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The crown of thorns starfish which has devastated large areas of the Great Barrier Reef has infested areas around the Montebello Islands off the Pilbara coast.

Surveys going back to the mid-1970s have shown the existence of the marine invertebrates in the reefs off the Pilbara coastline. However, the numbers being currently observed are much higher than seen in previous years.

Dr John Keesing is the Senior Principal Research Scientist with the CSIRO in Perth and has recorded 185 animals per hectare.

“Above about 10 crown of thorns starfish per hectare will cause noticeable damage on coral reefs.” he told ABC Mid West and Wheatbelt.

Though the numbers are high in Western Australia, they are certainly not as high as those seen on the Great Barrier Reef.

For Dr Keesing, who began studying the...

Scuba 6 Eco Diving plans to become the most respected and sought-after dive shop in Panama offering not only great dives and certifications but also evolving its shop to find new and innovative ways to enhance your experience.

Our aim is to successfully cater to the discerning diver looking for high quality service with justifiable prices and help you make the most of your vacation time spent with us. Unique and great dive experiences as well as students trained to the highest possible standards is our key to developing personalized connections that inspire customers to come back for more.

Our vision is to offer extended bottom time, share our love and knowledge of the marine environment and help you get more from your time spent underwater...

In April 2013, poaching vessel F/V Min Long Yu destroyed 3,902 square meters of seabed in the Tubbataha Reefs. Ongoing reclamation in a half-dozen reefs has now obliterated 1.2 million square meters—310 times the damage wrought on Tubbataha.

Mechanical dredgers that cut, crush and compact corals have also stirred up sediments to smother adjoining reefs. This threatens the biological productivity of the West Philippine Sea—a spawning and feeding site for endangered sea turtles and high-value fish like tuna.

“A single square kilometer of healthy coral reef can generate 40 metric tonnes of seafood yearly. We have theoretically lost the ability to produce 48 metric tonnes year on year,” notes WWF-Philippines President and CEO Joel Palma...

Vakkaru Island in the Maldives is little more than a spit of sand rising above the ocean, topped with a bit of vegetation and surrounded by coral reefs. Vakkaru is a reef island, which means that it’s made up of sediment produced on those reefs. There are around 1,200 islands like it in the Maldives, clustered in groups along the region’s numerous atolls. But where does the sediment come from? Mostly fish, a new study finds.

Specifically, fish feces.

Many species of parrotfish dine on coral polyps. But instead of delicately pulling the polyp out from its hard coral exterior (like how you might eat a snail), the fish just chomp on the stony reef, ingesting polyp and hard coral together. Inside the parrotfish, the polyp gets digested and the stony coral excreted...

Senator Loren Legarda called for the establishment of a comprehensive map of coral resources nationwide to help leaders and lawmakers arrive at a policy for food security in the Philippines.

An updated comprehensive mapping of the country’s coral reef resources should be done by the departments of agriculture; environment and natural resources; and science and technology, and the Marine Science Institute of the University of the Philippines, said Legarda, chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Natural Resources. She did not mention the project cost.

“We need coordinated efforts towards the rehabilitation and protection of our reefs, as well as our mangrove forests, seagrass beds, and countless other ecosystems,” Legarda said, adding the maps should indicate the state of health ...

Scientists have long recorded how human impacts can simplify ecosystems through wiping out some species or favoring others. Impacts can go so far as to push ecosystems into previous successional states, such as primary forests chopped down to be replaced by early successional forests, favoring light-loving plants.

But biophysical decoupling goes one step further: It alters the ecological community so far that it becomes both disconnected from the rules followed in pristine ecosystems leading to unpredictability. For example, if a warmer ecosystem predicts a higher abundance of a certain species, a decoupled ecosystem will no longer see the same abundance—despite the same physical components.

Essentially it becomes a “novel ecosystem”—a relatively new idea in ecology—where human pressures...

The threat of major coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef looks to be receding with the onset of stormier weather including the formation of the first tropical cyclone of the season likely to cross the coast. Sea temperatures are warmer than average from about Townsville all the way down the coast to the NSW-Victorian border, creating one of the components for coral stress.

Unusually calm conditions over much of the Great Barrier Reef have also contributed to setting up possible bleaching events as clearer water lets more sunlight reach the sea floor. During bleaching events, corals expel the algae that provide as much as 90 per cent of the energy they need to grow and reproduce, killing some of them.

“Heat makes light toxic,” Andrew Baird, a coral reef ecologist at James Cook Univers...

When it comes to abundance of species, nowhere else comes close to the waters between the Pacific and Indian oceans. Nestled between the Pacific and Indian oceans is a marine region deemed to be the richest biologically, in the world. Home to three-quarters of the world’s coral species and over a third of its coral reef fish species, it is the underwater equivalent of the Amazon jungle.

It is half the size of the United States and bordered by six countries – Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and East Timor – to form a triangular shape that gives it the name, Coral Triangle.

A new book, The Coral Triangle, by Ken Kassem and Eric Madeja, captures the rich life found above and beneath the water...

Scientists warn extreme sea temperatures could cause a “historic” coral reef die-off around the world over the coming months, following a massive coral bleaching already underway in the North Pacific. Experts said the coral die-off could be the worst in nearly two decades. Reports of severe bleaching have been accumulating in the inbox of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Coral Reef Watch programme since July. A huge swathe of the Pacific has already been affected, including the Northern Marianas Islands, Guam, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, Hawaii, Kiribati and Florida. Some areas have recorded serious bleaching for the first time.

“On a global scale it’s a major bleaching event...