Longest-ever period of coral bleaching to extend well into 2017

DAILY NEWS ,24 February 2016 ________The world’s corals are in hot water…
literally. Prolonged increases in ocean temperatures caused by this year’s severe El
Niño are intensifying the loss of corals around the planet.
“We are currently experiencing the longest global coral-bleaching event ever
observed,” says Mark Eakin, head of NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch in College Park,
Maryland. Eakin predicts that the bleaching, which started in 2014, will probably last
well into 2017.
Bleaching occurs when corals respond to stress by expelling the symbiotic algae they
rely on to provide them with food and energy. This causes them to pale to a ghostly
white colour, often leading to disease or death.

Since 2014, some 32 percent of the world’s reefs have seen temperatures that cause
bleaching, and off the US coast, nearly three-quarters of reefs have been exposed.
Eakin says that 60 percent of corals worldwide may be affected by the end of the
bleaching event. The extent of the resulting die-off is yet to be seen.
Eakin compares the continuous pressure that reefs have been under year after year
to a boxing bout. “What used to be a one-round fight is turning into a two- and three-
round fight,” he says.

Global events
Rob Ruzicka, a coral-reef ecologist at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation
Commission in Tallahassee, has studied the fallout from previous global bleaching of
coral during the 1998 El Niño and in 2010.

Following the 1998 event, Ruzicka found that on some reefs in the Florida Keys, the
seabed went from 14 to 7 per cent coral cover – a level at which it remains today.

This time round, he hasn’t seen as much die-off. “The corals that are here now might
be more resistant because they already endured an El Niño. Warming is happening
more and more, so they may have adapted,” says Ruzicka. “It’s unprecedented how
long the waters have been warm, but we don’t know if this is the worst event yet.
We’re still diagnosing the patient.”
Of particular concern are losses of older corals, which release more eggs and sperm
during reproduction than young ones, and bleaching in nurseries of corals
established to replace those that die off.
Apart from replacing lost corals, can anything be done?
Small-scale tests have shown that introducing cool water around corals can help their
colour return, which Eakin says shows promise for local interventions.

“The most important thing we can do is make sure that on a global scale we’re
working towards a reduction in climate change,” he says. “That’s the main source of
the bleaching on coral.”