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APAL

Why hard corals are important … Corals are animals in the phylum ‘Cnidaria’ that are stationary on the ocean floor. They …

  • Act as coral nurseries for fish
  • Protect the coastline from storm surges (over 90,000 miles of coastline in 100 countries)
  • Provide protection for zooxanthellae algae
  • Provide zooxanthellae with food
  • Absorb CO2 and sunlight
  • Produce 75% of the oxygen for the planet
  • Create jobs that make $30 billion globally in revenue
  • Generate $5 trillion dollars in cutting edge medical research discoveries
  • Bring in $5 billion  ecotourism dollars as people want to visit coral reefs around the world

Global warming and corals … Global warming is a gradual shifting in the earth’s temperature due to the greenhouse gas effect, a process that usually takes place over millions of years.  Industrialization and the excessive burning of fossil fuels, though, are causing an accelerated shift in the natural warming process. And human actions, in particular, are causing:

  • Ocean salinity change through the melting of polar ice caps
  • Sea level rise as a result of melting ice caps
  • Ocean dumping waste from cruise ships, oil spills, toxic waste and general garbage dumping
  • Ocean dumping of plastics  – 7 million tons of plastic is dumped into the oceans annually
  • Ocean dumping NIA/runoff  – pesticides and fertilizers and other chemicals
  • Trawling – raking the ocean bottom for fish and other seafood, which destroys coral reefs
ACER
SSID

Why coral bleaching is bad … Corals are stationary animals affixed to the ocean floor, and algae live within individual coral polyps.  The corals provide the algae with a safe place to live, give it exposure to sunlight and allow it to feed off of its waste.  In return, the algae provide the coral with 95% of its food and use photosynthesis to create oxygen.

 

Corals are affected by slight changes in temperature. A tiny two-degree Celsius change can cause corals to bleach.  Bleaching is the reaction of coral under stress, evicting the algae with which it shares a symbiotic relationship. The eviction is designed to give the algae a chance to survive. But without the algae, the coral polyp will die of starvation.