Warming Caribbean causing worst-ever coral die-off
OCT 15, 2010
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.024750
Science : In the summer of 2005 the waters of the Caribbean became warmer than usual, killing 40% of the coral in the sea’s eastern regions. This year, as Science‘s Eli Kintisch reports, could see an even bigger die-off. Evidence that coral is in danger from warmer-than-usual water comes from symbiotic microorganisms , which flee their coral hosts, turning the coral white. The bleaching in 2010 is severe:
“I’ve never seen bleaching like [it] in Panama,” said Nancy Knowlton, a coral biologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama who has been studying the local flora for 25 years. She and colleague Hector Guzman have seen massive reefs die in recent weeks in the enclosed lagoon of Bocas del Toro in Panama after becoming coated with giant sheets of slime, the remains of dead microorganisms. “This is NOT a normal condition on reefs, even bleached reefs. Where last year there were healthy corals, this year there was only gray ooze,” she wrote in an e-mail.
© 2010 American Institute of Physics
