Caribbean Coral Suffers Record Death

[jpak]

http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/tech/2006/mar/30/033002992.html

A one-two punch of bleaching from record hot water followed by disease has killed ancient and delicate coral in the biggest loss of reefs scientists have ever seen in Caribbean waters.

Researchers from around the globe are scrambling to figure out the extent of the loss. Early conservative estimates from Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands find that about one-third of the coral in official monitoring sites has recently died.

"It's an unprecedented die-off," said National Park Service fisheries biologist Jeff Miller, who last week checked 40 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."

Some of the devastated coral can never be replaced because it only grows the width of one dime a year, Miller said.

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[Boomer]

1. For anyone who has noticed...

...our oceans are no longer just sick, they are dying.

The coral reefs are bleaching, plankton numbers have plummeted, fish populations are crashing and ocean sea birds and mammals are starving to death.

Let's hear it for human ingenuity! We've used the earth's waterways as a dumping ground for toxic waste, fertilizer runoff, corroding munitions, atmospheric carbon and plundered anything and everything we could eat.

The vast ocean depths just weren't vast enough to accommodate human greed.

[phantom power]

2. It's adding up to a pretty scary picture. If earth were a human...

I worry that we're entering a phase analogous to rhenal and liver failure. Big, important systems are starting to fail.

[Dead_Parrot]

3. Great. We've turned Earth into Boris Yeltsin. nt

[phantom power]

4. must... not... laugh... disrespecting... earth...

:rofl: