Alabama fishermen and scuba divers will receive a welcome present from the state of Alabama in a few years: the coordinates to a series of man-made coral reefs teaming with fish and other reef creatures.
In order to promote coral growth, the state has placed 100 federally funded concrete pyramids at depths ranging from 150 to 250 feet (45 to 75 metres). Each pyramid is 9 feet (3 metres) tall and weighs about 7,500 lbs (3,400 kg).
The pyramids have now been resting off the coast of Alabama for three years and will continue to be studied by scientists and regulators for a few years more before their exact location is made public.
In order to find out differences when it comes to fish-attracting power, some pyramids have been placed alone while others stand in groups of up to six pyramids. Some reefs have also been fitted with so called FADs – Fish Attracting Devices. These FADs are essentially chains rising up from the reef to buoys suspended underwater. Scientists hope to determine if the use of FADs has any effect on the number of snapper and grouper; both highly priced food fishes that are becoming increasingly rare along the Atlantic coast of the Americas.
Early settlers and late followers
Some species of fish arrived to check out the pyramids in no time, such as grunt and spadefish. Other species, like sculpins and blennies, didn’t like the habitat until corals and barnacles began to spread over the concrete.
“The red snapper and the red porgies are the two initial species that you see,” says Bob Shipp, head of marine sciences at the University of South Alabama. After that, you see vermilion snapper and triggerfish as the next order of abundance. Groupers are the last fish to set in.”
Both the University of South Alabama and the Alabama state Marine Resources division are using tiny unmanned submarines fitted with underwater video cameras to keep an eye on the reefs and their videos show dense congregations of spadefish, porgies, snapper, soap fish, queen angelfish and grouper.
“My gut feeling is that fish populations on the reefs are a reflection of relative local abundance in the adjacent habitat,” says Shipp. “Red snapper and red porgy are the most abundant fish in that depth. They forage away from their home reefs and find new areas. That’s why they are first and the most abundant.”
What if anyone finds out?
So, how can you keep one hundred 7,500 pound concrete structures a secret for years and years in the extremely busy Mexican Gulf? Shipp says he believes at least one of the reefs has been discovered, since they got only a few fish when they sampled that reef using rod and reel. Compared to other nearby pyramid reefs, that yield was miniscule which may indicate that fishermen are on to the secret. As Shipp and his crew approached the reef, a commercial fishing boat could be seen motoring away from the spot.
The Florida legislature has unanimously passed a bill to create the “Florida Coral Reef Protection Act”.
The new act will protect Florida’s coral reefs from boat groundings and injuries caused by anchoring by providing penalties for anchoring on a coral reef or making any other vessel damages the corals. Depending on the nature and extent of the damage, wrongdoers will pay damages ranging form $150 to $250,000.
The “Florida Coral Reef Protection Act” applies to all State waters that contain coral reefs off the coasts of Broward, Martin, Miami-Dade, Monroe, and Palm Beach counties.
The legislature determined that coral reefs are valuable natural resources that contribute ecologically, aesthetically, and economically to the state of Florida. It also declared that it is in the best interest of the state of Florida to clarify the Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s powers and authority to protect coral reefs through timely and efficient recovery of monetary damages resulting from vessel groundings and anchoring related injuries.
The passage of the act has been preceded by several months of negotiations among various state agencies, stakeholder and environmental groups, including the Marine Industry Association and Reef Relief whose involvement greatly contributed to the act becoming a reality. Another important participant was the Palm Beach County Reef Rescue which has worked with the regulatory community for several years to develop a more effective enforcement strategy against coral reef anchoring.
To see a link to the legislation click here
As part of a reef restoration study, researchers removed 20 specimens of the Caribbean giant barrel sponge from the Conch Reef off of Key Largo, Florida and then re-attached them using sponge holders consisting of polyvinyl chloride piping. The sponge holders were anchored in concrete blocks set on a plastic mesh base. Some sponges were reattached at a depth of 15 meters and some further down at 30 metres.
Venus Flower Basket sponge. A deep sea glass species.
The results of the study now show that sponges are capable of reattaching themselves to reefs if we help them by keeping them properly secured during the recuperation period. After being held stationary by sponge holders for as little as 6 months the sponges had reattached themselves to the Conch Reef. Of the 20 specimens reattached in 2004 and 2005, 62.5 percent survived at least 2.3-3 years and 90 percent of the sponges attached in deep water locations survived. During the study period, the area endured no less than four hurricanes.
