Coral Reef News – SeaWeb, July 10th 2008
So, the final, dying embers of the conference to rake over. Dick Dodge kicks things off by saying what a diverse bunch of topics we’ve covered. This symposium has been one of synthesis, he says. Here’s how we’re going to do things over the next couple of hours…
Each Mini-Symposium chair has submitted a report. Nancy Barron is going to explain more.
The goal today, she tells us, is to make this fast food… er, fun. She emailed the idea through to her “victims” and …

I’m not entirely sure why the “sunscreen causes coral bleaching” story is doing the rounds in the news again (see here and here – it seems to make for a very media-friendly story), but i’m still amazed at the mileage these authors are getting from a highly questionable study. I’ve debated this before on Climate Shifts with Robert Danavaro, the lead author of the study. Statements such as “New research highlights sunscreen as major cause of coral bleaching” are stretching the findings and conclusions of this paper to ridiculous extremes …

Here is an excerpt from a recent news article (click below for full story):
Sunscreen may be killing corals
Cosmos, Monday 4th October
Some experts are yet to be persuaded by the findings, however.
“Any contaminant can experimentally damage a coral under artificially high concentrations. The amount [in the wild] must be tiny due to dilution,” commented Terry Hughes, director of the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in Queensland.
“Imagine how much water a tourist wearing one teaspoon of sunscreen swims through in an hour-long …

I was rung up today by a journalist who wanted me to comment on whether sunscreens could cause coral bleaching. Her question was triggered by an article published this month in Environmental health Perspectives by Danovaro, R. et al. (doi:10.1289/ehp.10966.) which shows that very small amounts of sunscreen can cause corals to bleach. This is potentially interesting given the often close association of tourists and coral reefs.
Looking closely at the paper, however, I think there may be a few problems. Whereas the article talks about ‘bleaching’ (which …