Egypt’s Climate-Resilient ‘Super Corals’ Are Starting to Feel the Heat
NEWS | 16 October 2026
As coral reefs have undergone massive bleaching events across the globe, the corals of Egypt’s Red Sea have offered some hope. They’ve been unusually resilient to rising water temperatures, and if the oceans continue getting hotter, some scientists even predict that Egypt’s northern reefs could become the world’s last-remaining corals. That’s what Mahmoud Hanafy, a professor of marine biology at Suez Canal University and consultant for the Hurghada Environmental Protection and Conservation Association (HEPCA), has previously predicted. But in the summers of 2023 and 2024, heat waves strained Red Sea coral ecosystems. A HEPCA survey led by Hanafy found bleaching throughout the Red Sea corals in 2024. In the northern areas, less than a tenth of coral colonies surveyed were affected, but further south, bleaching took out half the corals. Scientists are racing to piece together what these events mean for reefs long described as “super coral” for their unparalleled hardiness. But now the question is not just how much heat they can withstand, but what has protected them until recently—and whether that protection will hold. In overly warm waters, the algae nestled amongst the corals’ polyps begin to produce toxic substances. As a defense mechanism, the corals eject the algae. This is what is referred to as coral bleaching, and because these microscopic organisms are corals’ primary food source, bleaching events leave corals to starve. That’s among other negative impacts hot seas may be having on corals, which is an issue not just for the corals, but all the other life among the reefs. According to the United Nations Environment Program, reefs cover less than 1 percent of the seafloor yet support at least 25 percent of marine species—some that are only just now being discovered. For many years, northern Red Sea reefs remained quite stable as temperatures rose, while other coral ecosystems suffered bleaching. Eslam Osman, a marine ecologist at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), points to the Egyptian corals’ evolutionary history as a likely explanation for their heat tolerance. Corals are believed to have spread into the Red Sea through the Bab al-Mandab Straight, which lies at the southern point of the sea between modern-day Djibouti and Yemen. Crossing through these especially warm waters acted as a natural filter, Osman posits. Heat-tolerant species and genotypes survived, and their offspring spread northwards into cooler waters.
Author: Eli Siegel-Bernstein.
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