The research, published in Scientific Reports, focused on two dominant reef-building species in the Hawaiian Islands: Montipora capitata, commonly known as rice coral, which can form broad plates or branching colonies with a textured surface, and Porites compressa, or finger coral, which grows in clusters of slender, finger-like branches. Both species are ecologically important architects of Hawaiian reefs, and both are regularly exposed to summer warming events that can push reef ecosystems toward bleaching. The team chose a natural experiment built into the geography of Oʻahu itself. Reefs in Kāneʻohe Bay and Kailua Bay lie close to one another, yet they experience markedly different conditions. Kāneʻohe Bay is warmer and more sheltered, while Kailua Bay is cooler and more exposed to oceanic influence. That contrast allowed the researchers to ask a deceptively simple question: does a coral’s environmental history influence its ability to withstand heat stress, and is the answer the same for every species?

To find out, the scientists collected coral fragments of both species from reefs in Kāneʻohe Bay and Kailua Bay and brought them into the laboratory, where they were subjected to controlled thermal stress under standardized conditions. The key measurement technique was Pulse Amplitude Modulation fluorometry, a non-invasive optical method that tracks the photosynthetic efficiency of the algae living inside coral tissues. Because these symbiotic algae supply most of the energy corals need, a decline in photosynthetic efficiency is one of the earliest and most reliable indicators of physiological stress. By monitoring this response as temperatures rose, the researchers could quantify how much accumulated heat each coral could tolerate before its symbiosis began to fail, and then compare corals from the two environments across both species.

The results delivered both reassurance and surprise. Both species showed substantial thermal tolerance overall, with bleaching thresholds above the 4-degree heating week level that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration uses as an indicator of accumulated heat stress associated with the onset of significant coral bleaching. In other words, the Hawaiian corals tested in this study could absorb more heat stress than the conventional bleaching warning threshold before showing physiological breakdown. That baseline resilience is encouraging for reefs that face recurring summer heat events, and it suggests that these populations carry some capacity to endure warming that already exceeds what many reef managers once considered critical.

But the most striking finding concerned one species in one location. Porites compressa from Ulupaʻu, a site in the cooler, more exposed waters of the region, displayed significantly higher thermal tolerance than finger coral from the warmer, more sheltered Kāneʻohe Bay, and also higher tolerance than Montipora capitata from either location. This was not a case of one bay simply producing universally tougher corals. Within Kāneʻohe Bay, the two species had similar thermal thresholds, while at Ulupaʻu, P. compressa held a clear advantage. The pattern indicates that environmental conditions may shape thermal performance differently across species, rather than imposing a single hardening effect on everything living in a given habitat.

For Montipora capitata, thermal tolerance was remarkably similar between the two bays, suggesting that this species’ heat response was comparatively insensitive to the environmental differences between the sheltered and exposed sites. The researchers also observed that P. compressa bleached more slowly than M. capitata during the experiments, hinting that the two species may rely on distinct physiological strategies to cope with warming. Slow bleaching could reflect differences in symbiont types, tissue architecture, energy reserves, or the regulation of the stress response, although the study did not directly test the underlying mechanisms. What the data make clear is that species identity and environmental origin interact in ways that simple species-level generalizations cannot capture.

“Our findings highlight that coral resilience to ocean warming is not uniform, even among species living in close geographic proximity,” said Joshua D. Voss, senior author of the study and a research professor at FAU Harbor Branch. “As reefs around the world face more frequent and intense marine heat events, understanding which corals can tolerate that stress – and why – will be critical for protecting and restoring reefs. What works for one species or population may not work for another, so conservation strategies need to account for both the biological and the environmental diversity that exists within coral reef ecosystems.”

“By exposing corals from distinct environmental histories to a standardized thermal stress experiment, we were able to directly compare differences in thermal tolerance across species and populations,” said Allison M. Klein, first author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow at FAU Harbor Branch. “This approach allowed us to examine how prior environmental conditions may shape physiological responses to heat stress.” The standardized design matters because field observations alone cannot separate the effects of a coral’s history from the effects of the conditions it currently experiences. By bringing corals from both bays into the same laboratory environment and applying the same thermal challenge, the team could attribute differences in performance to the corals themselves rather than to their immediate surroundings.

