CORAL CROSSBREEDING

[Willis 78]

Hello reef2reefer's I'm a student with a concern on if we can crossbreed climate resilliant corals and fastly growing corals to make a big super coral??? if so what kinds would we mix.

 

[Mr. Mojo Rising]

People are already doing this regularly with montipora's, its called 'grafting', as in grafting 2 corals together. You can google images of grafted monti's, and can likely buy some locally, they are pretty common.

I've seen a few other grafted digitata's.

Somewhere on this forum is a really neat thread of someone that grafted 2 scolies together, that was cool.

So people are experimenting with this already, I think we'll see much more grafted corals in the future.

 

[livinlifeinBKK]

Grafting corals is far different than crossbreeding if you mean having different species breed together with the goal of producing a bleach resistant coral.

Ill point out a few other things:

One primary goal of breeding "super corals" is preventing extinction of existing coral species, not creating new species.

This isn't done by breeding distinct species together, but primarily by methods such as those involved in the "coral probiotics hypothesis" and through aiding the natural processes involved in genetics being passed from heat resistant individuals of a species to offspring.

 

[jez]

There is work being done on this in the UK through the Horniman Project Coral and other academic organisations. They are looking at cross-breeding the same species and then thermal stressing the offspring to see which corals receive the traits. I presume the end game is to consider the viability of introducing hybrid versions of corals into areas where the climate has changed. Although I am sure there are huge pro's and cons to that.