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Certain types of algae can help corals withstand higher sea temperatures and prevent them from bleaching, scientists in Australia have found.

Coral reefs are vulnerable to climate change and without rapid genetic adaptation, they will not survive projected sea temperature increases over the next 50 years, experts say.

But in an article published in latest issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, the researchers said they may have found an answer to why some corals continue to thrive in warmer waters when others die.

The answer appears to lie in a heat-tolerant single-celled algae which lives in coral tissue, said Ray Berkelmans at the Australian Institute of Marine Science.

In the study, the researchers tagged and analysed some 480 coral colonies in the Keppel Islands of the Great Barrier Reef and found that some 94 percent of them contained a heat-sensitive strain of the algae, named C2.

But after a natural bleaching event in 2006, those corals that managed to survive were dominated instead by the heat-tolerant algae strain, called type D...