Coral reef bleaching – 2012

Coral reef bleaching and it’s effects are killing the coral and the most important areas in underwater ecosystem as this is the home of many fishes in the sea. This is also their source of food most of the time. A coral reef is mostly where new eggs can be found. That’s why a small sign of damage to coral reefs is a sign of death to millions of different species of marine life. The biggest coral reef in the world is the Great Barrier Reef found in Coral Sea, off the coast of Queensland in northeast Australia.

The Great Barrier Reef

Global Warming.

The coral reef is one of nature’s valuable gift to us however it’s likely to be banished in the surface of the ocean. Why? Well, it looks like human doesn’t value that gift as it seems that most reasons why our coral reef got “sick” are the human activities. Experts say that 58 percent of the world’s coral reefs were threatened by human activities. And that includes the latest information on the impacts of Global Warming and Coral reef bleaching which is by the way caused by humans. Note that coral reef takes years to recover. This is really a bad news. The two impacts are the main reason of today’s coral reef extinction and it’s reported that it goes bad to worse as years pass.

The Dilemma

Global warming is obviously caused by people around the globe and the worst effect it could give is the coral reef bleaching. This dilemma happens to coral reef when the surface of the ocean rise its temperature from warm to hot. When that happens, the zooxantheallae or the unicellular algae that gives the coral “life” will die leading to coral reef bleaching or the simple definition would be a “lifeless coral reef”. One example of worst coral reef bleaching in the record happened way back 2005 on the area of Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea. And from the year 2010 up to present year, it is predicted to be even worse.

For that, will the time come that we can only see coral reef on pictures and not in real life?

I hope you enjoyed this small but very important feature.

The coral reef is probably the most diverse area in the seas since they allow fishes to live and eat. Due to its natural protection to certain predators, small fishes prefer to lay their eggs on the coral’s surface. In general, its diversity is made because of predator-prey interaction and some mutual interaction such as the fishes and corals. They are thus called the “rainforest” of the seas.

But these homes are slowly dying. Basically, there are two major factors that contribute to the death of coral reefs. Human related activities, such as illegal fishing, excessive exploitation and tourism have a very big impact to their death and the second factor is also made by humans also – global warming.

Global warming is one of the evidence that shows how humans helped make the world hotter and Mother Nature does not like it. It affects every organism that lives in this time, even the ones under the waters.  Coral reefs are affected by this because they are very sensitive to even the slightest change in temperature and pH concentration. Their death is fast and cannot be compensated by their reproduction since even in the normal condition, they reproduce slowly.

There are many effects to the world if the coral reef will be erased entirely. Their very function itself causes extinction to many marine organisms that depend on them for protection and foraging, and followed by the death of those animals that live by feeding on the organism living in the corals. This process is called successive extinction due to the loss of their limited geographic distribution.

Should we wait for that time to come to change what we are doing wrong? By being aware of this, people should take the first move in conservation since we are in top of the hierarchy of species.