Caribbean Coral Suffers Record Death

A sobering story...I wonder how the photoplankton are faring...you
know, the ones that produce the oxygen that you and I breathe?

Remember the 2005 hurricane season and the warm water temperatures?

Wanna guess what the 2006 season will be like?

TMT


Caribbean Coral Suffers Record Death By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science
Writer
Thu Mar 30

A one-two punch of bleaching from record hot water followed by disease
has killed ancient and delicate coral in the biggest loss of reefs
scientists have ever seen in Caribbean waters.

Researchers from around the globe are scrambling to figure out the
extent of the loss. Early conservative estimates from Puerto Rico and
the U.S. Virgin Islands find that about one-third of the coral in
official monitoring sites has recently died.

"It's an unprecedented die-off," said National Park Service fisheries
biologist Jeff Miller, who last week checked 40 stations in the Virgin
Islands. "The mortality that we're seeing now is of the extremely
slow-growing reef-building corals. These are corals that are the
foundation of the reef ... We're talking colonies that were here when
Columbus came by have died in the past three to four months."

Some of the devastated coral can never be replaced because it only
grows the width of one dime a year, Miller said.

Coral reefs are the basis for a multibillion-dollar tourism and
commercial fishing economy in the Caribbean. Key fish species use coral
as habitat and feeding grounds. Reefs limit the damage from hurricanes
and tsunamis. More recently they are being touted as possible sources
for new medicines.

If coral reefs die "you lose the goose with golden eggs" that are key
parts of small island economies, said Edwin Hernandez-Delgado, a
University of Puerto Rico biology researcher.

On Sunday, Hernandez-Delgado found a colony of 800-year-old star coral
- more than 13 feet high - that had just died in the waters off
Puerto Rico.

"We did lose entire colonies," he said. "This is something we have
never seen before."

On Wednesday, Tyler Smith, coordinator of the U.S. Virgin Islands Coral
Reef Monitoring program, dived at a popular spot for tourists in St.
Thomas and saw an old chunk of brain coral, about 3 feet in diameter,
that was at least 90 percent dead from the disease called "white
plague."

"We haven't seen an event of this magnitude in the Caribbean before,"
said Mark Eakin, coordinator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration's Coral Reef Watch.

The Caribbean is actually better off than areas of the Indian and
Pacific ocean where mortality rates - mostly from warming waters -
have been in the 90 percent range in past years, said Tom Goreau of the
Global Coral Reef Alliance. Goreau called what's happening worldwide
"an underwater holocaust."

And with global warming, scientists are pessimistic about the future of
coral reefs.

"The prognosis is not good," said biochemistry professor M. James
Crabbe of the University of Luton near London. In early April, he will
investigate coral reef mortality in Jamaica. "If you want to see a
coral reef, go now, because they just won't survive in their current
state."

For the Caribbean, it all started with hot sea temperatures, first in
Panama in the spring and early summer, and it got worse from there.

New NOAA sea surface temperature figures show the sustained heating in
the Caribbean last summer and fall was by far the worst in 21 years of
satellite monitoring, Eakin said.

"The 2005 event is bigger than all the previous 20 years combined," he
said.

What happened in the Caribbean would be the equivalent of every city in
the United States recording a record high temperature at the same time,
Eakin said. And it remained hot for weeks, even months, stressing the
coral.

The heat causes the symbiotic algae that provides food for the coral to
die and turn white. That puts the coral in critical condition. If coral
remains bleached for more than a week, the chance of death soars,
according to NOAA scientists.

In the past, only some coral species would bleach during hot water
spells and the problem would occur only at certain depths. But in 2005,
bleaching struck far more of the region at all depths and in most
species.

A February NOAA report calculates 96 percent of lettuce coral, 93
percent of the star coral and nearly 61 percent of the iconic brain
coral in St. Croix had bleached. Much of the coral had started to
recover from the bleaching last fall, but then the weakened colonies
were struck by disease, finishing them off.

Eakin, who oversees the temperature study of the warmer water, said
it's hard to point to global warming for just one season's high
temperatures, but other scientists are convinced.

"This is probably a harbinger of things to come," said John Rollino,
the chief scientist for the Bahamian Reef Survey. "The coral bleaching
is probably more a symptom of disease - the widespread global
environmental degradation - that's going on."

Crabbe said evidence of global warming is overwhelming.

"The big problem for coral is the question of whether they can adapt
sufficiently quickly to cope with climate change," Crabbe said. "I
think the evidence we have at the moment is: No, they can't.

"It'll not be the same ecosystem," he said. "The fish will go away. The
smaller predators will go away. The invertebrates will go away."

.

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