Many unknowns remain with respect to specific responses that corals will have to the continuing and projected warming of sea surface temperatures in tropical waters. These uncertainties extend profoundly to the swimming, larval phase of stony, reefbuilding corals....
Phil Dustan is a name you should know. A professor at the College of Charleston, Dr. Dustan is the reason we have photographic evidence for the devastating loss of coral cover in the Caribbean. He began photo-documenting places like Carysfort Reef in the Florida Keys...
As reefkeepers, and aquarists in general, know, most aquatic animals excrete ammonia as their primary nitrogenous waste product. What reefkeepers also know is that Tridacnid clams, like corals, host symbiotic zooxanthellae which utilize nitrogen, photosynthesize, and...
Three weeks ago, a manuscript was published in Nature's Scientific Reports detailing a catastrophic outbreak of White Plague Type II, where populations of susceptible stony coral species had been reduced to 25% of their original populations in the study area. I...
In a continuing string of brutal stories in a devastating 18 months for world coral reefs, a new paper in the high impact journal Nature Scientific Reports, by William Precht and others of Dial Cordy and Associates and the University of Miami, documents the "highest...
As we have been reported in largely real time, the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary has been in the throes of a generalized invertebrate mortality event of unknown origins. For background on the situation, these two posts should bring you up to speed:...
Recently, all of my conservation and science posts have been fairly dark in tone and content. From the seeming futility of local preservation, to the ongoing and unexplained mortality in the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, it is easy to get the...
As I reported at the end of last week, the Eastern Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, a magnificent coral reef in the northwestern Gulf of Mexico, is in the midst of a mysterious and active mass mortality event. This includes corals, sponges, and...
As if this year hasn't been rough enough on Global Coral reefs, I learned this afternoon that mysterious mass invertebrate deaths had suddenly begun and were continuing like wildfire in the East Flower Garden Banks. Many of the dying or stressed sessile organisms are...
The audience of this blog is likely well aware of the myriad threats that modern coral reef ecosystems face, both global and local: global warming, ocean acidification, pollution, eutrophication, overfishing. There is a broad scientific consensus that the health of...