Great star coral (Montastraea cavernosa)

Researchers from the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology at the University and the Smithsonian have brought the first frozen Hawaiian coral bank into existence to try and prevent them from becoming extinct and to preserve their diverse population in Hawaii.

A faculty member over at the HIMB, and also a respected scientist with the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, Mary Hagedorn, is leading the lab at the HIMB research facilities on Coconut Island in Kaneohe Bay, Oahu, which is storing the frozen cells of the coral.

“Because frozen banked cells are viable, the frozen material can be thawed one, 50 or, in theory, even 1,000 years from now to restore a species or population,” explains Hagedorn. “In fact, some of the frozen sperm samples have already been thawed and used to fertilize coral eggs to produce developing coral larvae.”

Many people tend to forget that Coral reefs are living, dynamic ecosystems which afford precious services: They are the home to many offspring for marine animals and other invertebrates; they give natural protection from storms on the coasts; they take carbon dioxide out of our atmosphere; and they even might be sources for future medical wonders.

So, is it any wonder that it would be a good idea to keep them alive? By freezing them, we are saving them, and can keep them alive for up to 1,000 years. Think of all the wonderful things will be accomplished, by simply saving the coral.. Imagine if we had the same initiative when it came to everything?

Coral bleaching. Picture: Bruno de Giusti

The Wildlife Conservation Society has recently released an initial report stating that there was a drastic rise in the surface temperatures in the waters of Indonesia, and has caused a massive bleaching event which has really sent coral populations into a tail spin.

The Wildlife Conservation Society’s “Rapid Response Unit”, a group of highly trained marine biologists, was sent out to take a look into the coral bleaching reported in May. This bleaching event occurred in Aceh, located on the northern side of the island of Sumatra, and the team discovered that over 60% of the coral population was bleached.

This “Bleaching” – coral turning white when algae which has previously made its home there gets booted out – is indicative of stress on the coral by any number of environmental factors. It could be the temperature of the ocean’s surface, or any other number of things. Depending on what exactly is the root cause of the issue, bleached coral may renew itself overtime or just die off.

The sad state of affairs, is it appears that this batch of coral is following the latter… A second monitoring by the marine ecologists at the WCS, James Cook University, and Syiah Kuala University have been completed since early August and the results are very grim indeed.

The group discovered that 80 percent of some of the species of coral have died off since their initial assessment and even more of the coral colonies are expected to die off within the next couple of months..

Someone really needs to get to the bottom of this, and soon.. Or we may find ourselves with no coral in our oceans.

Elkhorn Coral

An accidental find just off of Key Largo has lead to farms being created for delicate, yet ever so important, species of coral.

Just over 30 feet below the calm waters above the colorful reef off of Key Largo, Ken Nedimyer proudly displays a small slate which reads “Let’s plant corals.”

Along with a team of volunteer divers, they quickly get to work and utilize epoxy putty to help tiny bits of staghorn coral gain a foothold in the great big ocean.

In the vast expanse of ocean just off of Key Largo, Fort Lauderdale, and a few other choice locations, Nedimyer, an accomplished collector of tropical fish from Tavernier, along with researchers and his hodgepodge group of volunteers, are getting to work and raising groups of rare coral species to help repopulate the rapidly depleting reefs of the southeastern United States.

“These are my little children,” 54 year old Nedimyer, commented later that same day, explaining that the endangered coral which he has been cultivating on slabs of concrete, grows much like delicate saplings in an aquatic underwater offshore nursery.

Elkhorn and staghorn corals are classified as undersea architects, they create structures in the reef which then in turn support a myriad of sea lifeforms such as sponges, fish, lobsters, and many others. These reefs have really taken a beating from things like global warming, disease, and many other stresses over the past three decades, and have declined to just a few sparse patches in the warm waters that run from southern Palm Beach County to the islands of the Caribbean.

However, in an exciting turn of events, staghorn coral was found growing in an undersea farm for commercial aquarium rock, and researchers have now begun to raise these diffent species of coral in nurseries located offshore with the ultimate goal of transplanting them back into the wild.

