assisted-gene-flow-utac

GenesisAeon Package 125 — real assisted gene flow / coral selective-breeding science. Deliberately has no UTAC/CREP/AFET bridge — see DISCLAIMER.md.

For a plain-language explanation of the same topic (German, no jargon, written for general audiences), see WHITEPAPER.md.

Where this package came from

Surfaced via a six-document multi-AI gap-analysis of the GenesisAeon climate/ecology portfolio (KlimaAktuell/, 2026-09-01), then independently deep-dive verified before building — alongside ocean-acidification-utac (P122), tropical-glacier-ecosystem-rle-utac (P123), marine-compound-stressors-utac (P124), and climate-landuse-biodiversity-nexus-utac (P126).

What's real here

• Baker et al. (2025, Science) — real regulatory reform enabled the world's first international coral exchange, specifically to bolster genetic diversity in declining Caribbean elkhorn coral (Acropora palmata) populations via proactive assisted gene flow (AGF), across the tropical western Atlantic.
• Lago et al. (2025, Proceedings of the Royal Society B) — a real, measured empirical anchor: selective breeding improved larval heat tolerance by up to 2.2-fold in two Acropora species at Ningaloo Reef, Western Australia.
• Fitzpatrick & Keller (2015, Ecology Letters) — the foundational genomic-offset methodology used to identify AGF source/target population pairs.

Deliberately not one-sided

The SAME Lago et al. 2025 study that reports the strong larval gain also reports that adult response to heat stress was variable — was_adult_response_variable() returns True, and is_juvenile_gain_confirmed_to_persist_to_reproductive_adulthood() returns False. Whether juvenile thermal-tolerance gains actually persist into reproductive adulthood is the real, currently open question in the field.

This package also deliberately corrects an initially-proposed honesty-check angle: outbreeding depression is not the main current concern for coral AGF specifically (corals have high existing genetic diversity and outcrossed population structure, unlike some other AGF contexts) — is_outbreeding_depression_the_main_current_concern_for_corals() returns False.

Quickstart

pip install assisted-gene-flow-utac

from assisted_gene_flow_utac import (
    larval_heat_tolerance_max_fold_improvement,
    was_adult_response_variable,
    is_juvenile_gain_confirmed_to_persist_to_reproductive_adulthood,
    is_outbreeding_depression_the_main_current_concern_for_corals,
)

print(larval_heat_tolerance_max_fold_improvement())  # 2.2
print(was_adult_response_variable())  # True -- the honesty check
print(is_juvenile_gain_confirmed_to_persist_to_reproductive_adulthood())  # False
print(is_outbreeding_depression_the_main_current_concern_for_corals())  # False

Development

pip install -e ".[dev]"
pre-commit install
ruff check src tests
mypy src
pytest

Citation

See CITATION.cff and .zenodo.json.