The researchers suggest that Ulupaʻu’s cooler, more variable, and wave-exposed environment may provide repeated exposure to changing conditions that helps prepare some corals for heat stress, a form of environmental conditioning that has been observed in other reef systems, though this study did not directly test the mechanisms involved. The findings carry immediate implications for coral restoration, a field that increasingly seeks out naturally heat-tolerant colonies as broodstock for reef rebuilding. P. compressa from Ulupaʻu may represent one source of naturally heat-tolerant corals, but the researchers caution against assuming that the most heat-tolerant corals are always the best candidates for restoration. Maintaining genetic diversity and a range of traits could be essential for giving restored reefs the flexibility to respond to different environmental conditions over time, particularly as future oceans present combinations of stressors that no nursery can fully anticipate.

“This study identified more resilient corals from certain locations in these testing conditions, which provides important hope for the future,” said Voss. “The results demonstrate that both species identity and local environmental history can influence coral thermal performance and success in coral restoration efforts.” The research was conducted in collaboration with the Coral Resilience Lab at the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology, under the advisement of Crawford Drury, where coral collection and thermal performance assays were carried out. The project was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the U.S. Geological Survey, and an award from the Robertson Family Foundation to FAU Harbor Branch, with additional support provided through U.S. Geological Survey Cooperative Agreement No. G21AC10662-01. For reef managers watching successive marine heat waves reshape tropical coastlines, the message from Hawaiʻi is clear: resilience is written not only in a coral’s genes but also in the waters it has lived through, and protecting that diversity may be the surest hedge against a warming sea.

Subject of Research: Variation in thermal tolerance of Hawaiian reef corals across species and bay habitats

Article Title: FAU study finds Hawaiian corals respond differently to ocean heat

Article References: FAU study finds Hawaiian corals respond differently to ocean heat. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: coral reefs, coral bleaching, ocean warming, thermal tolerance, Hawaiʻi, Kāneʻohe Bay, Montipora capitata, Porites compressa, coral restoration, marine heat waves, Pulse Amplitude Modulation fluorometry, Scientific Reports

The central finding is a shift toward stronger storms near the islands, even as considerable uncertainty remains about whether the total number of tropical cyclones in the region will increase. Lead author Nicole Murray, who conducted the work as a postdoctoral researcher in the SOEST Department of Atmospheric Sciences and is now a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, framed the stakes in terms of the current hurricane season, noting that storms do not need to make a conventional landfall to disrupt communities, damage infrastructure and produce dangerous flooding and wind impacts. That distinction between landfall and impact is critical for Hawaiʻi, where a cyclone passing within a couple hundred miles can still drench mountainous terrain, generate life-threatening surf along exposed coasts and topple power lines across entire counties. The study therefore treats hazard not as a single number but as a multidimensional picture of frequency, intensity, track, duration, forward speed and landfall patterns.

To overcome the fundamental limitation of a sparse observational record, the team turned to the Columbia Tropical Cyclone Hazard computer model, developed by study co-authors Chia-Ying Lee and Suzana Camargo of Columbia University. The approach is a form of statistical-dynamical downscaling: the model ingests the atmospheric and oceanic conditions simulated by seven different global climate models and generates thousands of years’ worth of synthetic tropical cyclones consistent with those large-scale environments. Because the synthetic catalog contains vastly more storms than any observational dataset could, it allows researchers to estimate the probabilities of rare events, such as a strong hurricane passing directly over Oʻahu, with far better statistical confidence than the historical record alone would permit. The technique also makes it possible to compare present-day hazard with mid-century and late-century hazard under identical analytical assumptions, isolating the climate signal from the noise of natural variability.

The analysis focused on storms passing within 300 nautical miles of the Hawaiian Islands, a buffer that captures the majority of cyclones capable of producing significant impacts even without a direct landfall. For each synthetic storm, the researchers tracked its frequency, intensity, trajectory, duration, translational speed and landfall behavior under historical, mid-century and late-century climate conditions. The future simulations employ a high-emissions scenario, a deliberate choice designed to reveal how tropical cyclone activity responds to substantial warming rather than to bracket the full range of possible policy outcomes. Crucially, the team also separated storms occurring during El Niño years from those during La Niña years, creating parallel catalogs that allowed them to test whether the well-documented relationship between the El Niño-Southern Oscillation and Hawaiʻi’s hurricane hazard might itself be altered by climate change.