The Obama administration, through economic stimulus money, has been financing the expansion of the $3.4 million project. It is hoped that this will create 57 full time jobs, commented Tom Moore, who is a representative of the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration’s Habitat Restoration Center in St. Petersburg.

Healthy reefs lead to more jobs in the tourism industry, increase the habitat for fisheries, and even provide much needed protection from weather patterns such as hurricanes, Moore continued.

Today there are now a row of 10 such coral nurseries which stretch from Fort Lauderdale to the U.S. Virgin islands, which are cultivating new stands of both the elkhorn and staghorn coral.

“These are two of the most important species of coral,” explained the marine science program manager for The Nature Conservancy, James Byrne. The Nature Conservancy is an ecologically minded group of individuals corporations that have applied for the federal money and is coordinating the work. “The staghorn coral provides very important habitat for juvenile fish, and elkhorn coral is one of the most important reef builders.”

It is nice to see that a group has taken an interest in the “reforestation” of the seas, as well as on land. The ocean is crucial to our world’s survival.. Nice to know someone has remembered that.

Acropora palmata,

A scientist from Australia has stumbled across what might be the rarest coral in the world, in the vastness of the remote North Pacific.

The coral, identified as Pacific elkhorn, was discovered while performing underwater surveys at Arno atoll, situated in the Marshall Islands, by Dr. Zoe Richards, a coral researcher of the CoECRS (ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies).

This coral is strikingly similar to the endangered and rapidly disappearing elkhorn coral, known in scientific circles as Acropora palmata, native to the Atlantic Ocean.

However, upon close genetic comparison is has proven that this coral is actually a different species.

“When I first saw it, I was absolutely stunned. The huge colonies – five metres across and nearly two metres high with branches like an elk’s antlers – were like nothing I’d seen before in the Pacific Ocean,” Dr Richards commented during a conference.

So far I have only found this new population of coral to occur along a small stretch of reef at a single atoll in the Marshalls group.

“It grows in relatively shallow water along the exposed reef front and, so far, fewer than 200 colonies are known from that small area.”

Dr. Richards explained that the Pacific elkhorn colonies were the largest of their kind, and also largest in all of the colonies located at Arno Atoll. This means that they are incredibly old.

So, there you have it. A new coral, well OK, newly discovered coral, is making quite a splash in the scientific community, and has sparked debate as to whether it is indeed a new species or not. Only time will tell…

Great Barrier Reef

New research has discovered that seaweed is leeching the life right out of the Great Barrier Reef and annihilating coral!

Researchers who were engaged in one of the most extensive water quality and pollution studies on the reef have concluded that seaweed is taking a toll on the $1 Billion a year tourist attraction.

Due to run off in the area, the water quality on the reef is extremely poor. The study discovered the level of nutrients and high turbidity of the water was increasing the occurrence of seaweed and decreasing the biodiversity of corals on the reef.

The areas which seem to be the most effected are the inshore reef to the north of the Burdekin River and the whole of the Wet Tropics zone from Port Douglas to Townsville.

“Seaweeds are a natural part of the reef,” said Dr. Katharina Fabricius, an Australian Institute of Marine Science coral reef ecologist. “But what we don’t want is billions of algae smothering coral.”

“Choking is a loaded term but when seaweed abundance becomes too high there is no space left for coral to grow.”

This study and its results were recently published in the scientific journal Ecological Applications. The data published included data collected from 150 reefs and over 2000 water quality stations located across the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park since the early 1990’s.

Dr. Glenn Death, the principal investigator has said that the seaweed is now covering five times the coral under these poor water conditions.

“The diversity of corals was also affected, decreasing in poor water quality,” he explained.

“Currently, the water on 22 per cent of reefs – about 647 reefs – on the Great Barrier Reef does not meet water quality guidelines.”

The conclusion that the study eludes to is that if the quality of the water was improved in the problem areas, then the seaweed would diminish to one third of what it is now, and the coral species would exhibit a 13 percent increase.

