Go check out John Bruno‘s posts on patterns of coral loss and climate change over at the Reef Tank blog. Along with updates from the reef keeping community, there are some great popular science postings from an array of authors on coral disease, whalefish and some incredible photographs of starfish diversity in Singapore.
Dr. John Bruno’s column “Reef Science Corner” on all things coral, climate, and conservation are coming to a close on The Reef Tank blog and we’re sad to see it go! What originally started as merely an excerpt of a modified version of an article Dr. Bruno published last year on the Earth Portal and archived here in the Coral Reefs Collection of the Encyclopedia of Earth, which became a vast, educational tool to provide awareness of two very pertinent topics that TRT holds near and dear to its heart!
Moving from an introduction to corals on coral reefs and patterns of coral loss to climate change and all of it’s repercussions (which circles back to coral loss and also focuses on other marine conservation matters), Dr. Bruno (ironically, no pun intended) shifts from one course of action to the other, first speaking specifically about the history of corals, why they have formed where they are found to this day, and where prominent patterns of coral loss reside to the concerns raised by the world’s climate change, which are affecting these corals and also causing problems like patterns of coral loss and the threat that the world’s oceans are becoming more acidic—ocean acidification.
We learned about what could potentially happen in the future to our marine life, corals, and big, beautiful ocean if we don’t start becoming aware and doing something about these repercussions, and we learned why corals are so important to our world. Finally, we will soon learn why we should continue to remain optimistic despite all of the troubles our marine existence is experiencing today. That last and final post will be coming up next week.
We had an exceptional marine ecologist, conservation biologist, associate professor of Marine Science, and Climate Shifts blog (https://climateshifts.org) contributor on hand to provide us with all the information that goes into understanding and conserving the essence of marine communities and for that we are truly grateful! He has truly opened our eyes and we encourage you to read his work on The Reef Tank and continue to read his interesting, educated, and thought-provoking posts on Climate Shifts!
- Benefits/Ecosystem Services of Coral Reefs
- Local Threats of Reef Management
- Future Climate Scenarios and Coral Reef Decline
- Ocean Acidification
- Climate Change and Coral Loss
- Patterns of Coral Loss
—– Guest posting by Ava, The Reef Tank Blog
It seems like Cyclone Hamish has taken an unexpected turn eastwards, with the eye of the storm now projected to miss the Capricorn Bunker islands. Heron Island and other coral islands have been evacuated, and residents across the Bundaberg – Hervey Bay region are bracing themselves for the impact as Hamish crosses the in the next 48hrs. The impact of a category 4/5 cyclone on the Great Barrier Reef is likely to be huge – especially as Hamish has tracked parallel to the coastline for over 1000km, straight over the outer reef. The midshelf reefs at Mackay are currently being hit by 6m waves, and Flinders Reef near the eye of the storm recorded 154km/hr winds. More updates as they come keep – meanwhile keep an eye on the Bureau of Meteorology homepage, Earth Snapshot and the Weatherzone forums for up to the minute info.
Update @ 7.55pm:
Looks like the Bureau of Meteorology weather station at Creal Reef (directly in the path of the Hurricane) has been destroyed – the last recorded gust at 1.02pm was 189km/hr!
Only two weeks ago, 60% of Queensland was inundated with flood waters, whilst the south of Australia was hit by record high temperatures and bushfires. Now, the Queensland coastline is currently under cyclone watch as Cyclone Hamish is pushing south along the Great Barrier Reef, and has intensified to a category 5 cyclone, with winds reaching above 280kmh and waves >7m.
Cyclone Hamish missed the Whitsunday Islands, instead heading offshore and weakening to a category 4, but has now veered south-easterly and is currently heading towards the Capricorn Bunker group, directly in the path of Heron Island Research Station. More updates as they come – although no one is certain when the cyclone will cross the coastline, the news are predicting an impact similar if not larger than Cyclone Larry (the last cat 5 cyclone to cross the coast) in 2006.
“New fish is psychadelica” (Seattle Times, Feb 28th 2008)
There are 320 known species of anglerfish, and Ted Pietsch can describe each one down to the number of spines on its dorsal fin. So, when the picture from Indonesia flopped into his e-mail, his pulse started pounding.
“I pretty much freaked out,” the University of Washington fish biologist said.
With its flattened face, undulating stripes and turquoise-rimmed eyes that peer straight ahead, this fish looked like something out of a fever dream — and like nothing Pietsch had ever seen before. Now, after a year of lab work, DNA analysis and a race halfway around the globe, he and his colleagues have confirmed the find as a new species. And they have given the 4-inch fish a name that fits its style: psychedelica.
“This is such an amazingly different fish that people immediately get excited when they see it,” Pietsch said.
The first to lay eyes on the new species were commercial divers on the small island of Ambon, at the eastern edge of the Indonesian archipelago. The owners of Maluku Divers discreetly circulated photos early last year to see if anyone could identify the unfamiliar fish. The photos made their way to Jack Randall, a famed ichthyologist at Honolulu’s Bishop Museum. (Read more)
“Fang Blenny has coat of many colours” (SMH, March 3rd 2008)
A MASTER of disguise has been uncovered living in Australian waters. The blue-striped fangblenny is the first fish found to be able to change its colour at will to mimic a variety of other fish.
