Disease Amplifying Impact Of Massive Caribbean Coral Bleaching - NYT

[hatrack]

Unusually warm water over several months last summer followed by a wave of disease has killed a sizable fraction of the corals in parts of the Caribbean, the latest episode in a worldwide decline of coral reefs.

At a monitoring site to the south of St. John in the United States Virgin Islands, 30 percent of the corals have died. "Reefs that were growing in Columbus's time are dying in a six-month period," said Jeff Miller, a fisheries biologist with the National Park Service. The park service repeatedly visits coral locations to track their health. Sizable die-offs have occurred at other monitoring sites around the Virgin Islands, Mr. Miller said, although he hoped they were not quite as severe. "I fear for substantial losses of coral cover throughout the reefs," he said. "There's certainly more mortality on the reefs than I've seen at any other time."

Individual corals are tiny animals that live symbiotically with microscopic algae known as zooxanthellae. Genetically identical corals form a larger colony, and many grow skeletons of calcium carbonate to produce the reefs.

When waters become much warmer than usual, as occurred last summer, corals, for reasons not well understood, evict the zooxanthellae. Scientists call that event bleaching, because the corals turn white without the algae. "The stress that the corals have seen across the Caribbean in 2005 is more extensive and more severe than what we'd seen in the previous 20 years combined," said C. Mark Eakin, director of a program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association that monitors reef conditions though satellites.

EDIT

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/04/science/earth/04reef.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1144170457-f3mFkEQ0CYYjRBFXS/lR0w

[Inland]

1. We are so screwed. nt