Off the back of the last post, here is an interesting article from the Washington Post on the discovery of deep sea reefs in Hawaii. Deep reefs (‘mesophotic’ coral reefs) exist at the edge of the photic zone (upto 150m depth) and are still dependent on light. These are fascinating ecosystems that to date have been poorly studied:
“We were seeing reefs that no human has ever laid eyes on before,” Randall Kosaki, the research mission’s lead scientist and diver, said Tuesday. “We literally have better maps of the moon than …

Here is some good news from the Caribbean – despite a >95% decline in staghorn coral since the 1970′s, there are some signs of resurgence:
Dropping 12 feet below the ocean’s surface less than a mile off Fort Lauderdale’s beach-front towers, a diver might wonder if he or she somehow got magically transported to a remote coral reef in the Caribbean.
Covering the sea bottom is a forest of maize-colored, healthy staghorn coral with grouper, grunts, damselfish and other assorted tropicals swimming all around. If not for the dusky, green water, bits …

So it’s that time of year again in the Caribbean where the corals undergo the annual mass spawn. Along with this ritual comes the coral researchers, who run a bunch of experiments with coral recruitment, settlement, fertilization, which involves catching coral sperm and eggs using nets (see above) and mixing it all up in jars (see pictures here – honestly, i’m not kidding). Spawning time is usually pretty hectic for all researchers, as it’s generally a once a year sort of affair to raise and settle the larvae, and gather …

John Bruno mentioned this in passing at the bottom of his last post (Climate Literacy), but I thought this deserved a post of it’s own. Check out JB’s blog over at his lab website, bought to you live from the Galapagos Islands – shark surveys, coral monitoring, marine iguanas, seals on the rocky intertidal shores… (and who says the life of a marine biologist isn’t at least slightly glamorous?)

“I’ll be working with a team of scientists on San Cristobal island in the Galapagos for a week.  I am blogging about …

The 7000-year-old coral communities of Moreton Bay are telling a curious tale, expanding when sea-levels rise or water quality improves, then declining when current circulation becomes more restricted.
Intriguing new insights into the behaviour of corals and fish under changing climatic conditions will be presented by leading marine researchers at a public forum in Brisbane this coming Friday.
Professor John Pandolfi from the University of Queensland and ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and his team have been dating the corals of Moreton Bay and finding they have undergone surges …

CNN News, May 29th 2009:
Advances in the study of coral in the last few years has led a group of scientists to conclude that corals almost rival humans in their genetic complexity and their relationship to algae is key to their survival.

“We’ve known for some time the general functioning of corals and the problems they are facing from climate change,” said Virginia Weis, a professor of zoology at Oregon State University and an author of a report published in the journal Science.
“But until just recently, much less has been known …

I remember seeing a fascinating presentation by Mahmood Riyaz on the reef slope failure of this coral reef at the ICRS conference in Florida last year – how the atoll rim was cracking due to the sheer amount of construction and concrete. Welcome to Male, the capital of the Maldives, where >100,000 people are crammed ontop of a coral reef atoll only 1.7km in length.  The Maldives have been hit hard in recent years, collectively lost over 2/3 of it’s coral following the 1998 bleaching event. In addition, being such …

From the organization that brought you:

“35 Inconvenient Truths: The errors in Al Gore’s movie”
“Proved -There is no climate crisis”
“Greenhouse Warming? What Greenhouse Warming?”

comes another ‘bona fide’ report ( “CO2, Global Warming and Coral Reefs: Prospects for the Future“)  aimed at debunking the widely respected view among the scientific community that increases in temperature and atmospheric CO2 are detrimental to the future of coral reefs. In fact this report by the Science and Public Policy Institute of Washington, argues that these ‘twin evils’ actually have positive effects on coral reefs worldwide …

ABC News, 5th December 2008
Scientists who recently completed the most comprehensive study of the Great Barrier Reef are now turning their attention to Western Australia’s coast, focussing on Ningaloo Reef.
An Australian Institute of Marine Science study recently found the steepest drop in coral growth on the Great Barrier Reef in at least 400 years, which the Institute attributes to rising sea temperatures and ocean acidification.
The study found that on current trends coral on the Great Barrier Reef will stop growing by 2050.
The Institute’s Dr Janice Lough says scientists are now …

Glen De’ath and Katherina Fabricius, two co-authors from the recent science paper on the decline in coral calcification on the Great Barrier Reef were interviewed by Australian ABC radio this afternoon. Listen online below, or read on after the jump for a transcript.
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]
update: fixed the link to the correct interview.

As we’ve covered here before at Climate Shifts, the build up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has the potential to slow the growth of reef-building corals by increasing the acidity of the world’s oceans.   By burning immense amounts of fossil fuels, humans have increased the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere by nearly 40%.  Roughly a quarter of this CO2 is being absorbed by oceans, where it reacts with seawater to form carbonic acid, acidifying the upper layers of the ocean.
Several laboratory experiments suggest this could make …

BBC News, 26th December
Scientists have reported a rapid recovery in some of the coral reefs that were damaged by the Indian Ocean tsunami four years ago.
It had been feared that some of the reefs off the coast of Indonesia could take a decade to recover.
The New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) found evidence of rapid growth of young corals in badly-hit areas. A spokesman said reefs damaged before the tsunami were also recovering. Some communities were abandoning destructive fishing techniques and even transplanting corals into damaged areas, the WCS said.
“This …

Following on from a previous article at Climate Shifts, a recent article published in PLoS One shows that corals are proving to be even more non-conformist than previously thought. Zoe Richards and co-authors from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies found that ‘rare’ species of branching corals are able to cross breed with other branching corals to create hybrids, therefore avoiding probable extinction:
“Coral reefs worldwide face a variety of marine and land-based threats and hundreds of corals are now on the red list of threatened species. It …

An article published in PLoS One  has huge implications for almost everything we do in our research on corals.  In summary, using an array of genetic markers, a highly respected group of leading scientists including Fukami, Chen, Knowlton and others have shown that whilst Scleractinia (the stony corals) have a single origin in evolution, to date we have lumped many species and genera into families incorrectly, at least partly due to the traditional system of classification .  This finding has the interesting implication that morphological features (at the heart of …

Here are some underwater photographs taken at a recent field trip at Magnetic Island, inshore Great Barrier Reef. These reefs are usually highly turbid, based 8km away from the Townsville shoreline.  I’m often suprised at the diversity and high cover of some of these inshore reefs, and the visibility at Magnetic this day finally lifted above it’s usual "pea-soup" consistency to get some good photographs.