The area that the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park covers is approximately 345,000 square kilometers and extends itself for 2,000 kilometers along the northeast coast of Australia.

Great star coral (Montastraea cavernosa)

Scientists and conservationists might be barking up the wrong tree when it comes to finding corals which are suited to surviving the global climate crisis. This is according to a recent research paper which was published in the journal Science.

Two researchers, Ann Budd and John Pandolf, came to this conclusion after they closely analyzed the link between evolutionary innovation and geography of the boulder star coral species complex (which is known in the scientific community as Montastrae annularis). The boulder star coral complex is a group of Caribbean reef corals.

They took a look at the shape of various growths of coral, both recent and fossil in order to see what morphology differences existed. The fossils involved dated back to over 850,000 years ago.

The results were that the quickest, and most drastic, changes to the morphology of the fossil coral growth happened at the outer edges, and the least drastic, and slowest, changes happened in the more central parts.

This seems to suggest that the edge of the coral played an integral role in evolutionary innovation, which may just be caused by cross breeding, or any other number of factors.

This is very big in terms of conservation of the coral reefs. The conventional wisdom dictates that we preserve the center of the coral, more so than focus on conserving the outer edges.

However, by focusing our efforts on the center, we may be overlooking the important sources of adaptation during climate changes.

Ann Budd, lead author of the paper, elaborates more on the subject. “…areas ranked highly for species richness, endemism and threats may not represent regions of maximum evolutionary potential.”

The conclusion of the paper is that in order to properly design marine reserves in the future we need to also take the evolutionary processes and the link between the coral and other species into account by looking at the outer edges as well.

A conglomerate of Canadian and Spanish researchers have discovered new marine life, which have been previously unknown to the scientific community, and some are even over a 1,000 years old. They are hoping that these creatures will shed some light into the secrets of the ancient underwater ecosystems.

Scientists from the Spanish Institute of Oceanography in conjunction with three Canadian universities and the Fisheries Department are going on a 20 day expedition to take some photos and pick up samples of coral and sponges up to 3 kilometers deep in the cold waters off the Newfoundland coast.

The team will be studying 11 different areas which are under the protection of the North Atlantic Fisheries Organization.

These are important areas of study as they are the home to the “trees of the ocean” explains a research scientist with the Fisheries Department, Ellen Kenchington. Ellen is also leading the expedition.

The coral which can be found in these areas can be several meters tall and is sufficient enough in size to change the flow of currents. It is also the home to many other fish and other aquatic life.

The aim of the study is to see whether or not these areas need further protection from fishing to help keep the species abundant.

Ellen went on to explain that scientists can actually take a look at the chemical makeup of the coral and figure out the temperature of the water and other information dating back as far as 1,000 years!

For pictures see
http://www.montrealgazette.com

The Red Sea

A recent study has found that Global Warming is slowing the growth of Coral in the Red Sea, and all growth could stop by the year 2070.

By utilizing CT (computed tomography) scans, some scientists over at the WHOI (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) have found that the greenhouse effect (which is the leading cause of global warming) is killing off one of the predominant species of coral in the Red Sea.

The summer temperatures on the sea surface remained at roughly 1.5 degrees Celsius above what’s the norm for the past ten years. The growth of the coral, Diploastrea heliopora, has seen a marked decrease of 30% and as has been quoted by scientists, “could cease growing altogether by 2070” or even sooner, as the research team quoted in the July 16th issue of the journal Science.

“The warming in the Red Sea and the resultant decline in the health of this coral is a clear regional impact of global warming,” said a WHOL postdoctoral investigator, Neal E. Cantin, who is also the co-lead researcher on the project. In the 1980s, he explained, “the average summer [water] temperatures were below 30 degrees Celsius. In 2008 they were approaching 31 degrees.”

This could spell some big trouble for the Red Sea. If the Coral is being affected in such a way, what of the other species? Could it be that the Red Sea will become another DEAD Sea in the very near future? Scientists are working round the clock on a solution for Global Warming, but it seems a solution is still years from being worked out, and in the meantime we are losing out.

