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.

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 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.

For the first time, a predatory coral has been captured by the camera while eating a jellyfish almost equal to its size. The event occurred in March 2009 during a dive among the Red Sea reefs located near Eilat in Israel, and the photos has now been published in the journal Coral Reefs.

Israeli researchers Omri Bronstein from Tel Aviv University and Gal Dishon from Bar-Ilan University were conducting a survey on reefs when they spotted a mushroom coral sucking in a moon jellyfish.

“During the survey we were amazed to notice some mushroom corals actively feeding on the moon jellyfish,” says Ada Alamaru, a member of the research team who is doing her PhD in marine biology supervised by Prof Yossi Loya at Tel Aviv University. “We couldn’t believe our eyes when we saw it.”

Corals are predatory animals but most of them feed on tiny plankton, and corals living close to the surface can also obtain energy by forming symbiotic relationships with photosynthesising algae. While it may be possible for plankton eating corals to ingest miniscule embryonic jellyfish, this is the first time anyone has photographed a coral feasting on adult jelly.

“This is definitely unusual. As far as I know no other coral are reported to feed on jellyfish. However, some sea anemones, which are close relatives of corals, are documented feeding on other jelly species,” Alamaru explains.

The coral in question was a mushroom coral belonging to the species Fungia scruposa while the unfortunate jellyfish was an Aurelia aurita – a type of moon jellyfish. Exactly how the coral managed to capture the jellyfish remains a mystery. The area was subjected to a seasonal bloom of jellyfish brought on by nutrient rich ocean currents.

A previously unknown field of endangered Staghorn coral has been found in Florida waters by scuba divers belonging to the non-profit group Palm Beach County Reef Rescue.

“We’ve found the largest field (of the coral) in the county,” says Reef Rescue’s director Ed Tichenor. “We’re really surprised by this.”

The field, which is located roughly a mile east of Palm Beach island, is significant since Palm Beach town officials have objected to federal protection of the area.

Last year, the National Marine Fisheries Service designated roughly 1,300 square miles of ocean floor – ranging from the Florida Key to the Boynton Beach Inlet – as critical habitat for staghorn. This prompted the Palm Beach County Reef Rescue to petition the government to extend the protected area northwards to the Lake Worth Inlet, thereby including the coast off Palm Beach.

The Palm Beach County Reef Rescue estimates the newfound staghorn field to be between 100 and 300 feet long.

“I was expecting to see it but not as much,” said Connie Gasque, a Palm Beach resident who led the dive group. “My reaction was ‘Wow!

Everywhere you looked, there it was.”

Before this discovery, only small pockets of staghorn coral was known to exist in the waters off Palm Beach.

Palm Beach County Reef Rescue now hopes that the discovery will convince the National Marine Fisheries Service to include the region in the protected coral zone.

What is Staghorn?

Staghorn (Acropora cervicornis) is a branching coral that can reach a length of up to 2 meters (almost 7 feet). It is the fastest growing species of all West Atlantic corals and can grow 10-20 cm per year in favourable conditions. The natural range for Staghorn coral stretches from Florida, USA through the Bahamas and the Carribbean Sea, down to Venezuela in South America.

Acropora cervicornis was placed on the U.S. Endangered Species List in 2006, and it is also listed as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, staghorn is not found north of Boca Raton.

New coral reefs and hills have been discovered in Lónsdjúp, off Iceland’s eastern coast.

The corals, which come in two different colours, were stumbled upon by the Icelandic Marine Research Institute during a submarine research expedition in June.

The newfound coral area is located within a 40-square-kilometer vicinity at a depth of 200 to 500 meters. Unlike the corals that form reefs in tropical environments, the Icelandic corals are cold water species. Since no sunlight reaches them at these great depths they cannot carry out any photosynthesis. Instead, they survive by filtering nutrition from ocean currents.

“What makes these so special is that they take a very long time to grow; it takes a coral reef several hundred thousands of years to develop and in that time it creates a special habitat for other organisms,” says Steinunn Hilma Ólafsdóttir, an expert in demersal organisms.

All other known coral areas off the coast of Iceland are protected as nature reserves.

The reef in the picture is not the newly discovered reef. It is a picture from the great barrier reef.

Around 55 percent of coral reefs in South Sulawesi waters have been damaged by destructive fishing practices, the South Sulawesi marine and fishery service announced on Wednesday. Due to the destructive practise of throwing explosives into the water to catch fish, only 45 percent of the coral reefs in the national marine park of Takabonerate are in good condition.

The Indonesian Naval personal have arrested fishermen in South Sulawesi for using explosives to catch fish, but the practise continues.

Takabonerate is considered the world`s third most beautiful marine park and has received an award from the World Ocean Conference (WOC) which was held in Manado, North Sulawesi, this month. This marine park is located within the famous Coral Triangle; a Pacific region home to over 75 percent of the world’s known coral species. This figure becomes even more remarkable if you take into account that the triangle only comprises two percent of the world’s ocean.

Hopefully, the situation in the region will improve as six heads of state/government participating in the Coral Triangle Initiative (CTI) Summit organized as part of the WOC signed a declaration on May 15, approving the Coral Triangle Initiative Program. Within this program, the six countries who share this amazingly coral rich region will coordinate their protection of marine resources.

Over 120 million people depend on the Coral Triangle ecosystem for their survival and would suffer greatly if the diversity of fish, shellfish and other marine creatures were to become depleted due to unsustainable fishing practises.

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.