Coral Bleaching (Week 8) - Post 1

Chasing Coral Documentary Notes

Lead Scientist- Richard Vevers

Richard Vevers Founder and CEO, The Ocean Agency Richard Vevers is the founder and CEO of The Ocean Agency, an unconventional not-for-profit that uses the powerful combination of new technology, media, partnerships, and above all creativity to work at a meaningful speed and scale. Prior to joining the field of ocean conservation, Vevers worked for over ten years at some of the top London advertising agencies, and it is this background that allows him to bring a new approach to ocean conservation. He believes that the combination of creative thinking, effective communication, and strong global partnerships in business, science, and conservation are key to solving the threats facing the ocean. This thinking has manifested in groundbreaking ocean science and conservation projects, such as the XL Catlin Seaview Survey, the most comprehensive survey of the world’s coral reefs ever conducted.Together with The Ocean Agency, Vevers pioneered underwater 360-degree photography technology, leading to the most viewed underwater photography in history as he brought Google Street View underwater. For the last few years, he has lead the only team recording and revealing the Third Global Coral Bleaching event to the world - a mission that resulted in Vevers being the main subject in Jeff Orlowski’s latest documentary film, Chasing Coral.

Lead Technician- Zackery Rago 

 Zack’s passion for coral reefs began in the Hawaiian Islands were he spent his childhood summers under the waves of the Pacific. His infatuation with coral led to a position in the marine aquarium industry for 4 years before bringing his passion to Teens4Oceans and View Into The Blue. He received a degree in Evolutionary Biology & Ecology from the University of Colorado at Boulder. As a talented reef aquarist and long time scuba diver, he is dedicated to communicating the story of coral through science and art.

Chasing Coral Documentary Notes

-The ocean is a source of life, it controls the weather, it controls the climate, it controls the oxygen we breathe, without a healthy ocean we do not have a healthy planet.

-We’ve lost 80 to 90% of corals in Florida.

-In the last 30 years we’ve lost 50% of the world’s corals

What is coral?

“A coral individual is really made up of thousands of small structures called polyps. Each polyp is a circular mouth surrounded by tentacles and they can combine to be millions of them across a single animal. They have, inside their tissues, small plants, these microalgae, a million per centimeter squared. The plants that live inside them photosynthesize, and the animal uses that for their food. They essentially have food factories living inside of themselves.

So as the animal grows what you see is the animal growing over the skeleton and depositing the skeleton underneath it. They photosynthesize during the day, at night the plant’s really essentially asleep and the animal comes active. They expand their polyps. The tentacles come out. And now anything that swims by is caught by these stinging cells that are on the tips of the tentacles.

There are many different species of corals, and the different species of corals are different shapes. These are foundation species, they have all these other organisms that depend on them. They are the reason we have reefs. A consortium of organisms that cooperate together that now manifests in these massive structures that can be seen from space.”

- Dr. Ruth Gates / Coral Reef Biologists 

Coral Bleaching

“We look at climate change as if it’s an issue in the air. And you go, “one or two degrees Celsius? Does that really matter?” But when you talk about the ocean it’s like your body temperature is changing. Imagine your body temperature rises one-degree cenitgrade, or two degrees centigrade. Over a period of time, that would be fatal. And that’s the seriousness of the issue when you look at it in terms of the ocean.” - Vevers

“Coral bleaching is much like a fever in humans is a stress response. If the temperature spikes just a little bit above their normal range corals will start to bleach. The small plants that live inside their tissues, their ability to photosynthesize and feed the animal host is impaired. The animal essentially senses that: “I’ve got something inside of me that is not doing what I expect it to do,” and as happens with us, with when we get a bacteria, we try to get rid of it as quickly as possible. That’s exactly what these animals do. They try to get rid of those plants that are no longer functional and leave behind the transparent naked tissue. They’ve lost the very most important food source they have. So it’s starting to starve.” -Dr. Ruth Gates

“When the coral bleaches the flesh becomes clear. And what you’re seeing is it’s skeleton underneath. So, the bright whites that you see in the pictures is just the skeletons everywhere.” - Cleves

“If it’s a very clean white look about the coral it will still be alive. It’s not allowing anything else to grow on it. It will generally not grow. It will generally not reproduce. It is likely to die.