That ENSO relationship has long been one of the most useful tools in the seasonal forecasting toolkit for the central Pacific. Historically, El Niño conditions, characterized by warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures in the eastern and central equatorial Pacific, tend to favor stronger and more frequent tropical cyclones near Hawaiʻi compared with La Niña. The mechanisms are well understood: El Niño shifts the patterns of vertical wind shear, low-level vorticity and deep convection in ways that are generally more hospitable to cyclone development and intensification in the subtropical latitudes where the islands sit. Emergency managers and meteorologists have relied on this teleconnection to anticipate which seasons warrant heightened vigilance, making any erosion of that relationship a matter of practical consequence rather than academic curiosity.

The late-century simulations reveal exactly such an erosion. In the warmer future climate, the differences between El Niño and La Niña become less pronounced, particularly for tropical cyclone wind hazard around the islands, while the spatial pattern of storm tracks also changes. Under El Niño conditions in the late-century simulations, tropical cyclone tracks shift to the southwest of the Hawaiian Islands relative to the tracks seen under La Niña conditions, altering which communities and coastlines lie in the most exposed corridors. Co-author Christina Karamperidou, a professor of atmospheric sciences at SOEST, emphasized the broader implication: climate change may alter not only the overall tropical cyclone hazard facing Hawaiʻi, but also how climate patterns such as El Niño and La Niña relate to when and where that hazard is greatest. In other words, the diagnostic tools that forecasters and planners have used to translate Pacific-wide climate signals into local risk may need recalibration as the background climate warms.

The study’s framing of risk extends well beyond the question of how many hurricanes make landfall, a metric that has always understated the threat to the islands. Storms passing near Hawaiʻi can produce damaging winds, extreme rainfall, flooding, landslides, high surf and cascading secondary hazards that ripple through interconnected systems of power, water, transportation and communication. The 2026 hurricane season offered a vivid demonstration of this impact-without-landfall dynamic. Hurricane Lala passed just south of the islands in August and produced severe flooding and damaging winds across the state, while Hurricane Lowell approached from the south in September before passing west of the islands, generating damaging winds, heavy rainfall and flooding with particularly severe impacts on Kauaʻi. Neither storm followed the classic trajectory of a landfalling hurricane, yet both delivered consequences that communities felt directly and, in some cases, painfully.

Methodologically, the study exemplifies a growing trend in climate hazard research: rather than relying on global climate models to resolve tropical cyclones directly, which remains computationally challenging at the resolutions typically used for century-scale projections, researchers translate the large-scale climate projections into storm-level statistics through specialized hazard models. This allows the team to generate return periods, the average intervals between events of a given severity, for wind and other hazards at the level of individual counties, information that is directly usable in engineering design, insurance pricing and emergency planning. It also allows the researchers to distinguish robust signals, those that appear consistently across the seven underlying climate models, from areas of model disagreement, which is essential for honest communication of uncertainty.

That commitment to communicating both risk and uncertainty runs through the team’s account of the work. As Murray explained, the research is designed to determine which parts of the projections are robust, understand why models disagree, and communicate both the risks and the uncertainties accurately to those who need them. For emergency managers, infrastructure planners and community leaders in Hawaiʻi, the practical takeaway is twofold. First, the hazard profile of the islands appears to be shifting toward stronger storms, which raises the ceiling on worst-case scenarios even if average storm counts remain uncertain. Second, the traditional El Niño rule of thumb for anticipating active seasons may become a less reliable guide, meaning that preparedness planning cannot lean as heavily on seasonal climate outlooks in a warmer future.

