you cockroaches and tardigrades), others won't.
Humans don't have this problem (yet) because we are not constrained by purpose-built bodies. We are generalists. Where some creatures have thick furs, deep fat reserves, hibernate months away, have strangely long fingers and tails, harvest energy directly from plant symbionts and the sun, have eyes that are disproportionately large for our face, or tiny specialized beaks to harvest nectar from very specific plants, we have our brains. Our brains give us an enormous evolutionary advantage outside of what our bodies can do to adapt.
Our brains give us the ability to innovate and "evolve" artificially. It is how we survive all over the world in some of the most extreme and challenging places. It is how we combat sickness and disease. It is how we rise above challenges that other creatures simply can't meet. Sure, there are many biological processes at play that help keep our species strong but, on the whole, it is our brain that gives us an advantage.
I would say that if we refuse to own
any part we may have had in causing the conditions that exist today, then the least we can do is act on self-interest by helping the rest of the kingdom survive with us.
Like all of the creatures in our tanks, every species serves a purpose. Think of bees. Think of reefs. Letting pillar species go extinct simply isn't a viable path for human survival on this planet (consider the declining balance in the
Sheldon Spectrum).
Why wouldn't we want to apply our ingenuity to solve the problems (man-made or exacerbated) of other species?