Above you can see a fascinating video of squat Urchin shrimp and below you find some basic information about this tiny shrimp.

The squat Urchin shrimp, known in scientific circles as Gnathophylloides mineri, is quite a fascinating invertebrate that many aquarists would often look over, or even never see.

This fascinating little creature is only milometers in length, and it survives in its own little world, not seeming to care about how the rest of the Sea Urchins live. These Sea Urchins actually live ON TOP of other Sea Urchins!

The Squat Urchin Shrimp is incredibly tiny, often never reaching more than 6mm in length, and it often orients itself parallel with their hosts spines, which not only protects it from becoming lunch for some other sea critter, but also makes it nigh on impossible to see, some would even say it’s effectively invisible to the naked eye. Colonies of these little guys often have numbers ranging from a few to a half dozen will share the same host Sea Urchin. Not only does it seek protection from its hosts spines, it actually feeds on them, proving once again just how successful this tiny creature is at surviving. This is a rather odd kind of parasitism, as it does not have any ill effects for the host.

The Squat Urchin Shrimp also will take every chance they get to feed upon the detritus that the host sea urchin picks up off the ocean floor on it’s travels.

Photo by: Igor GOLUBENKOV

Thousands of barrels of oil continue to leak into the ocean from British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon each day, and as we have been able to see in countless news reports a lot of it reaches the surface.

Less well known is that a significant portion of the oil never make the full 1 502 meter (4928 feet) journey to the surface. Instead, the stratified waters of the Gulf of Mexico capture the oil or slow down its ascent, and this oil is now threatening numerous life forms far below the surface.

According to Dr Gregor Eberli, Dr Mark Grasmueck and Ph.D. candidate Thiago Correa – all three from the Marine Geology & Geophysics division of the University of Miami (UM), the oil that fails to reach the surface is a serious threat to planktonic and benthic life throughout the region, including many species of cold water coral. Planktonic life is all the tiny living creatures the drift around in the ocean, while benthic life is life confined to the sea floor.

“The deep water communities within the Gulf of Mexico and in the Straits of Florida are well hidden from us, but they include many species of cold-water corals that live in water at depths of 600 — 1500 m. (1969 -4921 ft.) in waters as cold as 3° Celsius (37.4°F),” Eberli explained.  “Unlike their more familiar shallow-water counterparts, these corals do not live in symbiosis with unicellular algae called zooxanthellae, but are animals that feed on organic matter floating through the water column. We know that most of the food consumed by the cold-water corals is produced in the surface waters and eventually sinks down to the corals.”

To make the problem even worse, the large plumes formed as a result of the oil spill has placed themselves between the deep-water corals and their food source. Some of these plumes are several miles long, and organic material – i.e. animals and plants – that sink through the plumes will become contaminated by micron-sized oil droplets. These droplets might not look as dramatic as a sea surface filled with crude oil, but they are equally damaging.

“It is most likely that the delicate cold-water corals are not able to digest these oil-laden food particles and will perish in large numbers,” said Eberli. “We are especially concerned because the migrating oil plumes have the potential to destroy or greatly diminish these deep-sea coral communities as they are carried by the currents. These corals are important because they are the foundation of a diverse ecosystem that at last count includes over 1,300 marine species, according to Dr. Thomas Hourigan at NOAA.”

Severe damages might not be limited to the Gulf of Mexico

The Loop Current transports water from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean, passing through numerous significant coral sites on its way from the eastern Gulf of Mexico through the Straits of Florida and northward to the Blake Plateau off North Carolina. The water enters the Straits of Florida to form the Florida Current and further north the Gulf Stream. Tiny droplets of oil suspended in the water could therefore wreck havoc with ecosystems far away from British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon.

While several (albeit not perfect) methods do exist for cleaning crude oil from the surface of the ocean, we know hardly anything about how to rid the water column from oil plumes.