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Extensive relict coral reef found in southern Pacific
ScienceDaily: Coral Reef News - Tue, 08/31/2010 - 19:00
Coral reefs are sensitive to climate change and track sea level. New observations show that an extensive coral reef existed in the southern Pacific Ocean thousands of years ago. Researchers used multi-beam sonar, coring, and dating to examine a relict reef discovered in water about 20-25 meters (65-82 feet) deep around Lord Howe Island in the southern Pacific Ocean.
Categories: Coral Feeds
Coral off Puerto Rico's coast 'ideal case study' for Gulf oil spill's impact
ScienceDaily: Coral Reef News - Thu, 08/26/2010 - 22:00
Coral living off the coast of Puerto Rico may provide researchers valuable information about the potential impact of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Categories: Coral Feeds
Reefs at risk: Roundup at the not-so-OK coral corral
Scientific American Topic - Coral Reefs - Tue, 08/24/2010 - 07:00
Coral, the reef-building organisms responsible for some of the oceans' most vital ecosystems, are in trouble around the world because of climate change, ocean acidification and human interference. But lots of people are also trying to save coral reefs before it's too late. Here's a roundup of some of the latest research into this important class of organism.
Some of the worst news comes out of Indonesia, where the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) found that rising surface water temperatures have created a large-scale bleaching event in the local coral. Bleaching occurs when environmental factors stress the living organisms residing within coral reefs, causing them to either leave their reef structures or die. As a result, reefs turn white. WCS marine biologists found that at least 60 percent of the area's coral reefs, and 80 percent of some coral species in the region, have bleached and died following a 4-degree Celsius rise in water temperatures. Bleached coral reefs cannot support the variety of marine life that depend on coral for their survival. That, in turn, affects the ability of people to fish for their livelihoods around those reefs.
[More]Coral reef - Wildlife Conservation Society - Climate change - Coral bleaching - Ecology
Categories: Coral Feeds
A tale of two atolls
ScienceDaily: Coral Reef News - Sun, 08/22/2010 - 07:00
To gain new insights on the impact of fishing on coral reefs, marine biologists are taking advantage of an ongoing "natural experiment" at two isolated Pacific atolls -- one inhabited by people, the other off-limits to fishing.
Categories: Coral Feeds
Creation of the first frozen repository for Hawaiian coral
ScienceDaily: Coral Reef News - Thu, 08/19/2010 - 10:00
Scientists have created the first frozen bank for Hawaiian corals in an attempt to protect them from extinction and to preserve their diversity in Hawaii.
Categories: Coral Feeds
How corals fight back
ScienceDaily: Coral Reef News - Wed, 08/18/2010 - 22:00
Researchers are a step closer to understanding the rapid decline of our coral reefs, thanks to a breakthrough study linking coral immunity with its susceptibility to bleaching and disease.
Categories: Coral Feeds
Massive coral mortality following bleaching in Indonesia
ScienceDaily: Coral Reef News - Tue, 08/17/2010 - 01:00
Initial field observations indicate that a dramatic rise in the surface temperature in Indonesian waters has resulted in a large-scale bleaching event that has devastated coral populations.
Categories: Coral Feeds
Human noise pollution in ocean can lead fish away from good habitats and off to their death
ScienceDaily: Coral Reef News - Fri, 08/13/2010 - 16:00
The growing amount of human noise pollution in the ocean could lead fish away from good habitat and off to their death.
Categories: Coral Feeds
Living in a Landscape of Fear: How Predators Impact an Ecosystem
Scientific American Topic - Coral Reefs - Fri, 08/13/2010 - 09:00
Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from Cristina Eisenberg's book The Wolf’s Tooth .
A doe burst out of the forest and tore across the meadow, two wolves in close pursuit. This drama unfolded not twenty feet from where my young daughters and I knelt in our garden peacefully pulling weeds, our pant legs wet with morning dew. One black, the other gray, the black wolf in the lead, they closed in on the doe's haunches. In less than two heartbeats they pierced the deep wood on the far side of the meadow, leaving a wake of quaking vegetation.
[More]Gray Wolf - Drama - Biology - Environment - Mammalia
Categories: Coral Feeds
Scientists test Australia's Moreton Bay as coral 'lifeboat'
ScienceDaily: Coral Reef News - Fri, 08/13/2010 - 01:00
An international team of scientists has been exploring Australia's Moreton Bay, close to Brisbane, as a possible 'lifeboat' to save corals from the Great Barrier Reef at risk of extermination under climate change. In a new research paper, they say that corals have been able to survive and flourish in the Bay, which lies well to the south of the main GBR coral zones, during about half of the past 7000 years.
Categories: Coral Feeds
How Acidification Threatens Oceans from the Inside Out (preview)
Scientific American Topic - Coral Reefs - Mon, 08/09/2010 - 09:00
"Slow sperm ... now that’s a problem,” said Jonathan Havenhand, his British accent compounding the gravity of the message. “That means fewer fertilized eggs, fewer babies and smaller populations.” We were sharing a hilly cab ride along the glistening northern coast of Spain to attend an international symposium about the effects of climate change and excess atmospheric carbon dioxide on the world’s oceans. As researchers, we were concerned about the underappreciated effects of changing ocean chemistry on the cells, tissues and organs of marine species. In laboratory experiments at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, Havenhand had demonstrated that such changes could seriously impede the most fundamental strategy of survival: sex.