This is very good news for anyone interested in reef restoration, since the new technique can be used to rescue sponges that have been dislodged from reefs by human activities or storms. Each year, a large number of sponges are extricated from reefs by human activities such as vessel groundings and the cutting movements of chains and ropes moving along with debris in strong currents. Severe storms can also rip sponges from the reef, which wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that so many sponges are also being removed by human activities. When combined, storms and human activities risk decimating sponge populations. Old sponges can be hundreds or even thousands of years old and their diameter can exceed 1 meter (over 3 feet). Sponges of such an impressive size and age can naturally not be rapidly replaced by new sponges if they die.
Sponges can survive for quite a while after being dislodged but is difficult for them to reattach themselves to reefs without any help since they tend to be swept away by currents and end up between reef spurs on sand or rubble, where they slowly erode and eventually die.
“The worldwide decline of coral reef ecosystems has prompted many local restoration efforts, which typically focus on reattachment of reef-building corals,” says Professor Joseph Pawlik of the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, co-author of the study. “Despite their dominance on coral reefs, large sponges are generally excluded from restoration efforts because of a lack of suitable methods for sponge reattachment.”
The results of the study, which were published in Restoration Ecology, show that we can help the sponges to survive by using the new technique. Earlier attempts were less successful since they relied on cement or epoxy; two types of adhesives that do not bind well to sponge tissue.
A NOAA* expedition by has discovered seven new species of Bamboo corals (family Isididae) in the deep waters off Hawaii Six of them may belong to en entirely new genus.
The findings were made within the Papah Naumoku Kea Marine National Monument, one of the biggest marine conservation areas in the world.
“These discoveries are important, because deep-sea corals support diverse seafloor ecosystems and also because these corals may be among the first marine organisms to be affected by ocean acidification,” said Dr Richard Spinrad, NOAA’s assistant administrator for Oceanic and Atmospheric Research.
The NOAA expedition made a lot of other interesting findings in addition to the new species, including a five foot (roughly 150 cm) tall Yellow bamboo coral tree and a 600 meter deep coral graveyard comprising an area of more 1 square kilometre. It is difficult to determine when the corals in the graveyard died; it could have happened a few thousand years back as well as more than one million years ago – or anytime in between.
Old corals can provide us with a lot of information about Earth’s history and how the oceans have changed over time since corals produce growth rings in a fashion similar to that of trees.
“Studying these corals can help us understand how they survive for such long periods of time, as well as how they may respond to climate change in the future,” said Rob Dunbar, a Stanford University scientist.
* The US Department of Commerce’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
A new study from Carl Meyer and Kim Holland of the Hawai’i Institute for Marine Biology encompassing four protected marine sites in Hawai’i reveals that snorkelers and scuba divers only have a low impact on coral reef habitants at these sites and that the impact is limited to comparatively small areas.
The study, funded by NOAA Fisheries and the Department of Land and Natural Resources’ Division of Aquatic Resources, is based on secret observations of snorkelers and scuba divers at four marine life conservation districts: Honolua-Mokule’ia on Maui, Kealakekua Bay on the Big Island, Manele-Hulopo’e on Lana’I, and Pupukea on O’ahu’s North Shore.
“These are areas created with the overarching goal of maintaining an environment in pristine or near pristine condition“, says Meyer. “One of the ironies is that because it’s such a nice area, a lot of people want to come and visit it, and that sets up the potential for the original goal of marine protected areas to be undermined by overuse.“
The researchers used handheld Global Positioning System (GPS) units to map the movements of swimmers in the water and identify “hot spots” where the highest amount of contacts with reefs and other substrate took place. They found that divers and snorkelers use no more than 15 percent of the total reef habitat at each studied site and that the visitors stay within comparatively small areas associated with access points.
“Although Hawai’i marine protected areas were heavily used in comparison to those in other geographic locations, this did not translate into high recreation impact because most fragile corals were located below the maximum depth of impact of the dominant recreational activity (snorkeling),” according to the report.
The Meyer and Holland study provides information on a subject suffering form a severe shortage of reliable data.
“A lot of work on marine protected areas has focused on what the marine life is doing, not people,” saysMeyer, who hopes that information from the study will be used to create designated access points and boat moorings to focus activities away from the most sensitive parts of the reefs. By looking at a dive site’s topographical features, it is possible to predict where snorkelers and scuba divers are most likely to proceed from an access point.
