Coral Reefs Face Extinction
By BRYAN WALSH Friday, Jul. 11, 2008
Fish swim near coral reefs.
Hassan Ammar / AFP / Getty
You don't have to be a marine biologist to understand the importance of corals — just ask
any diver. The tiny underwater creatures are the architects of the beautiful, electric-colored coral
reefs that lie in shallow tropical waters around the world. Divers swarm to them not merely for
their intrinsic beauty, but because the reefs play host to a wealth of biodiversity unlike anywhere
else in the underwater world. Coral reefs are home to more than 25% of total marine species.
Take out the corals, and there are no reefs — remove the reefs, and entire ecosystems collapse
Unfortunately, that's exactly what appears to be happening around the world. According to a
comprehensive survey by the Global Marine Species Assessment (GMSA) published Thursday in
Science, one-third of the more than 700 species of reef-building corals are threatened with
extinction. Compare that to a decade ago, when only 2% of corals were endangered. Using
criteria established by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature — a group that
publishes an annual Red List of threatened animals — that makes corals the most endangered
species on the Earth. The assessment's results, presented at the annual International Coral Reef
Symposium in Fort Lauderdale, come just a week after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) announced that more than half of the coral reef ecosystems in U.S.
territory are in fair or poor condition. "We're losing the coral in the coral reef," said William
Platt, a coral reef expert with NOAA.
The causes of the coral's demise are manifold, but they all come back to one culprit: us.
Overfishing — especially the kind that uses dynamite or poison to kill whole schools of fish —
destroys the coral directly, while polluted runoff from agriculture simply chokes them.
Development in booming coastal economies from the Caribbean to Southeast Asia further
threaten the delicate reefs. Tourism — in the form of diving and snorkeling — can also cause
damage. As with so many other endangered species around the world, there doesn't seem to be
enough space for healthy coral reefs and unchecked human development. "It's just a litany of
bad actions," says Brian Huse, the executive director of the Coral Reef Alliance. "Over the past
35 to 50 years, we've lost 25% of our reefs worldwide. Put it altogether, and you can see why."
Disease plays a role as well, with whole coral colonies wiped out by sudden sickness. That rise in
illness may be linked to warmer sea temperatures, which is caused by climate change. And it's
global warming that poses the most serious threat to the survival of coral. Corals have a
symbiotic relationship with a kind of algae that provide nutrients and energy through
photosynthesis — not to mention the vivid colors we associate with coral reefs. When corals are
stressed by rising temperatures, the algae are expelled by the coral, turning the reefs bone white.
That's a "bleaching event," and bleached coral are left weakened and defenseless against disease.
Increased carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere also lead to more acidic seas, which
impairs the ability of corals to form their skeletal reefs. (In acidic water, the reefs simply
dissolve.) "Corals appear to be particularly sensitive to the buildup of CO2," says Kent
Carpenter, the lead author of the Science study and the director of GMSA. "The corals will be the
canary in the coal mine in terms of the effect climate change will have on our oceans."
In one way, protecting the coral is not that different from protecting any endangered species.
First, we need to cut back on activities that ruin their habitat, the shallow waters close to our
coast. Agricultural runoff — already responsible for the oceanic "dead zones" seen in the Gulf of
Mexico and other heavily built up coasts — has to be curtailed, as does the senselessly
destructive fishing practices that have us tossing dynamite or poison into the waters. One of the
best strategies is to expand the range of territory protected by marine reserves — national parks
of the deep. And here the Bush Administration — usually anything but environmental —
deserves real credit. With a stroke of a pen in 2006, President George W. Bush created the
Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, a 140,000 sq. mi. protected area northwest
of Hawaii. Larger than every other national park in the U.S. combined, the monument protects
10% of the shallow coral reef habitat in U.S. territory. These kind of reserves need to be
expanded, to limit the influence of human activity on delicate corals.
But we could make the entire ocean into a marine park and still lose the coral, if we can't stop
climate change. As temperatures rise in the ocean, bleaching events will become more and more
common. According to a study published in Science late last year, if CO2 levels continue rising
unabated, by 2100 coral could be utterly extinct. "If we can't contain the CO2 problem and enact
strong coral reef conservation measures, we will lose them," says Carpenter. The depressing fate
of the coral could be a reminder that climate change has the power to undo all the work of
wildlife conservation over the past century — if we let it.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1821971,00.html
(TECHNOLOGY IN ARTICLE BELOW WITH HELPFUL INFORMATION)
Trying to Save the Coral Reefs
By KRISTA MAHR Friday, Aug. 17, 2007
A school of fish pass over a coral reef at Hanauma Bay, Hawaii.
Donald Miralle / Getty
Near the close of the 1960s, a squadron of young scuba divers headed out into the warm waters
of the South Pacific, tanks of air strapped to their backs and syringes at the ready. Their mission,
one lethal injection at a time, was to put a stop to an outbreak of crown-of-thorns starfish, a
voracious predator of fragile tropical coral reefs. Those early efforts — along with a big printing
of "Save the Barrier Reef" bumper stickers — helped establish what has since been considered
one of the world's best-protected coral reefs.