Ocean acidification--a result of too much carbon dioxide reacting with seawater to form carbonic acid--has been dubbed “the other CO 2 problem.” As the water becomes more acidic, corals and animals such as clams and mussels have trouble building their skeletons and shells. But even more sinister, the acidity can interfere with basic bodily functions for all marine animals, shelled or not. By disrupting processes as fundamental as growth and reproduction, ocean acidification threatens the animals’ health and even the survival of species. Time is running out to limit acidification before it irreparably harms the food chain on which the world’s oceans--and people--depend.
[More]Climate change - Ocean acidification - Acid - Carbon dioxide - Carbonic acid
Categories: Coral Feeds
NOAA divers capture invasive lionfish in the Virgin Islands National Park
ScienceDaily: Coral Reef News - Thu, 08/05/2010 - 23:00
Divers identified and killed a 15-cm-long lionfish in Fish Bay along the southern coast of St. John, making this the fourth such capture and kill of the invasive fish in the Virgin Islands National Park.
Categories: Coral Feeds
Fact or Fiction: Can a Squid Fly Out of the Water?
Scientific American Topic - Coral Reefs - Mon, 08/02/2010 - 11:00
Marine biologist Silvia Maciá was boating on the north coast of Jamaica in the summer of 2001 when she noticed something soar out of the sea. At first she thought it was a member of the flying fish family--a group of marine fish that escape predators by breaking the water's surface at great speed and gliding through the air on unusually large pectoral fins. But after tracing the creature's graceful arc for a few seconds, Maciá realized this was no fish. It was a squid--and it was flying. [More]
Squid - Fish - Marine biology - Jamaica - Proxying and Filtering
Categories: Coral Feeds
Extreme Function: Why Our Brains Respond So Intensely to Exaggerated Characteristics
Scientific American Topic - Coral Reefs - Mon, 08/02/2010 - 09:00
If someone showed you a caricature of Richard Nixon--a man’s face with oversize shaggy eyebrows, a bulbous nose and pronounced jowls--you would probably recognize the former president immediately, even though the drawing is not true to life. A cartoonist creates such a sketch by taking the average of many male faces and subtracting it from Nixon’s face, then amplifying those distinctive differences. To an observer, the result looks more like Nixon than Nixon himself. Why is it that our brains respond so intensely to extremes?
When the cartoon’s “Nixon-ness” jumps out at you, you are experiencing what scientists call “peak shift.” To understand the concept, imagine, for argument’s sake, that you want to teach a rat to distinguish a rectangle from a square. It’s quite easy to do. Simply give the animal cheese every time it picks the rectangle, and it will soon learn to select the rectangle every time. Once the rat has developed this preference, let’s say you show it a longer, skinnier rectangle. Inevitably, you will find that the rat prefers the exaggerated one to the original. What the rat has learned to recognize is not a particular rectangle but rather rectangularity itself: the more rectangular the better. The savvy rodent looks at the longer, skinnier quadrilateral and goes, “Wow, what a rectangle!” In scientific parlance, the rat’s “peak response”--its strongest reaction--has shifted away from the original--hence the term “peak shift.”
[More]Richard Nixon - Cartoon - Caricature - Rectangle - United States
Categories: Coral Feeds
The evolutionary origins of coral sex
ScienceDaily: Coral Reef News - Sun, 08/01/2010 - 23:00
Ancient corals consisted of mostly separate sexes and needed to pass through an evolutionarily period in which they brooded their young before they could become spawning hermaphrodites, according to new research.
Categories: Coral Feeds
Engineered coral pigment helps scientists to observe protein movement
ScienceDaily: Coral Reef News - Tue, 07/27/2010 - 16:00
Scientists have shown that a variant form of a fluorescent protein originally isolated from a reef coral has excellent properties as a marker protein for super-resolution microscopy in live cells.
Categories: Coral Feeds
Ancient Ocean Acidification Intimates Long Recovery from Climate Change
Scientific American Topic - Coral Reefs - Thu, 07/22/2010 - 16:01
Single-cell life-forms thrive throughout the world's oceans--and have for hundreds of millions of years. Tiny varieties known as calcareous nanoplankton build exuberant, microscopic shells --resembling wagon wheels, fishlike scales, even overlapping oval shields decorated with craggy explosions at their centers--known as "coccoliths". The ability to form these shells rests on the amount of calcium carbonate (CaCO3) dissolved in the seawater--and that amount depends on the concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2). [More]
Climate Change - Environment - Ocean acidification - Carbon dioxide - Activism
Categories: Coral Feeds
The New Normal?: Average Global Temperatures Continue to Rise
Scientific American Topic - Coral Reefs - Thu, 07/22/2010 - 10:01
Hot summers (and balmier winters) may simply be the new normal , thanks to carbon dioxide lingering in the atmosphere for centuries. [More]
Carbon dioxide - Atmosphere - Environment - Carbon Cycle - Products and Services
Categories: Coral Feeds
International law failing to protect coral reefs and tropical fish, experts argue
ScienceDaily: Coral Reef News - Wed, 07/21/2010 - 19:00
International law has failed to protect coral reefs and tropical fish from being decimated by a growing collectors market, but US reforms can lead the way towards making the trade more responsible, ecologically sustainable and humane, according to a group of 18 experts.
Categories: Coral Feeds
Unfair trade: A week in the world of illegal wildlife trafficking
Scientific American Topic - Coral Reefs - Tue, 07/20/2010 - 17:30
Illegal trade in endangered species continues to grow around the world. How big is the problem? Here are 10 major cases that have hit the media in just the past week: [More]
EndangeredSpecies - Wildlife - Illegal drug trade - Environment - Conservation and Endangered Species
Categories: Coral Feeds