Its repertoire of colour changes includes olive, orange, and black and electric blue, and it appears to use colour vision to achieve its incognito exploits, new research shows.
University of Queensland biologist, Karen Cheney, said that her examination of the little fish’s eyes showed they should be able to detect different hues. They also have a habit of curling their tail around to touch their head, so they can see their body. “It is possible that fangblennies can view some of their own colouration,” Dr Cheney said.
The only other creature known to be able to imitate other species is the mimic octopus, which alters its colour and shape to resemble lionfish, flatfish and sea snakes. Dr Cheney and her colleagues had studied the habits of fangblennies on coral reefs in Australia and Indonesia. Their results are published in the journal Proceedings Of The Royal Society.
For food, fangblennies dart out and attack larger reef fish, nipping off tiny pieces of their fins, scales or mucus. In olive mode they tend to hang out in shoals of similarly coloured damselfish, and in orange mode they mingle with yellow anthias. (Read More)
It’s been a busy few weeks in the media. Hilary Clinton and her climate change envoy met with officials in China, Obama says that the upcoming climate bill is needed to ‘save our planet’, the ‘danger threat’ of global warming was increased, Dr Hansen took the final leap from scientist to activist, and NASA’s newly launched carbon tracking satellite came to an abrupt end as it crashed into the Pacific Ocean.
However, nothing seems to beat news from home soil. In a week where the Australian government announced the emissions trading scheme (which plans to reduce emissions by 5 to 15 per cent before 2020) is full steam ahead, Australian Liberal Member of Parliament Dr Dennis Jensen (a well known climate skeptic, who holds a PhD in the physics of ceramics) managed to violate Godwin’s law by pointing to Adolf Hitler as a classic example of how scientists (and therefore climate change) can be wrong.
“Albert Einstein was very much criticised by Hitler, and Hitler actually had a group of 100 top scientists in Germany write a book called 100 scientists against Einstein,” Dr Jensen told reporters in Canberra.
“Einstein was asked: ‘Doesn’t it bother you Dr Einstein that you’ve got so many scientists against you?’
“And he said: `It doesn’t take 100 scientists to prove me wrong, it takes a single fact’.”
A fantastic new paper published recently in Current Biology (Cinner et al. 2009) examines the correlations between a variety of human demographic, social, cultural and economic indicators and reef fish biomass. The somewhat surprising and novel result is that fish depletion is maximized at intermediate levels of human socioeconomic development. The authors, mostly based at James Cook University’s Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, surveyed 19 coastal communities adjacent to coral reefs in the Indian Ocean.
In fished sites, fish biomass was negatively related to human population density, but it was best explained by reef complexity and a U-shaped relationship with socioeconomic development. The biomass of reef fishes was four times lower at locations with intermediate levels of economic development than at locations with both low and high development.
An important underlying mechanisms was the changing availability of technologies as communities become wealthier:
…in low-development sites, technological constraints and social institutions may limit people’s exploitation of marine resources. Reduced dependence on marine resources, variable access to boats but increasing access to engines and other technologies, high use of spear guns, and a lack of customary management institutions characterize communities with intermediate levels of development.
One thing that didn’t surprise me was that human population density was only weakly related to fish biomass and wasn’t even included in the best fit model:
A key and surprising finding from this study is that the best model included the quadratic socioeconomic-development index and reef structural complexity, but did not include human population density.
There is a pretty big debate among coral reef and other marine scientists about whether human population size (and growth) per se is the ultimate problem (as my buddy The Natural Patriot believes) or whether the impacts of societies have a lot more to do with governance and policy, local choices and customs, and the application of technologies. As I have written about on ClimateShifts in the past, I think simply blaming the problem on human population growth is silly, i.e., condoms are not going to save coral reefs. Stephen Jameson published a provocative essay addressing this debate and I still think there is plenty of evidence to suggest that we cannot mitigate most threats to the ocean simply by limiting or reducing the number of people on earth. In the context of the Cinner et al paper, where would a human population cap put us along the development index?
One of the other things that struck me about the results was the relative weakness of the effect of the human indicators on fish biomass compared to unfished reefs in fully protected reserves (Fig 3): across a range of human population density and socio-economic indicators, people flat out totally deplete coral reef fish. I wonder what this means for the purported links between the development index, macroalgae, coral recruitment and reef resilience laid out by Bob Steneck in his companion piece (Steneck 2009; see the figure from Steneck’s article about the Cinner et al. paper below). Given the relatively small variance in fish biomass (only about 25% of the natural range) could there really be a predictable indirect effect of human development on coral populations? Maybe. I wonder if Cinner et al. also measured macroalgae and coral recruitment in their surveys.