“If you manage those access points somehow, you can determine where people go,” Meyer explains.
According to data retrieved from the study, boat access has a lower impact per dive than shore access, for several reasons. People that dive and snorkel from a boat do not access the site from land so there is no wading involved, but information and supervision also seem to play a major role.
Divers and snorkelers on tour boats are instructed on proper reef behaviour before going into the water and they are also monitored by dive tour staff.
“If people are doing things they are not supposed to be doing, I’ve seen them intervene, and that separates boat-based activities from shore-based,” says Meyer.
Shore-based snorkelers and divers may of course receive instructions from shops where they rent their gear, but they will not be as strictly supervised during the actual dive as those who access from tour boats. There is less on-site management at dive spots accessed from shore, Mayer says.
According to the study, most of the substrate contacts between reef and humans occurred at shoreline access points where people waded to enter and exit the ocean. Even in such areas, the reef impact level was low since the contacts mainly involved sand or rocks where no coral grew. (The study does however point out that we “cannot rule out that (coral) colonization is being prevented by continued trampling.”) Only 14 percent of the contacts were between humans and live substrates, such coral, coralline algae, or invertebrates living attached to the substrate, and less than 1 percent of the contacts caused apparent damage, e.g. tissue abrasions or broken branches. Most of the damage was caused by snorkelers accessing from the shore. Scuba divers do however have a greater average impact on coral per dive than snorkelers, chiefly because scuba divers stay down longer each dive, explore a larger area, and venture deeper down.
As in many other parts of the world, a major part of the damage is caused by a comparatively small part of the population.
“One of things we noticed is that about half of the physical impacts that we observed in these areas [shoreline access points] resulted from only 16 percent of the people who are using it,” Meyer says. “There is a subset of people who have a much higher impact. If you can reach that 16 percent, you could literally halve the existing impact.”
Meyer suggests placing educational signs at popular dive sites and letting volunteers provide visitors with information and advice.
Although coral trampling only damages a very small part of Hawai’i’s total reef resources, the damage naturally tend to take place along beaches and at offshore sites of high recreational value.
The state of Hawai’i’ is heavily dependant on its $800 million ocean recreation industry and managing even heavily visited areas is therefore imperative for the long-term financial stability of this island state and its inhabitants.
According to Ku’ulei Rodgers, another scientist with the Hawai’i Institute for Marine Biology, increased visitor use results in a clear pattern of decreasing coral cover and lower fish populations since popular reefs can’t recover from damages while being continuously trampled.
“It can do really heavy damage to have people standing on the reef, but the good news is there are few places where there is a heavy impact from tourists. It’s mostly concentrated in places like Waikiki and Hanauma,” she said.
During the last fiscal year, the lower beach at the renowned snorkelling site Hanauma Bay was visited by 780,000 people. This can be compared to the areas studied by Meyer and Holland where the most heavily visited site, Kealakekua, was visited by roughly 103,300 snorkelers and 1,440 divers annually. Honolua-Mokule’ia received 84,000 snorkelers and 2,050 divers, Pupukea 47,700 snorkelers and 22,500 divers, and Manele-Hulopo’e a mere 28,200 snorkelers and 1,750 divers.
In some situations, education and information simply isn’t enough. Last year, people straying onto unmarked coastal trails and trampling reefs at two popular snorkelling coves (the Aquarium and the Fish Bowl) forced managers of the ‘Ahihi-Kina’u Natural Reserve Area in South Maui to close much of the reserve’s 2,045 acres.
“It was a big step for us,” says Bill Evanson, Maui District natural area manager for the Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR).
The closure took place in October and will be in effect for two years to give damaged areas a chance to recover. An advisory board is currently considering whether to allow future access by permit only or through guided hikes. Before the closure, the ‘Ahihi-Kina’u Natural Reserve received 700 to 1,000 visitors a day.
The ‘Ahihi-Kina’u reserve was created for conservational reasons and is home to some of Hawai’i’s oldest reefs. Within the reserve, you can find rare anchialine ponds as well as numerous extraordinary geological and archaeological features.
Even though the reserve has only been closed since October last year, there are already noticeable signs of recovery.
“We’re seeing that many of the tide pools and coves where there used to be people are inhabited by fish in numbers and variety we haven’t seen,“ says Evanson. “Fish aren’t being scared away by the presence of people. Now they are able to feed, hide from larger predatory fish and breed.“
Good news from Queensland: Certain reefs in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Marine Park seem to have undergone a remarkable recovery since the devastating Keppel Islands coral bleaching event of 2006.