The research also connects the abstract dynamics of the tropical Pacific, the shifting sea surface temperatures, wind shear patterns and convective envelopes that define ENSO, to the concrete hazards that reach the doorsteps of communities across the island chain. In a state where a single storm can isolate neighborhoods, contaminate water systems and strain emergency response capacity across multiple islands at once, translating global climate model output into county-level storm statistics is more than an academic exercise. The study, published under the title describing tropical cyclone activity in the vicinity of Hawaiʻi in present and future climates, offers a template for how rare-but-consequential hazards can be assessed in data-sparse regions, and it delivers a clear message: the islands’ hurricane future will not simply be a warmer version of the past, and the climate patterns that once signaled danger may speak in a different accent as the century progresses.

Subject of Research: Projected changes in tropical cyclone activity and its relationship with the El Niño-Southern Oscillation near Hawaiʻi under climate warming

Article Title: Warmer climate could reshape hurricane risk and its relationship with El Niño around Hawaiʻi

Article References: Warmer climate could reshape hurricane risk and its relationship with El Niño around Hawaiʻi. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: tropical cyclones, Hawaiʻi, El Niño, La Niña, climate change, hurricane risk, synthetic storm modeling, wind hazard, storm tracks, ENSO, Pacific climate, hazard projection

The research, led by Carmen Dobszewicz and Michele Barnes of the University of Sydney, together with colleagues at James Cook University, the University of Sydney’s School of Social and Political Sciences, the University of Manchester, and Dalhousie University, tackled a stubborn gap in the literature on nature-based solutions. Shark ecotourism is widely promoted as a way to align ocean economies with ocean protection, but most studies of its effects rely on surveys taken immediately after an experience, when enthusiasm is at its peak. Whether that enthusiasm translates into durable behavior change has been notoriously difficult to demonstrate.

To get around this problem, the team employed a quasi-experimental, longitudinal design. They surveyed shark tour participants at the time of their tour and again two years later, and they surveyed a comparison group drawn from the general public over the same period. This structure matters because simply measuring people before and after an experience cannot separate the effect of the experience itself from broader trends, such as rising environmental awareness across society or the tendency of already-committed conservationists to sign up for shark dives in the first place.

The analytical approach was correspondingly rigorous. The researchers used a Bayesian model designed for quasi-experimental repeated cross-sections, combined with inverse-probability weighting and attrition adjustment. In practical terms, these techniques allowed the team to correct for baseline differences between tour participants and non-participants, and to account for the fact that some respondents dropped out of the study between the first and second survey rounds. Without such corrections, the apparent effect of the tour could have been inflated by self-selection: people who choose to swim with sharks may already care more about the ocean than the average beachgoer.

The headline result is striking. Participation in the shark ecotourism program was associated with a 40 percent increase in the likelihood of engaging in shark conservation behavior two years after the tour, with a credible interval of 26 to 55 percent. In other words, even after statistically accounting for who signs up for such experiences and who stayed in the study, the tour itself emerged as a strong predictor of lasting pro-conservation action. The Bayesian framing also means the estimate expresses uncertainty transparently rather than resting on a single binary significance threshold.

Importantly, the study found that overall conservation engagement increased among all respondents during the study period, not just among tour participants. This is precisely why the comparison group was essential. If everyone in Hawaiʻi was becoming more conservation-minded over those two years, a naive before-and-after comparison of tour participants might have credited the tour for a societal trend. Instead, the sustained gap between participants and non-participants provides suggestive evidence that the experiential component of the tourism program produced an effect above and beyond the background rise in environmental engagement.

The researchers also looked closely at what kinds of conservation behavior people actually adopted. The most common forms of engagement were relatively low-barrier actions, such as sharing shark conservation content on social media and making donations to conservation causes. These findings are telling for anyone designing outreach campaigns. Ecotourism appears to convert awe into accessible forms of advocacy rather than immediately producing deep commitments like volunteering or policy engagement. That pattern suggests a pipeline: experiences create emotional connection, emotional connection fuels visible and shareable advocacy, and that advocacy may normalize pro-shark attitudes across wider social networks.

Just as valuable are the study’s insights into barriers. By identifying what prevents participants from moving from casual engagement to deeper involvement, the research offers actionable guidance for conservation organizations. If the main obstacles are practical, such as lack of information about where to direct support, then simple follow-up communication from tour operators could bridge the gap. If the obstacles are motivational or structural, different interventions would be needed. Either way, the study frames ecotourism not as a magic bullet but as one entry point in a longer pathway of engagement that operators, NGOs, and policymakers can deliberately extend.

