Bleaching Ravaging The Beautiful Reefs Of Tobago - Times of London

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SOMETHING TERRIBLE happened last summer beneath the startlingly blue Caribbean seas off the island of Tobago, where we have just been staying. The Buccoo coral reef, home to one of the richest marine ecologies in the world, turned a brilliant white. “It looked as if it had been bleached,” said my brother-in-law, a marine biologist. “It was a strangely beautiful sight, but in fact it was sick, so sick that we wondered whether it could recover.”

We inspected it from our glass-bottomed boat, and watched its dazzling display of exotic fish, dipping down through waving green tendrils, shivering over the strange, sponge-like surface of the coral. To our untutored eyes the reef looked pure and unspoilt. It has recovered, but the bleaching has weakened it. Like a human body infected by disease, it is in a fragile state, vulnerable to the stress of pollution and the shock of the next big hurricane.

Tobago, like many Caribbean islands, is in the front line of climate change. The bleaching of its reefs came about because the sea around its coast had warmed by three degrees centigrade above the normal, rising as high as 31 (88F), which is well above the coral’s tolerance levels. At that temperature the algal cells that provide its life-support system are expelled and may never re-grow. Like a skeleton in the desert, the whitened coral remains only as a stark warning of its own mortality. The death of the reef would signal the end of the marine life it supports, as well as the fish and the birds that feed on them.

For Tobago, that would be more than just an environmental tragedy, it would be an economic disaster. Tourism and fishing — the only indigenous industries left after the devastation of its sugar plantations by successive hurricanes — are its lifeblood; an island that advertises itself as one of the world’s great eco-tourism destinations stands to lose its prime attraction — and with it, its principal source of income.

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,6-2140574,00.html