20% of coral reefs dead

[Boogie711]

the problem is that all the above problems face ecomomic politics-that is, to solve them, certain very rich people would have to settle for less for a while-and they just won't agree to do that-and my friends, most of those very rich people live in these United States...its going to be a long uphill battle-don't give up-just know who you're fighting....Peace...Saildiver

Saildiver - what if I told you that the one you're fighting is yourself?

To say "they won't do it just because they don't want to spend the money" is simplistic and dangerous. Unfortunately, one of the resources we have to balance our use of is the available economic resources.

Let me give you an example - if you're familiar with the work of Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, you may have heard this. I'm not commenting on Dr. Lomborg's work (although I am a fan) but consider his point:

According to ICLEI, the cost to implement the Kyoto protocol is approximately $500 billion across the world annually.

How much is $500 billion? Well, in the first year, that would be enough to deliver a permanent source of clean drinking water to every person on earth. In the first year alone.

What's better - spending that $500 billion on a process which has unproven results, or on delivering clean water? Remember - this isn't a "both" situation. We simply don't have the resources to do both.

I feel spending any resources on the implementation of the Kyoto protocol is the equivalent of spending $500 billion on lottery tickets instead of contributing to a registered retirement plan.

 

[Rick Murchison]

Those flippin' Crown-of-Thorns aren't helping things in the Indo-Pacific. Of course, we think the starfish are going nuts due to people overharvesting their main predators, trumpet snails.

Just saw a show on the Crown of Thorns last week. At least one scientist in Australia is showing a pretty definitive direct correlation between CoT survival rates and nutrients in the water. Her theory is that overharvesting of the Triton is small potatoes compared to agricultural run-off.
On the other hand...
In our own water quality work here, we are finding agricultural run-off to be a tiny percentage of what we expected it to be, and a minor factor compared to some other major sources (ours is a different problem, but the agricultural run-off has turned out to not be the villain it was expected to be). Don't know about the GBR and nutrient sources though.
------
We would do well to realize that
(1) There have been three (maybe more) major worldwide die-offs of coral in the geologic past, before the first human struck the first fire.
(2) In geological time, we're just at the end of an ice age; average sea levels for the time between ice ages is some 150 - 200' higher than it is today (here the beach was near Prattville, AL, just north of Montgomery, 150 miles from the Gulf's current beach.)
(3) We may or may not figure into what's happening in any substantive way - we'd best be prepared to find out we can't do much to change global meteorlogical and oceanographic cycles, but rather have to adapt to what we can't control. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try... it just means we'd better be prepared to fail.
Rick

 

[tx.lakerats]

what all this means to me: I NEED more vacation time to see what's left of all the reefs!!

 

[Hank49]

Let me toss this one into the foray. Has anyone looked into the possibility of viral infections killing corals?
An example in crustaceans is, about 16 years ago or so, shimp farming was booming in Ecuador. Then the shrimp started dying enmass. The farmers were quick to blame the banana industry and pesticide runoff as the culprit. There are still pending lawsuits today. However, about three years after the onset of dying shrimp it was confirmed that a virus,( detected using new technology at the time), possibly introduced from SE Asia was the pathogen directly responsible for the mass mortalitly. There have now been other viruses identified that have been transferred across the globe. Some are carried and do not affect the host until triggerred by environmental changes such as temperature or some other stress.
My point is, at the time of the outbreak, everyone was SURE that pesticides were the problem. There may be minor to major coral die offs (as Rick Murchison pointed out) every 100-500 years. And I also agree with Rick in that we're best off to observe, take data and prepare for what we probably have to control over. Hank

 

[archman]

In our own water quality work here, we are finding agricultural run-off to be a tiny percentage of what we expected it to be, and a minor factor compared to some other major sources (ours is a different problem, but the agricultural run-off has turned out to not be the villain it was expected to be). Don't know about the GBR and nutrient sources though.

Sometimes what matters is what nutrients are measured, and how/when they're measured. For absorptive nutrition in echinoderms, dissolved free amino acids and *maybe* simple carbohydrates are what's needed. Not a whole lot of water quality surveys measure these. As far as I know one needs a dedicated HPLC to properly monitor this stuff. I tried setting up a research program into this years ago, but the equipment was too costly. I did nutrient-starve a lot of pencil urchins, however.
Acanthaster has a great deal of external surface area, even without factoring in the spines. This could foster an enhanced absorptive nutritional mode across the exposed body wall, which in echinoderms is comprised of living tissue. If the water vascular system is highly active (which it likely is for this species), there can also be a direct absorptive mode across the surfaces of the internal canals.