The implications extend well beyond sharks. Marine ecotourism is a growing industry worldwide, from whale watching in Norway to manta ray dives in the Maldives, and it is frequently pitched to governments and investors as a nature-based solution that pays for itself. Demonstrating a measurable, persistent behavioral effect strengthens the economic and social case for these programs. It also raises the bar for the industry: if the conservation dividend depends on the quality of the experience, then operators have an incentive to invest in education, interpretation, and meaningful wildlife encounters rather than spectacle alone.

Caveats remain, and the authors are careful about them. The design is quasi-experimental rather than a randomized trial, so the findings are described as suggestive evidence of a durable effect rather than definitive proof of causation. The study examined a single program in a single location, and Hawaiʻi’s distinctive cultural relationship with sharks may not generalize everywhere. Still, the combination of longitudinal follow-up, a public comparison group, and sophisticated statistical adjustment represents a major methodological advance for a field long dominated by one-off exit surveys. If replicated across other programs and species, the result could reshape how conservation funders think about experiential nature tourism, treating it not merely as revenue or recreation but as a scalable, measurable investment in long-term environmental behavior.

Subject of Research: Long-term effects of shark ecotourism on conservation behavior in Hawaiʻi

Article Title: Nature-based experiences support lasting conservation behavior: longitudinal evidence from shark ecotourism in Hawaiʻi

Article References: Dobszewicz, C., Banchik, A., Pepin-Neff, C., Sutcliffe, S., MacNeil, M. A., & Barnes, M. L. (2026). Nature-based experiences support lasting conservation behavior: longitudinal evidence from shark ecotourism in Hawaiʻi. npj Ocean Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44183-026-00247-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44183-026-00247-5

Keywords: shark ecotourism, conservation behavior, Hawaiʻi, nature-based solutions, longitudinal study, Bayesian analysis, marine conservation, quasi-experimental design, pro-environmental behavior, ocean sustainability, npj Ocean Sustainability, wildlife tourism

Wolbachia is an intracellular bacterium that manipulates the reproduction of its insect hosts, most famously through a phenomenon known as cytoplasmic incompatibility. When males carrying a particular Wolbachia strain mate with females that either lack that strain or carry a different one, their fertilized eggs fail to hatch. This quirk of reproductive biology has become the foundation of several mosquito control approaches, including the incompatible insect technique, in which large numbers of Wolbachia-carrying male mosquitoes are released to mate with wild females and crash the population. Wolbachia also has pathogen-blocking properties, meaning it can interfere with the ability of mosquitoes to transmit viruses such as dengue, which underlies replacement strategies that spread virus-resistant Wolbachia strains through wild populations.

Unlike Aedes aegypti, the yellow fever mosquito, which does not naturally harbor Wolbachia, Aedes albopictus carries two native strains of the bacterium, designated wAlbA and wAlbB. In most populations studied elsewhere, individuals are superinfected, meaning they carry both strains simultaneously. This natural dual infection matters enormously for control programs because the outcome of any cytoplasmic incompatibility-based intervention depends on which strains are already circulating in the target population. If wild mosquitoes carry unexpected combinations of strains, or if the density of the bacteria in their tissues varies in unanticipated ways, releases of incompatible males may fail to suppress reproduction as intended.

Despite the global importance of these questions, the infection status of Hawaiian Aedes albopictus had remained poorly characterized. A research team led by Sangwoo Seok and senior authors Eric P. Caragata and Yoosook Lee of the Florida Medical Entomology Laboratory at the University of Florida, working with collaborators from state and federal agencies in Hawaiʻi and the University of California, set out to fill this gap. Using quantitative PCR, a laboratory technique that can detect and precisely quantify the amount of bacterial DNA in an individual mosquito, the team characterized Wolbachia infections in 399 specimens collected from two islands: Oʻahu and the Island of Hawaiʻi.

