Latest Resilience of coral reefs Stories

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online When corals become stressed, they expel their symbiotic algae companions in a process known as “bleaching.” Corals can survive the bleaching, but it leaves them highly vulnerable and often results in die-off. As a changing climate threatens to bleach the corals of the world’s oceans on a massive scale, a team of researchers from Northwestern University has found that some corals facilitate bleaching through the light-scattering...

Using a world-first scientific discovery, Australian researchers are developing a stress-test for coral, to measure how coral reefs are being impacted by pressures from climate change and human activity. The scientists have found hemoglobin genes in the microalgae which live symbiotically with coral, which may provide a readout on how stressed a particular coral is – and how likely it is to bleach and die. Coral bleaching occurs when the symbiotic algae abandon the coral due to...

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online While the single-celled algae that live inside corals typically play a vital role in keeping the reefs healthy, a new study suggests that an overabundance of the symbiotic organisms could have a negative effect on them. According to scientists at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science, these algal symbionts provide corals with the energy needed to build larger reef frameworks. When...

Marine conservationists from the Wildlife Conservation Society working with other coral reef experts have identified heat-tolerant coral species living in locations with continuous background temperature variability as those having the best chance of surviving climate change, according to a new simplified method for measuring coral reef resilience. Therefore, coral reefs with these characteristics should receive immediate attention for conserving this highly threatened ecosystem, according...