coral reef tagged posts

The vast, underexplored seas covering much of the planet could be the key to saving what remains of a more familiar undersea feature, a new study finds. The “living rock” that thrives in tropical shallows around the world, coral supports a quarter of all marine life. Yet around 20 percent of the world’s coral is already gone, and most of the rest is severely threatened by climate breakdown, overfishing and pollution.

Now, a deep dive into history on the “high seas” — the waters that lie beyond maritime borders — is providing a ray of hope for the world’s reefs: Combing through historical data and more than half a million records on the distribution of corals worldwide, researchers identified more than 116 coral reefs flourishing throughout the high seas.

Conser...

Transplanting coral is difficult work. “You only have 20 minutes to dive down 30 metres and transplant the coral to the correct part of the rock, where hopefully it will live for hundreds of years,” explains Serço Ekşiyan, one of a small group of volunteers who have taken on the huge task of saving the corals around the Princes’ Islands (Adalar), a picturesque archipelago in the Marmara Sea about a 40-minute boat ride from Istanbul.

The Marmara Sea, made up of water from the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, is home to 24 Alcyonacea coral species whose existence is threatened by the onslaught of nearby property development. Among those disappearing are sea whips, sea pens, sea fans and some types of red and yellow soft corals.

“Most of these corals you would never find outsid...

Scientists reached a major breakthrough recently in their efforts to restore coral off the coast of the Florida Keys. Researchers in South Florida have figured out a way to get coral to spawn more rapidly, which is notable because much of the coral in the Florida Reef Tract is dying. Over the last 40 years, nearly 90% of the live corals that once covered those reefs have died off.

Scientists are using a technique called microfragmentation or reskinning to get coral to reproduce, says Sarah Fangman, superintendent of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, which is leading a 15-year, $100 million project to restore the coral.

“The Florida Reef Tract is the only barrier reef system that we have in the United States. The only one,” Fangman says...

Off the east coast of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) coral freshly removed from a reef is cut into pieces and replanted by a group of divers in the waters below. The divers, from the Fujairah Adventure Centre, are building artificial reefs they hope will spur a resurgence in sea life degraded over the years by climate change and development.

The small team and other volunteers have planted more than 9,000 corals over about 600 square metres in the past year. Within five years, they hope to cover 300,000 square metres with 1.5 million corals.

“It’s a fertile environment for coral reefs, and this diversity has started spreading and has helped bring back sea life,” diver Saeed al-Maamari told Reuters.

Reefs, developing over thousands of years, are crucial to the survival of many ma...

As oceans warm due to climate change, some coral reefs have been devastated in recent years by bleaching events that cause them to die and damage the biodiversity that depends on them. Multiple studies are underway to understand more about these bleaching events and if corals can bounce back. While bleaching is associated with the stark white skeletal remains of corals after they have lost their live tissue, an opposite effect can also take place when such an event occurs.

It’s known as colorful bleaching, where corals seem to amp up their pigments and provide brilliant displays of neon color.

Colorful bleaching has been observed since 2010 in coral reefs aroundthe globe, but the mechanism and reasoning behind it hasn’t been understood...

A new study from The University of Western Australia has revealed clear evidence highlighting the importance of fish biodiversity to the health of tropical coral reef ecosystems. This is the case for reefs that are pristine and also those that have been affected by stresses, such as bleaching events caused by warming oceans.

However, the study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, showed that even though strong relationships between diversity and a healthy ecosystem persist, human-driven pressures of warming oceans and invasive species still diminish ecosystems in various ways.

A team of researchers from UWA and Lancaster University in the United Kingdom conducted surveys on coral reefs around 10 islands in the remote Chagos Archipelago – the largest uninhabited and unfished coral re...

For the third time in 5 years, an underwater heat wave has turned vast stretches of coral on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef ghostly white, a desperate survival strategy that is often a prelude to coral death. Now, scientists there have taken a small step toward helping coral survive in a warmer world. For the first time, researchers have grown algae in a lab that can reduce coral bleaching, as it’s known. The results are a notable advance in the growing field of “assisted evolution,” in which scientists are working to alter coral genetics to help them endure hotter water.

It’s a “groundbreaking” study, says Steve Palumbi, an evolutionary biologist at Stanford University who was not involved with the work...

New research on the Great Barrier Reef associates severe coral loss with substantial increases in the size of large, long-living herbivorous fish. However, the ecosystem is also left vulnerable to crashing.

In research published in the British Ecological Society journal Functional Ecology, an international team of researchers compared reef surveys from 2003-2004 and 2018. They found severe coral loss—up to 83% in some areas—was associated with increases in fish biomass, productivity and consumed biomass. This means the reef currently has more energy stored in the form of fish weight, is able produce more fish weight, and these fish are being consumed by predators.

Lead author Renato Morais, a PhD candidate from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook Universit...

Coral reefs are so fundamentally damaged by climate change that decades of research on how to protect them may not even still be applicable, scientists say.  In a study of coral over 20 years, UK scientists found that a warming climate undoes decades of knowledge on coral in protected areas, known as marine reserves.  These delicate and vital ecosystems have been used as a guide to rejuvenate biodiversity in other disrupted regions.

However, tropical coral reef marine reserves can offer little defence in the face of climate change impacts, meaning conservationists may have to ‘rethink their role’.

The team is calling for urgent reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions and poor land practices that leak pollutants into coastal waters, to protect coral reefs.

‘Climate change is so f...