Fertile Hybrids Could Aid Coral Adaptation.

Fertile hybrids can enhance the adaptive capacity and resilience of species under stress by increasing genetic diversity within populations, masking the effects of deleterious recessive alleles, and facilitating the introgression of beneficial genetic variants into parental species. However, many hybrids are infertile. We compared the fertility of aquarium-reared F1 hybrid and purebred corals of the species and and examined the viability of early life stages of second-generation (F2) hybrid and back-crossed planula larvae and recruits.