(1) There have been three (maybe more) major worldwide die-offs of coral in the geologic past, before the first human struck the first fire.

There were quite a bit more than three, although most of these "corals" weren't scleractinians like we have today but extinct things like rugose and tabulates, archaeocyathids, stromatoporoids, etc... Those die-offs also took place over geologic time scales spanning tens-hundreds of thousands of years, rather than centuries. A steep decline in Caribbean acroporids over a measly few dozen years is a tad unusual, to say the least. One shouldn't be seeing drastic changes in coral reef community structure between spans of a single human generation, without a cataclysmic event in the works. Then again we are undergoing the functional equivalent of a global catyclysmic event, as evidenced by the Holocene extinction listings. 99% of ecologists concur that the current mass extinctions will rival those of the Permian-Triassic, if not exceed it. Tropical corals are excellent proxies for global health, as they have narrow environmental tolerances. Steep drops in community abundance and diversity at the biome (or gamma) level typically are not indicative of natural perturbations. It is also relatively easy to monitor coral health within recent geologic time scale, via simple coring. As far as I know there are no indications that major die-offs occur on the short-term scales of 100-150 years. That would be easy to see on many a coral coring. I could show a high school student what to look for in two minutes.

Regarding disease, that's actually a hot topic of growing concern. The bacterial and cyanobacterial ailments are increasing across the board; new diseases keep popping up that nobody's seen before (usually near coastal populations). Viral problems are much more difficult to identify, as evidenced by our lingering questions about what caused the Diadema crashes in the 1980's. Working on marine viruses just ain't easy.

Contemporary work on pico and nano-planktonic communities show that marine viruses are major players in ecologies. There's also a marked trend between planktonic viral outbreaks and deteriorating/eutrophic water quality. Basically the crummier your water quality, the more viral outbreaks to expect in the water column. Viroplankton research represents the state-of-the-art in current plankton ecology. You need electron microscopes to do the work. Those aren't cheap, portable, or easy to operate.

 

[zboss]

There is no one reason why reefs are dying... sometimes its because of water temps, others because of pathogens, and others because some jack*** drops his anchor over board and swings in a big circle all night long. It's probably the case that we could do something about 50% (pulling from my rear) of these causes.

In the BVI's we are starting to see the majority of charter boats hook up to moorings if available rather than drop anchors. Frankly, I would rather not see boats and such at all but if I had a choice between permanent moorings and anchors, I'll take the moorings.

Of course the BVI government could also exercise some authority and say "no more charter boats unless you also put in five moorings for each boat" but monkeys will fly out my behind before that happens. Hm... let's see potential income over the long-run which might not come because we're not really sure what's causing the reefs to die, or get the short-term taxes to pay my salary and hire my cousins. hm....

 

[Hank49]

Regarding disease, that's actually a hot topic of growing concern. The bacterial and cyanobacterial ailments are increasing across the board; new diseases keep popping up that nobody's seen before (usually near coastal populations). Viral problems are much more difficult to identify, as evidenced by our lingering questions about what caused the Diadema crashes in the 1980's. Working on marine viruses just ain't easy.

Contemporary work on pico and nano-planktonic communities show that marine viruses are major players in ecologies. There's also a marked trend between planktonic viral outbreaks and deteriorating/eutrophic water quality. Basically the crummier your water quality, the more viral outbreaks to expect in the water column. Viroplankton research represents the state-of-the-art in current plankton ecology. You need electron microscopes to do the work. Those aren't cheap, portable, or easy to operate.

It's an area we're barely begun to research and understand. One shrimp virus, Taura Syndrome, has mutated now three times since it's indentification in 1989 or so. Breeding companies select survivors for specific resistance to it, which has worked, but now Belize has a strain of the virus that kills all formerly resistant strains and Venezuala just found a newer strain of it. There is one family strain of vanammei that IS resistant, fortunately. It just got me thinking about the corals. The shrimp viruses spread all over the world by transfer of infected stocks from one area to another. With the marine fish trade and corals moving world wide etc...maybe it's happened to the reefs also. And it could be that the recent stress of the big El Nino of 1998 triggered a normally dormant virus strain. It can get real complicated. But this is why I get frustrated when people just jump on the Global Warming bandwagon. Nothing is so simple in nature.

 

[ScubaTwo]

Does global warming exist? MAYBE.

Is it human caused? No.

Is there anything we can therefore do about it? No.

Please dont take this as argumentative because I really dont know and am just asking. I have always heard on news reports and such that much of global warming is caused by pollution from from humans. This isnt true? If not, I feel like such a sap. For years I have been trying to do all the things they said would help reduce this. :06:

 

[Boogie711]

The best thing you can do for the environment? Seriously?