In 2006, massive and severe coral bleaching occurred around the Keppel Islands due to high sea temperatures. After being bleached, the reefs rapidly became overgrown with a species of seaweed and scientists feared this would be the end of the corals.
Picture is not from Keppel Island. It is another part of the Great barrier reef
Earlier studies have indicated that reefs that do manage to recover from catastrophes like this one need at least a decade or two to bounce back. However, a lucky combination of three previously underestimated ecological mechanisms now seems to have made it possible for the Keppel Islands reefs to make an amazing recovery, with large numbers of corals re-establishing themselves within a single year.
“Three factors were critical,” says Dr Guillermo Diaz-Pulido, from the Centre for Marine Studies at The University of Queensland and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (CoECRS). “The first was exceptionally high regrowth of fragments of surviving coral tissue. The second was an unusual seasonal dieback in the seaweeds, and the third was the presence of a highly competitive coral species, which was able to outgrow the seaweed.“
Dr Diaz-Pulido also stresses that the astonishing recovery took place in a well-protected marine area where the water quality is at least moderately good.
Surviving tissue, not sexual reproduction
“The exceptional aspect was that corals recovered by rapidly regrowing from surviving tissue,” explains Dr Sophie Dove, also from CoECRS and The University of Queensland. “Recovery of corals is usually thought to depend on sexual reproduction and the settlement and growth of new corals arriving from other reefs. This study demonstrates that for fast-growing coral species asexual reproduction is a vital component of reef resilience.”
Buying time
According to Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, also of the CoECRS and The University of Queensland, understanding the different mechanisms of resilience will be critical for reef management under climate change. “Clearly, we need to urgently deal with the problem of rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but managing reefs to reduce the impact of local factors can buy important time while we do this. Our study suggests that managing local stresses that affect reefs, such as overfishing and declining water quality, can have a big influence on the trajectory of reefs under rapid global change.”
Dr Laurence McCook from the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority agrees. “As climate change and other human impacts intensify, we need to do everything we possibly can to protect the resilience of coral reefs. This combination of circumstances provided a lucky escape for the coral reefs in Keppel Islands, but is also a clear warning for the Great Barrier Reef.“
You can find out more about the remarkable recovery in the paper “Doom and boom on a resilient reef: Climate change, algal overgrowth and coral recovery”, published in the journal PLoS ONE, by Guillermo Diaz-Pulido, Laurence J. McCook, Sophie Dove, Ray Berkelmans, George Roff, David I. Kline, Scarla Weeks, Richard D. Evans, David H. Williamson and Ove Hoegh-Guldberg.
Zoology Prof. Yossi Loya at the Tel Aviv University in Israel has discovered that corals changes sex to survive periods of stress, such as high water temperatures. By observing the behaviour of Japanese sea corals he discovered that stressed female mushroom coral (fungiid coral) change gender to become males, and that male corals are much better at handling stress and fare better at surviving on limited resources. Not all females go through his change but many do and most of the population is therefore male during periods of intense stress.
Yossi Loya says: “We believe, as with orchids and some trees, sex change in corals increases their overall fitness, reinforcing the important role of reproductive plasticity in determining their evolutionary success. One of the evolutionary strategies that some corals use to survive seems to be their ability to change from female to male, As males, they can pass through the bad years, then, when circumstances become more favourable, change back to overt females. Being a female takes more energy, males are less expensive to maintain. They are cheaper in terms of their gonads and the energy needed to maintain their bodies. Having the ability to change gender periodically enables a species to maximize its reproductive effort.”
Loya’s discoveries have been published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The professor hopes that this new knowledge will help coral farmers by allowing them to reproduce the hardy Fungiid corals more effectively.
Loya has been studying coral reefs for more than 35 years and won the prestigious Darwin Medal for a lifetime contribution to the study of coral reefs. He is also involved in coral rehabilitation projects in the Red Sea and is a professor at the Tel Aviv University in Israel.
A group of scientists from the Catalyst One expedition has discovered three previously unknown coral reefs 35 miles of the coast of Florida. The coral reefs consist mainly of Lophelia coral and are located at a depth of 450 metres (1475 feet).
Lophelia pertusa is a cold-water coral famous for its lack of zooxanthellae. The well known coral reefs found in warm, shallow waters – such as the Great Barrier Reef – consist of reef building corals that utilize energy from the sun by forming symbiotic relationship with photosynthesising algae. Lophelia pertusa on the other hand lives at great depths where there isn’t enough sunlight to sustain photosynthesising creatures, and survives by feeding on plankton.
