“When coral bleaches during a heat wave and ejects its symbiotic algae, it usually means either a death sentence or a slow recovery over months or years. But scientists working separately at two labs an ocean apart have found a faster acting shortcut, one that has scientists hoping it could eventually help coral recover from bleaching and endure future heat waves.

The approach, reported in a 2 October paper in Environmental Microbiology Reports and one published today in Science Advances, is deceptively simple. By touching a piece of bleached coral to a healthy piece, a kind of algal transfusion can occur. Symbionts flow through a bridge of tissue and then rapidly reproduce, repopulating the bleached piece in as little as 4 weeks.”

From Science.