Everything You Need To Know About Coral Bleaching
Our beautiful Planet Earth is constantly changing throughout the years, sometimes for the better but unfortunately this is often not the case. Right now as we speak, climate change and the ever-increasing temperature of global warming are negatively impacting our planet.
A whopping 90% of global warming affects the world’s oceans, causing rising sea levels and alterations in ocean temperatures around the globe. Studies of ocean conservation have become much more intense during recent years with more and more people understanding the importance of protecting marine life and in particular, the preservation of coral reefs!
What Is The Importance of Coral Reefs?
Coral reefs play a very important role within our environment all over the world. These amazing and beautiful underwater rainforests provide shelter for a quarter of the world’s marine life. They are responsible for producing almost half of the world’s oxygen, help with nutrient recycling, are the source of nitrogen, and assist in carbon fixing, which is essential to marine food chains!
Reefs help to preserve our coastlines by forming a barrier against the ocean’s robust currents, breaking down the wave’s movement and forcing the water to slow down in various directions. The reefs also take on the powerful impact of tropical storms which help to protect beaches and shorelines across the globe.
In many countries, corals are a huge tourist attraction. Water-based activities in particular, usually rely on coral reefs to draw in tourists due to their colourful, vibrant nature. In some areas, they’re also used to provide extremely exotic-looking souvenirs.
Coral reefs only take up 1% of the ocean floor but unfortunately, they’re now in decline and under many great threats due to various harmful factors. Some of these include human pollution, global stresses, geological hazards, and inexperienced divers touching corals or even deliberately breaking off pieces and removing them from the ocean. At the moment, one of the biggest threats to coral reefs is climate change. It’s the ever-rising temperatures within the oceans that are what’s causing corals to turn ghostly white and bleach.
What Is Coral Bleaching?
Coral bleaching happens when corals become stressed due to drastic temperature changes in the ocean. Reef-building coral-like to live in very specific temperatures which can’t be too warm or too cold, usually somewhere in between 68-90 degrees. They can withstand slight fluctuations but drastic irregular changes have been proven to be too much for them. Corals like specific PH levels, sunlight and particularly clean, clear saltwater in order to flourish.
Corals have a symbiotic relationship with extremely tiny algae called ‘zooxanthellae’. These algae live within the coral tissue, providing the coral with its vibrant colour and is its main primary food source. When the coral becomes stressed, the algae will exit (taking away its food source and its colour) leaving it ghostly white and much more vulnerable to disease.
If these stresses are managed properly (and possibly relieved), some coral can be saved! These coral reefs are commonly known as ‘resilient reefs’. It can take algae several months to return to bleached coral but once a bleaching event has occurred, the coral is more than likely to weaken over time. Let’s compare it to a human cold sore, if you’ve experienced it once then you’re more than likely to experience it again! Partially bleached coral has a much higher percentage of bouncing back to fully restored health than completely bleached coral.
What Can We Do To Help?
Coral growth patterns have changed drastically in recent years and will continue to do so over time, due to many elemental threats but there are several ways we can help.
There are many restoration projects that try and help encourage the growth of coral, such as the Coral Restoration Project and Project AWARE. Actually, many dive sites around the world are completely made up of artificial reefs. These reefs are built solely to take the pressure off natural dive sites, as well as to provide scuba diving training grounds and new homes for numerous marine life and corals to form.
There are also many coral nurseries to help aid corals to regenerate. These are transplanted where the sun’s rays can reach them and where the water temperature is safely monitored. Some nurseries even allow you to adopt a coral, keeping you updated with their growth over time!
We divers often take it upon ourselves to enrol in eco speciality courses, participate in organised beach cleans and as previously mentioned, even adopt corals! We all have a huge responsibility to ensure the safety of our oceans. As visitors, we need to act responsibly by avoiding touching coral as well as removing any plastic or human debris as we go!
The study and education of coral reefs continue to be extremely important to this intense, ongoing global warming issue and I really hope this blog has been helpful. Thankfully, due to the ever-growing organised marine conservation ventures all over the world, more of us are taking the initiative to educate ourselves on coral bleaching and how to tackle this ever-growing crisis. If we can all come together and do our part, we can all be a force for good and a positive force for change!
