Tides & Islands -- Day 3 -- Tough Corals of the Kimberley

So over the last couple of decades climate change has really loomed as an imminent problem for coral reefs corals in particular are really quite suspectible to the change in climate. All over the world there's been mass coral bleaching events, and it's for this reason that corals of the Kimberley are particularly fascinating. As you can see at low tide they are exposed three or four metres out of the water and normally at high tide the water would be right above us. Yet the corals of the Kimberley appear to be very, very hardy and very tolerant of these extreme conditions so very high sea surface temperatures very high daily temperatures and very high light exposures so it's clear that there's some special biological adaptations that have occurred in the corals of the Kimberley that helps them to survive these extreme conditions.

So I'm particularly interested investigating these biological adaptations. And right here today we've found something that gives us a little bit of a hint into one of these possible adaptations. See here is a porites micro-atoll so ordinarily this coral will be this yellow colour, but as you see on the here where the coral is exposed it is pink. So what I'm proposing this is this is an expression of a fluorescent protein have a photo-protective role.

So it's obviously able to reflect the light better and it helps the exposed part of the colony survive these extreme conditions. So presently nothing is known about the pigments of corals of the Kimberley but in other locations the pigments have proven very, very interesting in that they're used in biomedical imaging and other types of cell biology research. Also what corals have is a sunscreen a natural sunscreen in their mucus so combined with the fluorescent pigments and proteins and the sunscreen properties, corals really do seem to have worked out how to cope with these conditions up here in the Kimberley..