A team of international researchers have found coral with higher levels of fat are better at surviving adverse events.

Australia's coral reefs are expected to experience the worst coral bleaching event in decades this summer, due in rising water temperatures.

To test how different corals may respond to the damaging heatwaves, researchers including Verena Schoepf simulated annual bleaching on Caribbean corals in an experiment in Mexico.

"We bleached corals in a tank by exposing them to warmer than usual temperatures and then we put them back on the reef for a full year to let them recover," she said.

The researchers repeated the experiment the following summer and took sub-samples from the corals to test their short and long-term recovery.

The study found corals with higher levels of fat or other energy reserves were better at adapting and surviving in the longer term.

"It was really interesting because we found that of the three coral species that we studied, two of them were able to recover from the second repeated bleaching within one year, but the third coral species was unfortunately not able to recover all the variables that we looked at, within that one year," Dr Schoepf said.

"So that means that some corals will be able to cope with annual bleaching in the future but other corals may experience cumulative damage that will make them increasingly more vulnerable to bleaching."

Some corals fatter than others

Some species of coral contain more fat than others, researchers found. ( Supplied: UWA Oceans Institute )

Researchers said it appeared some corals naturally have higher levels of fat reserves than others, but that factors like food energy and coral spawning impact on their fat and energy reserves.

Scientists have predicted that the world's third mass coral bleaching will happen early next year and damage about 38 per cent of the world's coral reefs.

The first mass coral bleaching occurred in 1998, when about 16 per cent of the world's reefs were affected, including up to 10 per cent of the corals on Queensland's Great Barrier Reef.

Dr Schoepf, who is a research associate at the University of Western Australia's Oceans Institute, said the study's finding could help estimate which coral species will be able to adapt or acclimatise to conditions in the future.

She said the outcome of the experiment in Mexico could be applied to corals around the globe.

"We generally think that these responses that we've found in these Caribbean corals represent general responses of corals around the world," she said.

"That means we think that even in Western Australia or other areas of the world, some of the corals probably respond in a similar as the corals did in the Caribbean.

"So some species will be able to cope with annual bleaching and will be able to recover, but others will not be able to do that."

The study was carried out by scientists from The University of Western Australia's Oceans Institute, the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, Ohio State University's School of Earth Sciences and the University of Delaware's School of Marine Science and Policy.