Coral Bleaching (Week 8) - Post 2

Coral Bleaching 

           All around the world corals are dying at incredible rates due to ocean warming, a direct result of global climate change. Corals are a vital part of the environment, and as more and more die out, the lively hood of humans and the ocean's ecosystem is threatened. As humans increase carbon dioxide concentrations in the air more heat is trapped. This trapped heat increases the global temperature and the ocean temperature. Through studying the ocean scientists have found that humans have changed the ocean's average temperature. The ocean has normal cycles of warming and cooling that it goes through, but with increased temperatures, those warming periods keep getting warmer and warmer and warmer. And for an animal like coral, that sustains itself through a healthy ocean, these levels of warming are deadly. A common misconception is that corals, and coral reefs are nonliving, or inactive plants, but corals are actually highly sophisticated animals that live in symbiosis with plant structure. A single coral individual is really made up of thousands of small protruding structures called polyps. Each of these polyps have millions of small plants, called microalgae, living inside their tissue. These plants photosynthesize to provide the coral with food. This coral that lives underwater is very fragile, as any living thing is, and ocean waters warming by just two degrees Celsius is fatal. The warming of ocean temperatures essentially causes the same response in corals that a fever causes in human bodies. The small planta, the microalgae that live inside the coral's tissue can not photosynthesize when temperatures rise beyond two degrees. The coral animal senses that the microalgae are not responding properly and they dispell them in same way that humans will try to get rid of a bacteria. With the tiny plants gone, all that's left of the coral is this transparent naked tissue, it has lost its most important food source and the animal is no longer functional. When the coral bleaches and appears totally white in color, what is seen is really just the skeleton of the coral. Then, the bright white will fade away and fuzzy moss and algae will grow on it. When the whole surface of the coral has become much fuzzier to look at, that is an indication that the coral has died. There is no question that ocean's are warming. looking at temperature anomalies back to the 1800s, there was always a steady average, however in the last thirty years that average has increased, and temperature anomalies are now well into the danger area for corals. In the early 1980s the first global mass bleaching event hit. Then in 2010, only twelve years later a second mass bleaching event hit, and a third event is fast approaching. All the while corals are still bleaching all over the world every single year. The Great Barrier Reef in Australia is the size of the entire East Coast line of the United States. And in 2016 alone twenty nine percent of the Reef died. twenty nine percent in a single bleaching event. That is equivalent to losing a majority of the trees between Washington D.C. and Maine. Since the 1980s eighty to ninety percent of the corals in Florida have died. In the last thirty years over fifty percent of the world's corals have died. This bleaching phenomenon is not a natural cycle. One way scientists look at past coral is with coral cores. Coral cores are slices of corals that scientists extract. A coral core keeps record of growth the same way trees do with tree rings. With these cores a regular growth pattern is visible. The coral will grow around a centimeter and a half per year, right up until the 1980s when signatures of a coral bleaching are present. By looking back in time scientists can determine that the effects of recent years are not a natural fluctuation. The cause is directly attributed to global climate change, driven by human emitted carbon dioxide in the air. The effect of rising ocean temperatures is devastating, not just because of the lost coral, but because everything that coral supports is lost as well. Corals are foundation species, they have hundreds of other living organisms that depend on them. Its the consortium of different types of corals that cooperate together to create these massive structures that are called coral reefs. As Dr. Ruth Gates a coral reef biologist at Hawaii University has said "When a 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 on of the big fish." Coral reefs are imperative to a healthy ocean because they're essentially the nursery. twenty five percent of all marine life relies on coral reefs. Beyond that humans rely on coral reefs for food. Between half a billion to a billion people rely on coral reefs as their main source of food. Without that protein those people will be malnourished. People's culture, way of life, and economies rely on healthy coral reef systems. In addition to the fact that people use the reefs for food, there are also people who rely on the reefs for medicine. There are drugs like Prostaglandin and Bryostatin that come from different corals that are used to fight cancer. Then there are storms, coral reefs provide massive sections of breakwater that protects coastlines from big waves and cyclones. Coral reefs are so vital oceans and to humans, and based on current trends and climate model prediction, within the next thirty years annual bleaching will kill almost all of the world's corals. If humans do not address the warming of the planet, an entire ecosystem could be lost, and millions of people will suffer.
          Everything on planet earth is connected. Every ecosystem relies on another, supports another. Humans are changing the chemistry of the air, destroying the ice caps, killing the coral. Coral reefs make up an ecosystem in the environment and the loss of them will cause a lot of harm to the environment. But the real danger is what will come next. Because if humans can destroy an entire ecosystem and not even look up, which ecosystem will be next? And how many ecosystems will be destroyed before the whole environment collapses. Global action needs to be taken in order to prevent these disasters. Humans would have a much better time mitigating these events then adapting to them.