What’s killing the coral reefs?
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We knew we were onto a big thing and just last week New Scientist reported that coral reefs are under serious threat of permanent destruction.
Recent research shows that in the past 40 years, many Caribbean reefs have lost their characteristic branching corals such as Elkhorn and Staghorn from coral bleaching and are being replaced by shorter rival species. These flatter reefs now dominate 75% of the Caribbean, compared to just 20% in the 1970s.
These spectacular tree-like corals are important to the coral ecosystems because they provide homes for a variety of fish species and prevent coastal erosion by acting as a wave break.
Alex Rogers, a marine biologist at the Institute of Zoology in London, suggests, "the only answer may be immediate cuts in emissions of carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels, which would curb the amount of coral bleaching."
Which means we all have a part in saving these distant coral landscapes.
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What’s killing the coral reefs? (text) by Ruth Carruthers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.Comments (3)
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These ecosystems will return in the long run, ie. when mother nature throws us parasitic humans off the planet.
But we as humans will miss out on all the beauty there is in the world as we have been disrespecting it for so long.
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