Mediterranean species such as red coral, with a hard and striking red skeleton, is key for formations of encrusting corals and algae, as it gives it physical structure, increases its complexity and serves as protection for several species, which feed on the coralligenous habitat.
Photographic evidence has been posted on Facebook showing that names have been carved into coral at Crystal Bay, Nusa Penida, and it has enraged social media users.
What’s wrong with some people? Seriously, do they need to scratch their name on this beautiful coral. Unbelievable!
It is thought that tourists are responsible. The Bali Sun stated that one post observed “how can you be so stupid?”
Scientists at Pennsylvania State University and the University of California, Santa Barbara have discovered that when fishermen selectively catch large and medium-sized parrotfish at coral reefs facing decline due to climate change, algae has a better chance of growing and overtaking the corals.
Nonetheless, according to the research, the reef’s biomass is maintained. This is because even with less of the large and medium-sized parrotfish, there would be many smaller parrotfish that would take their place.
Healthy coral reefs are full of sounds of life—with the whistles, pops and grunts of fish, the crackle of snapping shrimp, etc. These sounds travel out through the ocean currents, and “advertise” to young fish to come and settle down at this particular reef ecosystem.
However, when reefs are degraded or dying, the environment falls silent. Literally.
As a result, young fish do not find their way to such reefs, and this exasperates the reef's dire situation.
When investigating whether corals that split their spawning over multiple months are more successful at spreading their offspring across different reefs, researchers discovered that split spawning can indeed improve the coral reef's resilience.
The findings of the study was published in the Nature Communications journal recently.
This sounds simple enough, but not when one considers that the reef - the third largest coral reef in the world - measures nearly 150 miles long and four miles wide. The question of where to place the new corals comes into play.
Enter biology professor Robert van Woesik, from Florida Institute of Technology.
Armed with a US$205,000 grant from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission, he and his team are working to identify the habitats and localities in the reef tract that offer optimal conditions for coral survival.
Antioxidant capacity is a critical component of stress tolerance because in a range of organisms, including corals, stressors such as high water temperature, poor water quality and even pathogen infection, produce an increase in damaging, highly reactive oxygen molecules (free radicals) inside the tissues.
The ability to tolerate environmental stress varies between individuals, so the team associated with the Australian Institute of Marine Science set out to find the most stress-tolerant of the common reef-building coral Acropora millepora.
For two years, the researchers from University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science collected water samples along the 200-kilometre (124-mile) stretch of the Florida Reef Tract north of Biscayne National Park to the Looe Key National Marine Sanctuary. The data provide a snapshot on the health of the reefs, and establish a baseline from which future changes can be judged.
Coral reefs are particularly vulnerable to the ocean acidification process, because reef architecture is built by the accretion of calcium carbonate, called calcification, which becomes increasingly difficult as acid concentrations increase and the surrounding water's pH decreases.
With up to 10m tides, the Kimberley region in north Western Australia has the largest tropical tides in the world, creating naturally extreme and highly dynamic coastal habitats that corals from more typical reefs could not survive.
Researchers at the University of Western Australia's Oceans Institute were thus surprised to find that corals from the region are just as sensitive to heat stress and bleaching as their counterparts from less extreme environments elsewhere.