The deep-sea reef habitat formed by Lophelia pertusa is important for a long row of deep water species, such as lanternfish, hatchetfish, conger eels and various molluscs, amphipods, and brittle stars. The reefs that we see today are extremely old, since Lophelia reefs typically grow no more than 1 mm per year. Unfortunately, these deep reefs are today being harmed by trawling and oil extraction.
The Catalyst One expedition will submit its newly acquired information to the South Atlantic Fisheries Management Council to provide further data for the proposed Deep Coral Habitat Area of Particular Concern (HAPC).
The Catalyst One expedition is a collaboration between the Waitt Institute for Discovery, the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute at Florida Atlantic University, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. It combines the scientific expertise of Harbor Branch’s senior research professor, John Reed, with Woods Hole’s high-tech operations skills and Waitt Institute’s modern autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs).
In order to reach these great depths and efficiently explore substantial areas, the expedition used REMUS 6000 AUV vehicles capable of carrying two kinds of sonar and a camera. With this type of equipment, each mission can last for up to 18 hours and provides the researchers with mosaic pictures of the bottom, pictures that can then be pieced together to form a detailed, high-definition map.
“Rarely do scientific expeditions produce solid results this quickly,” says Dr Shirley Pomponi, executive director of Harbor Branch. “This is a big win for the resource managers tasked with protecting these reefs and proof that cutting edge technology combined with the seamless teamwork of the three organisations involved in Catalyst One can accelerate the pace of discovery.”
You can find more information about the Catalyst program at the Waitt Institute for Discovery.
Rare coral species may be saving themselves from extinction by hybridising with other coral species, says Australian scientist Zoe Richards. Richards and his colleagues have studied 14 rare[1] and eight common coral species of the genus Acropora in the Indo-Pacific.
In order to find out more about hybridisation among corals, the team did a phylogenetic analysis using the highly polymorphic single-copy nuclear Pax-C 46/47 intron and the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) control region as markers.
The analysis showed that many of the rare species are polyphyletic for both Pax-C and mitochondrial phylogenies, and this is seen as a clear sign of interspecific hybridisation.
The results of the study “Some rare Indo-Pacific coral species are probable hybrids” by Richards, Oppen, Wallace, Willis and Miller were published in a recent issue of the journal PLoS ONE[2].
In their paper, the authors explain how “[t]he results presented here imply that a number of rare Indo-Pacific Acropora species are the products of recent hybridisation events, and highlight the significance of hybridisation in coral diversification. Whether these species have hybrid origins or have evolved and then hybridised in the absence of conspecific gametes remains to be elucidated.”
“In summary, although it has often been assumed that small populations have a decreased potential for adaptation, our analyses imply that some rare acroporid corals may actually have increased adaptive potential as a consequence of introgressive hybridisation, and therefore may be less vulnerable to extinction than has been assumed.”
[1] For the purposes of this study, rare species were defined as those which have been recorded at less than 2.5% of sites for which data are available in the World Wide Acropora Database.
[2] Richards ZT, MJH van Oppen, CC Wallace, BL Willis and DJ Miller (2008) Some rare Indo-Pacific coral species are probable hybrids. PLoS ONE 3(9), e3240. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0003240
A six-month long investigation by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission (FWC) has led to the arrest of seven adults and one juvenile in Tampa. The arrested persons are believed to have been involved in various illegal activates concerning marine life, including catching protected sharks, sea horses, peppermint shrimp and bay scallops in Floridian waters, and exporting illegally obtained marine life to Europe. They are also suspected of having sold bait fish and bait shrimp as food for human consumption.
According to the FWC, the ring is believed to have operated for at least five years before attracting the attention of FWC. The ring lost a lot of animals due to poor maintenance, but the FWC still believes the group managed to sell $600,000 worth of peppermint shrimp alone.
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission came into existence on July 1, 1999. The Investigations Section of the commission conducts both overt (uniform) and covert (plainclothes) investigations, and one of their tasks is to target hard-core commercial violators by conducting long-term undercover investigations. In 2003, the Investigations Section made 554 arrests/warnings and seized 130 illegally possessed specimens of fish and wildlife including a cougar, tigers, leopards, primates, exotic deer, venomous reptiles, protected birds and exotic aquatic species.