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# In a bay too warm for the Barrier Reef, Australia's reef scientists go to school
- URL: https://www.earthtoseanews.com/palau-reef-school/
- Published: 2026-10-30T05:35:27.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-31T06:49:53.000Z
- Description: Palau's lagoons run hot enough to bleach the Great Barrier Reef, and the corals there are fine. In August the people who look after Australia's reef flew to Koror to see how, and came home with a model worth copying.
- Author: Nicole McMahon
- Tags: Conservation, Innovations, Global Good News, All stories

Picture a bay on the edge of Koror where the water runs warm enough to bleach corals on the Great Barrier Reef, and a line of snorkellers from Townsville and Brisbane floating over reef that is doing perfectly well. On 30 August, the eve of the Pacific Islands Forum leaders meeting in Palau, the Palau International Coral Reef Center took a delegation from the Australian Institute of Marine Science and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation to school. Prof Selina Stead, who runs AIMS, came with Dr Manuel Gonzalez Rivero and Amanda Brigdale; Theresa Fyffe, the Foundation's executive director, came with Dr Kalara McGregor. Their hosts, led by PICRC's chief executive Roxanne Siual Blesam, walked them through the research tanks at the Palau Aquarium, then took them out to the coral nursery at Ucheliungs Reef, built and run with Newcastle University's CORALASSIST team, where corals have been bred for heat tolerance for eight years. Then came the swim in Ngermid Bay, the naturally hot inlet where scientists go to watch corals living with heat, a visit to Jellyfish Lake with Gerda Ucharm of the Coral Reef Research Foundation, and a snorkel through Ulong Channel in the Ngerumekaol marine protected area. "Palau offers an exceptional living laboratory for understanding coral reef resilience," Blesam said.

![Aerial view of a green jungle covered island with a dark lake in the middle and blue sea and islets beyond](https://storage.ghost.io/c/0d/06/0d067be9-327f-4730-b9c3-5f0cdd2bc6fa/content/images/2026/10/palau-reef-school-inside.jpg)

Jellyfish Lake on Eil Malk, in Palau's Rock Islands. Photo: Lukas, Munich, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Why Palau? Its Rock Island lagoons run hotter than the outer reefs all year, and when the 1998 El Niño hit, about a quarter of the Rock Island corals bleached against nearly 60 per cent outside. Researchers from Woods Hole and Stanford later found that heat tolerant lineages of one common coral live in those warm lagoons, and that one of them has already spread to the cooler outer reefs, which is how a tough coral seeds its neighbours. Honesty matters here: a Stanford and PICRC study of 221 colonies across 37 reefs found the most heat resistant corals tended to grow more slowly, and the Newcastle team wrote in April that breeding alone will not keep pace with heatwaves without strong, repeated selection and cuts to emissions. Nobody on the boat called them super corals. What the Australians took home was a working model: a national research centre, a university breeding programme and local reef managers sharing one lagoon and one set of results. PICRC has already outplanted up to 12,000 bred juveniles at restoration sites around Koror and raised nearly 40,000 more from a spawning in April, and there is more Palauan good news on the same shore: in June, Conservation International Palau and the Palau Aquaculture Alliance opened the country's first community run giant clam hatchery, expected to supply about 25,000 young clams a year to local farmers so the reef's wild clams can be left alone.

### Sources and links

Our short take: from Island Times, "PICRC hosts international coral reef partners for Palau field visit" (28 September 2026, byline Island Times, no named reporter; the visit was 30 August), with the science from The Conversation (Liam Lachs, Adriana Humanes and James Guest, Newcastle University, 18 April 2026) and the studies below. Clam hatchery from Conservation International (Mary Kate McCoy, 19 August 2026).

- [Island Times, PICRC hosts international coral reef partners](https://islandtimes.org/picrc-hosts-international-coral-reef-partners-for-palau-field-visit) The delegation, the itinerary, the Blesam quote.
- [The Conversation, how accelerating evolution could help corals survive future heatwaves](https://theconversation.com/how-accelerating-evolution-could-help-corals-survive-future-heatwaves-new-study-280487) Eight years of breeding in Palau, what selection can and cannot do, no growth trade off found in the bred population.
- [Island Times, nearly 40,000 coral juveniles produced at PICRC](https://islandtimes.org/nearly-40000-coral-juveniles-produced-at-picrc-to-support-reef-restoration/) Up to 12,000 juveniles outplanted around Koror last year, nearly 40,000 from the April 2026 spawning, Coralassist Lab, SECORE, TNC and GBRF partners.
- [WHOI release, Palau's Rock Islands harbor heat resistant corals (Communications Biology, 2022)](https://www.whoi.edu/press-room/news-release/palaus-rock-islands-harbor-heat-resistant-corals) 25 per cent versus nearly 60 per cent bleaching in 1998, the tolerant lineage on the outer reefs.
- [eLife, Cornwell et al. 2021, heat tolerance and growth trade offs in Acropora hyacinthus in Palau](https://elifesciences.org/articles/64790) 221 colonies, 37 reefs, the slower growth line.
- [Conservation International, to save the reef this island is raising clams by hand](https://www.conservation.org/news/to-save-the-reef-this-island-is-raising-clams-by-hand) 25,000 juvenile clams a year, eight giant clam species in Palau, Pacific numbers down about 80 per cent in a century, Manaaki Fund.
- [Al Jazeera 101 East, 29 August 2026](https://aljazeera.com/video/101-east/2026/8/29/can-super-coral-and-cooling-the-sea-save-reefs-from-climate-change) Background only; we do not use "super coral".