Bottom of Form
More than 30 years later, some of those dive bums have grown up to become full-fledged coral
ecologists, and what they are seeing today is probably making them long for the halcyon days of
the '60s. Rising ocean temperatures, compounded by other man-made factors, like pollution and
overfishing, have been catastrophic for the earth's coral. "I grew up diving and snorkeling all
over the world," says Gregor Hodgson, executive director of the coral monitoring organization
Reef Check Foundation. "Those reefs are all gone."
On August 7, researchers at the University of North Carolina released the world's first
comprehensive study on coral in the Indo-Pacific region, which stretches from Japan to
Australia and east to Hawaii, and is home to 75% of the world's coral reefs. The outlook is grim.
Between 1968 and 2003, more than 600 sq. mi. of reef disappeared in the region — that's 1% a
year, twice the pace of rainforest decline — and the losses are hitting well-protected areas like
the Great Barrier Reef just as hard as the stressed, overfished reefs that surround crowded
countries like the Philippines. "People thought the Pacific was in much better shape," says John
Bruno, lead author of the study, which was published online by the Public Library of Science.
Scientists assumed that far-flung reefs in the vast waters of the Pacific would be safely isolated
from negative human impact. They were wrong. "There is no such thing as an isolated reef from
the perspective of climate change," says Bruno.
The UNC report coincides with separate accounts of another widespread scourge: in July, coral
reefs in the South China Sea and around the Florida Keys and Caribbean started to bleach — a
result of warming waters. Healthy reefs live symbiotically with algae, which takes shelter inside
the coral and, in return, passes nutrients to its host. When waters reach an uncomfortably high
temperature, coral gets stressed and kicks the algae out, which turns the coral white and
essentially starves it to death. Local reef watchers have contacted the U.S. National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Association (NOAA) from the northern Philippines to southern Japan, some
warning that their coral is bleaching nearly as much as it did in 1998, when El Ni�o–heated
waters killed 15% of the world's reefs.
Like the busily receding glaciers in the Arctic, coral reefs are a canary in the global warming coal
mine. "They are a sensitive species that are affected first," says C. Mark Eakin, coordinator of
NOAA's Coral Reef Watch program, which warns scientists when their part of the world is at risk
for bleaching. And though climate change awareness is up, and embattled reefs do get moments
of compassion, the public has a short attention span when it comes to ecosystems it can't see. So
do policy makers. Bruno says more coral data is being gathered today by non-governmental
organizations than universities or government programs, particularly in developing nations
where the focus is more on building hospitals and roads than on marine science. But even in the
U.S., NOAA's satellite data program, alert system and monitoring are second to the larger
network of local groups and governments keeping watch over the U.S. reefs. "Nobody wants to
pay for monitoring because it's boring," says Hodgson.
That's why he founded Reef Check. Realizing that one man's chore might be another's hobby,
Hodgson decided to fill the information gap by enlisting people who were naturally interested:
divers. In 1997 he created a global network of volunteer snorkelers and divers, specially trained
by scientists to monitor reefs using a standardized checklist. Over the last 10 years, Reef Check's
volunteers have amassed a bounty of data on the world's coral. "In the beginning, people were
looking down on us, saying 'Oh, you guys are just volunteers,'" Hodgson recalls. Now, Reef
Check has become one of the primary sources of scientific information about coral health.
Why the need to monitor coral so closely? Coral reefs constitute a complex and vast global
ecosystem, home to millions of species of plants and fish that people depend on for food and
tourist revenue; in some areas, healthy reefs help protect the shore from potentially destructive
waves. But arguments about the preservation of biodiversity make eyes glaze over, so Hodgson,
who's trying to get coral on the World Conservation Union's red and endangered species lists,
likes to point out that several anticancer drugs are derived from reef species. "Maybe one day a
coral will save your life," Hodgson tells skeptics. "That gets to people."
Perhaps the single best advocate for the preservation of coral reefs is the reefs themselves. In
many parts of the world, conservationists are letting the natural beauty and allure of the reefs —
which generate about $1.6 billion annually in tourist dollars — do the talking for them. In one
area of the Philippines, for instance, local leaders asked fishermen who had been making a living
by blast-fishing, which destroys reefs, to trade in their trawlers for dive boats. They did, the fish
came back to the reefs, the local economy flourished and everybody — tourists, residents, and
coral ecologists alike — was happy. In cases like these, one hand washes the other, says NOAA's
Eakin. "If healthy coral reefs are your bread and butter, you're going to make sure they're in
good shape."
It remains to be seen whether local solutions, like ecotourism or the establishment of marine
parks, will create lasting changes. No one knows when the warm waters causing the current
bleaching epidemic will recede, and once coral starts dying in warm currents, there isn't a lot
that scientists can do but sit back and watch. Some reefs may recover, but others won't, and
researchers are still trying to figure out why. "I don't think there's any way you can manage for a
global effect locally," says Bruno, the author of the UNC report. He thinks the root cause of
disappearing coral is, in the end, climate change, which can be addressed only by a worldwide
effort to cap fossil-fuel use and pass stringent climate change legislation. "If we only manage
locally, [we] will be totally overwhelmed over the next century."
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