Word: corales
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...More than 30 years later, some of those dive bums have grown up to become full-fledged coral ecologists, and what they are seeing today is probably making them long for the halcyon days of the '60s. Rising ocean temperatures, compounded by man-made factors like pollution and overfishing, have been catastrophic for the earth's coral. "I grew up diving and snorkeling all over the world," says Gregor Hodgson, executive director of the coral monitoring organization Reef Check Foundation. "Those reefs are all gone...
...August, researchers at the University of North Carolina in the U.S. released the world's first comprehensive study on coral in the Indo-Pacific region, home to 75% of the world's coral reefs, focusing on waters from Japan to Australia and east to Hawaii. The outlook is grim. In recent decades, at least 600 sq. mi. (1,550 sq km) of reef have disappeared every year. "People thought the Pacific was in much better shape," says John Bruno, lead author of the study. Scientists assumed that far-flung reefs in the vast waters of the Pacific would be safely...
...Healthy reefs live symbiotically with algae, which take shelter inside the coral and, in return, pass nutrients to their host. When waters reach an uncomfortably high temperature, coral becomes stressed and kicks the algae out; this turns the coral white and essentially starves it to death. Some local reef watchers are warning that their coral is bleaching nearly as much as it did in 1998, when El Niño-warmed waters killed 15% of the world's reefs...
...Like receding glaciers in the Arctic, coral reefs are a canary in the global-warming coal mine. "They are a sensitive species that are affected first," says C. Mark Eakin, coordinator of the Coral Reef Watch program of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA). Though climate change awareness is up, the public has a short attention span when it comes to ecosystems it can't see. So do policymakers. Bruno says more coral data is being gathered today by NGOs than universities or national programs, particularly in developing nations. But even in the U.S., NOAA's satellite-data...
...That's why he founded Reef Check. Realizing that one man's chore might be another's hobby, Hodgson decided to fill the information gap by enlisting people who would be naturally interested in saving coral: scuba divers. In 1997 he created a global network of volunteer snorkelers and divers, specially trained by scientists to monitor reefs using a standardized checklist. Over the past 10 years, Reef Check's volunteers have amassed a bounty of data on the world's coral. "In the beginning, people were looking down on us, saying 'Oh, you guys are just volunteers,'" Hodgson recalls...