Coral

Two interesting stories appeared this week on coral. The fact they are endangered and that they have been discovered off the Canadian East Coast.

Corals Added To IUCN Red List Of Threatened Species For First Time

"There is a common misconception that marine species are not as vulnerable to extinction as land-based species," said Roger McManus, CI's vice president for marine programs. "However, we increasingly realize that marine biodiversity is also faced with serious environmental threat, and that there is an urgent need to determine the worldwide extent of these pressures to guide marine conservation practice."

"Marine ecosystems are vulnerable to threats at all scales -- globally through climate change, regionally from El Niño events, and locally when over-fishing removes key ecosystem building blocks," said Jane Smart, head of the IUCN Species Program. "We need more effective solutions to manage marine resources in a more sustainable way in light of these increasing threats."

Scientists find trio of coral 'hot spots' off Canada's East Coast

Scientists have for the first time discovered a string of coral 'hot spots' in waters off Canada's East Coast and will use the surprising finds to press global fishing interests to steer clear of areas they say are vital marine habitats.

Canadian researchers, in a study to be released Tuesday, said they found heavy concentrations of about 30 species of coral along a stretch of the seabed that extends from the Hudson Strait off Labrador to the Grand Banks off southern Newfoundland.

Their 40-page report says three main sites serve as sanctuaries for a variety of marine animals, but are being damaged by intense fishing.

"We're recommending an immediate fisheries closure in those areas where coral concentrations can be identified within those hot spots," said Bob Rangeley of the World Wildlife Fund, which released the study.

While large scale trawler fishing is a problem for coral reefs so is offshore oil and gas exploration in countries like the Philippines.

Gov’t Selling Protected Seas to TNCs – Environmental Groups In line with its thrust of attracting foreign investments, the Arroyo government is now opening up the country’s protected seas to oil and gas exploration by transnational corporations.

In our brave new world of genetic modification coral genes have been added to tropical fish.

GlowFish - freshwater zebra fish native to Asia that have been genetically modified to express fluorescent proteins so they glow red, green or yellow. The genes come from a coral and an anemone.

And ancient coral reefs are being studied because of the impact that volcanic global warming had millions of years ago on the extinction of almost all life on earth.

In 1991, scientists reported that the largest known volcanic event in the past 600 million years occurred at the same time as the end-Permian extinction. Magma extruded through coal-rich regions of the Earth's crust and blanketed a region the size of the continental United States with basalt to a depth of up to 6 kilometers. The eruptions that formed the Siberian Traps not only threw ash, debris and toxic gases into the atmosphere but also may have heated the coal and released vast quantities of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.

Rapid release of these greenhouse gases would have caused the oceans first to become acidic and then to become supersaturated with calcium carbonate. In the July Bulletin, Payne presents evidence that underwater limestone beds around the world eroded at the time of the end-Permian extinction. This finding, coupled with geochemical evidence for changes in the relative abundances of carbon isotopes, strongly suggests an acidic marine environment at the time of the extinction. The rock layers immediately covering this eroded surface include carbonate crystal fans, which indicate oceans supersaturated with calcium carbonate.

More than 90 percent of all marine species disappeared from the Great Bank of Guizhou and other end-Permian fossil formations 250 million years ago. Land plants and animals suffered similar losses. Douglas Erwin, curator of the Paleozoic invertebrates collection at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, has dubbed this event "the greatest biodiversity crisis in the history of life." An unusually long period of time passed before biological diversity began to reappear.

"This end-Permian extinction is beginning to look a whole lot like the world we live in right now," Payne said. "The good news, if there is good news, is that we have not yet released as much carbon into the atmosphere as would be hypothesized for the end-Permian extinction. Whether or not we get there depends largely on future policy decisions and what happens over the next couple of centuries."

Reef communities are a sort of canary in the mineshaft, Payne explained. Today, coral reef health is considered a measure of environmental stability. When stressed by environmental conditions, the algae that inhabit the reef leave, and the reef loses color-and one reason why algae might leave is temperature. For example, when ocean temperatures rise during El Niño years, corals bleach. This type of immediate response to environmental change is hard to track in the geologic record.

The climate change deniers will probably blame El Nino and El Nina for this.

In mid-2007, scientists announced the results of an examination of the geological record of coral reefs in the Caribbean, dating back over 3,000 years.

Using core samples from the coral, these scientists found that – for thousands of years – reefs grew rapidly. But, since about 1980, reef-building has faltered.

Richard Aronson: The kinds of changes that we’ve seen over the last several decades are unprecedented on a scale of at least several thousand years.

That’s Rich Aronson of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama. He said that reef cover – the percentage of living coral on a reef – has shrunk from covering about 50 % to 10 % of Caribbean reefs since the late 1970s.

Threats to coral come from water pollution – from destructive fishing with dynamite – from carbon-based greenhouse gases, which can acidify the ocean and stunt coral growth and from warmer ocean waters causing coral bleaching.

Another recent study found a nearly identical trend in the much broader Indo-Pacific region, which contains 75% of the world’s coral reefs.

Canada's Coral Museum on Video.ca

Welcome to Canada's Coral Museum which turned out to be the greatest coldwater coral museum in the entire world. Canada had more coral on our East Coast than 11 Great Barrier Reefs but we destroyed it all in our mindless quest for fishsticks while we blamed seals and handliners for the disaster. Too bad nobody helped and I only run the very sucessful museum for a few months.


See:

Strange Sea Creatures

Climate Catastrophe In Ten Years

They Walk Among Us

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Strange Sea Creatures

HAMLET

And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Scientists back from a three-week probe in the deep waters off Nova Scotia and Newfoundland discovered a surprising diversity more than 2 1/2 kilometres below the surface.

"Not so long ago, these deep waters were thought to be barren, and what we're looking at and finding is that they're quite rich," said Ellen Kenchington, one of 20 scientists who participated in the research mission aboard the coast guard ship Hudson.

This was deep-water fauna, creatures of the inky blackness and the stuff of Jules Verne: The metre-long dumbo octopus (so named for its prominent fins); the xenophyphore, a single-celled organism better known as "the Green Blob"; and the long-nosed chimera.

Amidst the weird and wonderful are three types of coral key to understanding climate change: Primoa, Paragorgia, and Keratosis, also known as seacorn, bubblegum, and bamboo coral respectively.

An octopus with ears like an elephant? Scallops that hang like bats? Yup, they're real and they live off the East Coast.

The creatures were found after Canadian marine scientists fitted the coast guard ship Hudson with Canada's most powerful deep-sea diving robot, and sent it to explore water too deep for humans.

The octopus was spotted on the second dive at 2,500 metres. When the robot got close enough, the researchers could see the metre-long octopus had fins near its eyes.

"It looks like Dumbo the elephant," Kenchington said, showing off some of the more than 3,000 digital images, hundreds of hours of videos and dozens of live samples taken during the research trip.

It was a creature that had never been seen in the Atlantic before, but Kenchington later found out one had been spotted in the Pacific Ocean.

The robot picked up images of many other creatures, including orange scallops hanging from underwater cliffs, and yellow and pink bubblegum-coloured coral.

More than half of the dives were below the 1,000-metre threshold, and they discovered "at least a dozen" species not previously found in Canadian waters. Particularly striking, she said, was the discovery of a type of bubblegum coral far from the nearest known colony of that species. The largest sea-floor invertebrate, bubblegum coral can live hundreds of years and grow at least a metre off of the bottom.

"How did it get there?" Dr. Kenchington mused. "How are they connected to the nearest neighbours, which are hundreds of miles away?"

SEE:

Sea Serpent

Die Vurm

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