Friday Feature: Where have all the corals gone?

Another week has flown by and with it has come some new insights into the resilience and fraility of larvae in the face of climate change - including a more acidic ocean due to the rising CO2 levels.

Corals have served as a poster child for the harmful effects of a rapidly warming world.  Images of bleached and dying corals have been a mainstay in climate change research for the past decade, plus. It is feared that calcification by the corals to make reefs may be negatively impacted. Now it appears that there additional threats to these critical habitat-forming species. Rebecca Albright at the University of Florida and her co authors report in PNAS that the larval and juvenile stages of a threatened coral species suffer greatly under predicted low pH (ocean acidification) conditions.  From fertilization to settlement, projected acidification would result in a 52-73% decrease in the number of successful larval recruits!

Photo by Susie Balser, Illinois Wesleyan University (acquired from www.whoi.edu)

For more information see news coverage at http://www.practicalfishkeeping.co.uk/content.php?sid=3346 or if you have access, the PNAS article at http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/10/29/1007273107.