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Originally Posted by Punchanello
I have no idea if you are correct about coral evolution but the claim that every propagated coral is the same genetically to what it was taken from doesn't ring true.
Each coral consists of hundreds (thousands?) of polyps. Different types of polyp animals reproduce differently but many are sexual. It is possible that the frags of frags of great, great grandfather frags are generically different to the original due to reproduction after fragging.
Of course it's just as likely that the corals adapt. The textbooks say than two members of one species on the same reef can look like entirely different species due environmental factors like water turbidity, flow, competition etc.
Great topic
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Do a search on epigenetics and do some reading. In the short term (thousand of years) frags will be identical in their genetic makeup. Short term adaptation has to do with specific bits of genetic code being triggered by changes in the environment to change the way proteins are folded.
Over much larger periods of time, populations of fragments that become geographically separated can become genetically different because of replication errors, or even because bits of foreign genetic material have been incorporated. The latter is something that has been verified in bacterial populations.
Edit: here's a good link:
https://www.whatisepigenetics.com/what-is-epigenetics/