Go buy stuff.

Improve the economy of the world around you. As countries grow, they buy prosperity. As they develop prosperity, they start to look after the environment around them.

The Great Lakes are cleaner now than they were 50 years ago. The air over London, England is cleaner than it was in the 1700's!

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is not a bad thing, ScubaTwo, and kudos to you for doing your part. But don't think that anything us humans are going to do is going to make a significant affect on global warming.

Even if the Kyoto protocol were fully implemented, it does next to nothing to slow the supposed global increase in temperature. At the cost of $500 billion per year, a Bangladeshi farmer who will have to move in 96 years because of flooding/global warming will, under Kyoto, only have to move in 101 years. That's it.

Put this in perspective. That's all I'm asking. Is it real? Maybe. Should we be spending money to fix it? Not at the rate the activists pushing Kyoto say we should be... and DARN near not enough to give clean drinking water to every citizen on earth. Every year!

 

[archman]

It's an area we're barely begun to research and understand. One shrimp virus, Taura Syndrome, has mutated now three times since it's indentification in 1989 or so. Breeding companies select survivors for specific resistance to it, which has worked, but now Belize has a strain of the virus that kills all formerly resistant strains and Venezuala just found a newer strain of it. There is one family strain of vanammei that IS resistant, fortunately. It just got me thinking about the corals. The shrimp viruses spread all over the world by transfer of infected stocks from one area to another. With the marine fish trade and corals moving world wide etc...maybe it's happened to the reefs also. And it could be that the recent stress of the big El Nino of 1998 triggered a normally dormant virus strain. It can get real complicated. But this is why I get frustrated when people just jump on the Global Warming bandwagon. Nothing is so simple in nature.

One of the most common techniques employed by governments that are *cheap* and/or *short-sighted* is blatant overruse of the "we don't know enough, so we'll just monitor" strategy. When there is majority scientific consensus on an issue, that's good enough. Universal consensus is not how the scientific method operates; minor dissent is supposed to be present on every issue, no matter how well it's studied. The general public routinely does not understand this, which is an educational flaw. Often deliberately propagated. There are more lawyers than scientists. :11:

Monotype viral outbreaks occurring on mariculturally-cultivated species represent the very simplest of research environments. It's essentially a big laboratory experiment. Scaling up for even partial wild ecological surveying... you're talking about well over an order of magnitude of both cost and staffing. And I know those Taura studies weren't cheap. Monotype mariculture ops are not conducive to natural viral evolution, either. Expect to see a heck of a lot more strains in the wild. It's not the presence of waterborne viruses in the water column that is damaging to other organisms, but the abundance of particular strains. Viruses are a natural constituent of the nano/pico-plankton, and have always been so. It's frequency and intensity of bloom outbreaks that are alarming. Mariculture ops by their very design are a virus strains dream come true, representing environs that should only very rarely occur in nature. The same ecological parameters that go into a mariculture operation are those indicative for habitats that have recently suffered near-complete ecological catastrophe, or an extreme environment. You need a very low species diversity. Plant farms operate the same way. For both, disease is very much a valid concern. One does not normally encounter such systems in the wild.

With hermatypic coral reef communties, you have high species diversity and an ecology the complete polar opposite of one resembling a mariculture operation. High diversity, climax communities by design can and do defeat disease-type vectors under *normal* conditions; they're better at this than any other ecological model-type.

Coral reef impacts are due to multiple overlapping causal agents. They do not like high temperatures, eutrophic water quality, reduced water clarity, bacterial diseases (maybe viral too), and acidic pH. Viral agents are host-specific, yet we have coral die-offs at the community level (comprising different species, genera, and families). Viral agents thus may have a part to play, but only a part. The critters themselves are difficult to isolate, but it's quite easy to observe disease symptoms vs. most other forms of coral damage. Where problems really arise are in environments with multiple damaging paramaters (most coral reefs). The public wants a quick solution... a proximal cause, and when we can't give them one, either the science "must be bad" or the science "needs more study". The annoying truth is that we cannot supply a proximal cause because there isn't one. There is no magic bullet to repair ecosystem-level damage, short of closing off the system.

Boogie has excellent points regarding international greenhouse gas regulations. Too many loopholes, too expensive, and they don't deal with more pressing environmental concerns. Water quality should be the main focus. Many view junk like Kyoto as nothing more than a distraction. Nobody honestly expects it to be implemented, and arguing about it is simply a ploy to delay more meaningful and pressing concerns. But I'm biased.