Scientists turn to seaweed biobanking to save Australia's warming Great Southern Reef

SYDNEY, June 29 (Xinhua) -- Scientists are developing "seaweed biobanks" to help safeguard Australia's vast Great Southern Reef, as marine heatwaves drive widespread losses in the country's underwater seaweed forests.

Seaweed biobanks use cryopreservation -- storing reproductive material at ultra-low temperatures -- to preserve genetic diversity that could help future restoration and adaptation in a warming ocean, according to an article published on The Conversation website on Monday.

The Great Southern Reef, built by seaweed rather than coral, stretches more than 8,000 km around southern Australia and supports more than 1,500 seaweed species as well as fisheries worth billions of dollars annually, the article said.

"But these remarkable cold-water forests face a worsening threat. The ocean is getting steadily warmer, pushing seaweed species outside their survival zone," with heatwaves already driving major declines in seaweed forests nationwide, wrote Catalina A. Musrri, postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Sydney, and Georgina Wood from Flinders University.

The authors warn that when local populations disappear, unique genes are lost with them, citing a 2011 extreme marine heatwave in the state of Western Australia, which reduced genetic diversity in two common seaweed species by an estimated 30 to 65 percent.

Early cryopreservation trials on crayweed, a key Australian seaweed, show promise, with frozen sperm surviving thawing, though germlings (baby seaweed) did not, said the researchers, hoping to adapt the method for a broader range of Australian seaweed species.

The researchers described cryobanking as "an insurance policy for biodiversity" and said preserving the remaining genetic diversity of Australia's seaweed forests could prove critical to the survival of the Great Southern Reef by "buying valuable time" and keeping options open for future conservation methods. Enditem