Newsroom

Palo Alto, Calif. — With support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the National Science Foundation, Dr. John Pringle and his team at Stanford have been working to understand how corals resist stress. To develop hypotheses about coral stress, Dr. Pringle’s group is first studying sea anemones, which are evolutionary cousins of corals. By developing a sea anemone experimental model system, his team is attempting to identify early, reliable signals of stress that result from changing environmental conditions. These results will then be tested with corals at a field site in American Samoa to see how well the scientists can predict coral resilience in a natural environment. Watch the video to learn more.