I also wonder if the net impact of people living in societies with a high development index (>1) is just being displaced across a region or even globally via protein imports, i.e., does the net impact continue to increase even as the local impact decreases? Think of highly developed countries like the US and Japan that import a large portion of their animal protein. Such societies do have far higher protein consumption rates, so it seems plausible that they are simply eating fish from other peoples reefs! It would be interesting to examine fish imports, exports and consumption at a local societal scale across such a development gradient.
Another issue is how the other impacts to coral reefs, in particular fossil fuel consumption and global warming, are related to the development index. They must certainly be related, but are they linearly related? I bet it could even be a positive exponential function. In other words, how is the development index related to other taxa and indicators of reef health or state. For example, what about invertebrates? Might prey populations of these harvested fish species show the opposite relationship with socio-economic indicators? And what about corals? The enormous complication is that the impacts of many human activities (e.g., driving a car, using an electric clothes dryer, flying on an airplane to go on vacation, etc.) are regional to global and thus cannot be analytically related to local human socioeconomic parameters (i.e., the sample size of the response variable is essentially 1).
Like most transformative research, the Cinner et al. paper raises at least as many questions as it answers. I think it is sometimes hard to gague the future impact of resarch when it first comes out-it can be difficult to impossible to envision all the twists and turns a research program will take. But I put my money on this being a citation classic. It has already really influenced my thinking and future research plans!
Literature Cited
Cinner, Joshua E, Timothy R McClanahan, Tim M Daw, Nicholas A.J Graham, Joseph Maina, Shaun K Wilson, Terence P Hughes (2009) Linking Social and Ecological Systems to Sustain Coral Reef Fisheries. Current Biology 19:206-21
Jameson SC (2008) Guest editorial: Reefs in trouble the real root cause. Marine Pollution Bulletin 56(9):1513-1514
Steneck, RS (2009) Marine Conservation: Moving Beyond. Malthus. Current Biology R117 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2008.12.009
Several of our San Diego-based colleagues have been making the argument that fishing is the ultimate cause of coral bleaching, disease and loss in a series of stimulating papers. One purported underlying mechanism is that by reducing the density of herbivores, fishing is causing increases in macroalgae and concentrations of Dissolved Organic Carbon (DOC), thereby fueling microbes that lead to coral diseases or make corals more susceptible to warming.
Evidence supporting this idea stems from somewhat artificial laboratory studies and a field survey of four remote reefs in the central Pacific (see my post on this work here). After reading these papers, three UNC undergrads working in my lab asked “why doesn’t someone do a field experiment to test this idea?” So they did. Working with Ernesto Weil and I in Puerto Rico they performed three field manipulations to test the general hypothesis that overfishing and the subsequent alteration of coral reef trophic dynamics are a cause of coral epizootics. Specifically, they asked whether the presence of macroalgae can influence within- and among-colony spread rates of Caribbean Yellow Band Disease in Montastraea faveolata.
They placed macroalgae in small pouches next to infected and healthy, adult and small coral colonies to measure effects on disease spread rate, coral growth and coral survival. Surprisingly, the addition of macroalgae did not affect disease severity or coral fitness. Their results (published yesterday in PLoS One; Vu et al. 2009) suggested that macroalgae have no effect on the severity and dynamics of Caribbean Yellow Band Disease, a critical coral epizootic.
There are several unresolved issues though. First, could other algal species or other combinations of algae cause or exacerbate yellow band disease? What about other host species and other coral disease syndromes? Could there be other unexplored factors that are also necessary for infection to occur (e.g., high temperature)? And how is the concentration of relevant forms of DOC related to fish, fishing and algae? All of these questions remain unanswered. Leaving lots of room for future field experiments by ambitious students.
From CNN.com:
By John D. Sutter, CNNBoats of people with snorkels typically launch into the reefs from Cairns, Queensland. If you go, tread lightly, Henson said. Visitors can damage the reefs if they get too close.
“It’s a feast for the eyes in terms of color, texture variations — it’s just amazing to see,” he said. “It’s wonderful to be enveloped in the warm water and look down just a few feet below at this amazing spread of ocean life.”
Henson said the reefs’ colorful displays are not to be missed.
(CNN) — Scientists expect some great travel spots to be altered or ruined by global climate change.
Some of the changes are already taking place. Others are expected to be seen in coming decades.
There are two ways to look at this: Either stay home (which might be less depressing and won’t add more airline emissions) or get a move on it and see the hot spots you just can’t miss.
For those who want to head out, CNN got advice on the best pre-warming travel destinations from Bob Henson, author of “The Rough Guide to Climate Change” and a writer at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
Here are Henson’s top five choices:
Warming temperatures can spell disaster for coral reefs, which depend on a delicate balance of ocean temperature and chemistry to bloom into colorful displays.
Many of the world’s reefs already are experiencing “bleaching” in which algae living in the coral die and leave behind whitened skeletons.
The Great Barrier Reef — which is composed of about 2,900 individual reefs and is off the northeast coast of Australia — is seeing limited bleaching now, and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority expects the problem to grow in coming decades.
See the full article here
