Oceans Warming With Coral Bleaching & Disintegration

In March, 2006 researchers discovered devastating loss of coral in the Caribbean off Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. "It's an unprecedented die-off," said National Park Service fisheries biologist Jeff Miller, who last week checked 40 official monitoring stations in the Virgin Islands. "The mortality that we're seeing now is of the extremely slow-growing reef-building corals. These are corals that are the foundation of the reef ... We're talking colonies that were here when Columbus came by have died in the past three to four months."Miller noted that some of the devastated coral can never be replaced because it only grows the width of one dime each year.

If coral reefs die "you lose the goose with golden eggs" that are key parts of small island economies, said Edwin Hernandez-Delgado, a University of Puerto Rico biology researcher. While investigating the widespread loss of Caribbean coral, Hernandez-Delgado found a colony of 800-year-old star coral — more than 13 feet high — that had just died in the waters off Puerto Rico..."We did lose entire colonies," he said. "This is something we have never seen before." "We haven't seen an event of this magnitude in the Caribbean before," said Mark Eakin, coordinator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Coral Reef Watch. Tom Goreau of the Global Coral Reef Alliance says that compared to coral areas in the Indian and Pacific ocean, where warming waters have brought about a 90% mortality rate, the Caribbean is healthier. The Caribbean is actually better off than areas of the Indian and Pacific ocean where mortality rates — mostly from warming waters — have been in the 90 percent range in past years, said Tom Goreau of the Global Coral Reef Alliance. Goreau called what's happening worldwide "an underwater holocaust." "The prognosis is not good," said biochemistry professor M. James Crabbe of the University of Luton near London. "If you want to see a coral reef, go now, because they just won't survive in their current state."