You’ll see these fuzzy microalgae. The whole surface suddenly becomes much, much fuzzier to look at. That’s an indication that the coral has died.” Dr. Ruth Gates

Ocean Warming

“The one thing that temperatures have shown us, with no question, is the oceans have been warming. Temperatures in the ocean go through normal cycles. If the temperature were staying constant, then all those ups and downs would be around that average temperature. But now we’ve reached that point that we’ve changed that average. Your warm temperatures keep getting warmer and warmer and warmer. The first widespread bleaching event occured in the early 1980s. 97’, 98’, this was the first global-scale mass-bleaching. A lot of corals bleached, a lot of corals died. 2010, only 12 years later, we saw the second global-scale mass bleaching. Now, only five years later we’ve got the potential of the third global-scale mass bleaching event.” -Dr. Mark Eakin / NOAA Coral Reef Watch 

 

The Importance of Coral Reefs

“In a healthy coral reef system, the entire landscape is covered with coral. They’re competing for space with one another, the grow over and under.”-Dr. Ruth Gates

“Coral reefs are hugely important for the ocean because they’re essentially the nursery. And they say something like 25% of all marine life relies on coral reefs.” -Richard Vevers

“We’ve got half a billion to a billion people that rely on coral reefs as their main source of food.” -Dr. Mark Eakin

“Without that protein they’re going to be malnourished. Their culture, their way of life, their economies are all reliant on healthy coral reefs. And many of the new drugs that are coming to help humans come from the sea. There’s a drug called prostaglandin that comes from sea fans, and that fights cancer. There’s another one called bryostatin that comes from coral rhizomes, and it fights cancer too. There are so many things that we don’t know yet, that could help society, through the novel chemistries that we find on coral reef organisms.   -Dr. James Porter / Marine Biologist

“Cora reefs are producing a breakwater that’s protecting us from big waves, from cyclones. They’re better than the ones that we can produce, because they’re growing and rebuilding it all the time.” -Dr. Mark Eakin

“The corals are the real basis of that ecosystem. You can’t have a city without buildings. And you can’t have a coral reef without the corals.” -Kleypas 

 

            The Great Barrier Reef

“Im standing on one of the two and a half thousand or so enormous platform reefs that make up Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Very few people can realize that this is the largest structure ever made by life on Earth. These reefs extend along the tropical coastline of Australia, a distance of over 2,000 kilometers, the length of the entire East Coast of the United States of America.” -Dr. Charles Veron

Coral History (Reef Cores)

“This isn’t a natural cycle. This is a phenomenon directly attributed to climate change, and it’s something that we’ve only seen in recent years.” -Dr. Richard Vevers

“One of the ways of looking back in time with a reef is to take coral cores, or slices through coral. You can look at growth rings in corals in the same way as you look at growth rings in trees. -Dr. Justin Marshall

“[talking about coral cores] You can see a regular, normal growth pattern. This coral grows at around a centimeter and a half per year, right up until 1998, where you start to see the signature of a coral bleaching event.” -Dr. Neal Cantin

“By tracking back in time, by looking at the history of the reef, we’re absolutely certain that what we’re seeing now is not a natural fluctuation. The cause is, unequivocally, global climate change, driven by emitting carbon into the atmosphere.” -Dr. Justin Marshall

 

Coral Bleaching Effect

“When coral bleaches and dies, you’re losing the coral animal and that’s a shame, because it’s a beautiful thing. But a coral is a fundamental part of a huge ecosystem. It is, in a way, just like the trees in a forest. If coral reefs are lost, we’re affecting the life of a quarter of the ocean. If the little fish disappear, the big fish disappear, and then you can look at humans as one of the big fish.”

“When scientists say they’re researching climate change and coral reefs, it’s not about whether or not climate change is happening or not. It’s really the uncertainty between knowing whether it’s going to be bad or really bad.

“When we look at ocean temperatures, there are a range of projections of how they’re going to change into the future. If you take the average, in a about 25 years all across the planet the oceans become too warm for coral reefs to survive. That means they’ll bleach every year and they won’t be healthy enough to recover.”  -Prof. Ove Hoegh Guldberg / Coral Reef Biologist 

 “Coral reefs will not be able to keep up, they will not be able to adapt, and we will see the eradication of an entire ecosystem in our lifespan.” -Dr. Ruth Gates

“Everything in our planet is connected. What we’re doing is pulling out the card called “coral reefs” from this house of cards. And the real fear is that we’ll take out enough of those cards where the whole thing will just simply collapse.” -Prof. Ove Hoegh Guldberg

Final Images (Over 2 Months)

“29% of the Great Barrier Reef died in 2016. 29% in a single bleaching event.”

“It’s equivalent to loosing most of the trees between Washington D.C and Maine.”

“This isn’t just the great barrier reef, this is a global massive event.”

“-This bleacing event has been the longest, deadliest, and most widespread in history.

-Based on current trends, within the next 30 years annual bleaching will kill mot of the world’s corals.

-If we don’t adress the warming of the planet we will lose this ecosystem and millions of people will suffer.”