The headline finding was that Wolbachia is nearly universal in these populations: 98.5 percent of the mosquitoes tested were infected. However, the composition of those infections was strikingly lopsided. Every infected specimen carried wAlbB, but only 28.6 percent were superinfected with wAlbA. In other words, the vast majority of Hawaiian Aedes albopictus carry only a single Wolbachia strain, a pattern that departs from the double infection typically assumed for this species. This lower-than-expected prevalence of wAlbA establishes an important baseline for any future biocontrol effort in the region, because it means the resident bacterial landscape is not uniform across individuals.

The study also revealed that infection dynamics are strongly shaped by the sex of the mosquito. Females were significantly more likely than males to harbor wAlbA, and bacterial density, the quantity of Wolbachia per individual, was significantly higher in females for both strains. This sex bias has practical implications because only female mosquitoes bite and transmit viruses, and because cytoplasmic incompatibility manifests through the interaction between infected males and uninfected or differently infected females. A sex-skewed distribution of native strains therefore changes the arithmetic of any release program designed around mating incompatibility.

Environmental factors also left their mark on the bacterial communities. The prevalence of wAlbA was associated with the island of collection and with precipitation at the collection site, suggesting that local climate and geography influence which mosquitoes carry the second strain. By contrast, the prevalence of wAlbB did not vary significantly with sex, island, temperature, or precipitation, indicating that the two native strains respond to different ecological pressures. Temperature is known from laboratory studies to affect Wolbachia density, and rainfall shapes breeding habitat availability, so these field associations provide a real-world counterpart to experimental work on how environmental conditions modulate symbiont infections.

Perhaps the most technically intriguing results concern the interactions between the two strains when they coexist in the same mosquito. In superinfected individuals, wAlbB consistently exhibited higher density than wAlbA, and wAlbB density was higher in superinfected mosquitoes than in those carrying wAlbB alone. Both strains reached higher densities in females than in males. In females, the densities of the two strains were positively correlated, meaning mosquitoes with more wAlbA also tended to have more wAlbB, whereas no such correlation existed in males. These sex-specific microbe-microbe dynamics suggest that the two symbionts do not simply compete for host resources; their relationship differs fundamentally between the sexes, possibly reflecting differences in tissue tropism, vertical transmission requirements, or host physiology.

For the design of Wolbachia-based control in Hawaiʻi, these findings carry a clear warning. Population suppression projects that rely on cytoplasmic incompatibility depend on predictable mating outcomes between released and wild mosquitoes. If a substantial fraction of wild females carry only wAlbB while released males carry both strains or a different combination, the strength of incompatibility may vary across the population, diluting the effectiveness of releases. Similarly, the sex and site-specific variation in bacterial density could influence how faithfully the released strains are transmitted to the next generation. The authors emphasize that future projects in the region must account for these varying patterns of infection before strategies are developed and implemented, rather than assuming a uniform superinfection across the archipelago.

The study, funded in part by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Science to Achieve Results program, the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, and the National Institutes of Health, and conducted with permits from Hawaiʻi’s national parks, demonstrates the value of baseline surveillance before intervention. As Hawaiʻi confronts recurring outbreaks of dengue and the expanding range of mosquito vectors in a warming climate, understanding the invisible bacterial passengers of its mosquitoes has become a practical necessity. The nearly universal presence of wAlbB, the patchy distribution of wAlbA, and the complex density relationships between the strains together form a map of the biological terrain on which any future Wolbachia campaign will be fought, and this research provides the first careful survey of that terrain across the Hawaiian Islands.

Subject of Research: Native Wolbachia infection prevalence and density in Hawaiian Aedes albopictus mosquito populations

Article Title: Native Wolbachia infection dynamics across Aedes albopictus (Diptera: Culicidae) populations in Hawaiʻi

Article References: Seok, S., Salama, L., Vorsino, A. E., Leong, M. K. H., Haines, W. P., Jacobsen, C. M., Akbari, O. S., Caragata, E. P., & Lee, Y. (2026). Native Wolbachia infection dynamics across Aedes albopictus (Diptera: Culicidae) populations in Hawaiʻi. Parasites & Vectors. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13071-026-07695-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s13071-026-07695-5

Keywords: Wolbachia, Aedes albopictus, Hawaiʻi, cytoplasmic incompatibility, mosquito control, dengue, Zika, chikungunya, endosymbiont, quantitative PCR, invasive species, vector biology