Julian Sprung's email.

Bruce Carlson carlson at soest.hawaii.edu
Sun Sep 17 21:43:53 EDT 2000


Rosalind, et al.

The really interesting question in all of this is whether or not all those
"ancient" coral heads that apparently "died" in 1998 in the Pacific and
Indian Oceans will recover or not.  If so, will they still be "ancient"
coral heads, or do we reset the clock to zero - hmmm????  Or more
importantly, how many times has the clock been re-set the past few centuries
on these corals??

How long do we wait before we really call it "brain dead" (pun intended)?

Bruce


----- Original Message -----
From: Rosalind Hinde <rhinde at bio.usyd.edu.au>
To: <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>
Sent: Sunday, September 17, 2000 3:13 PM
Subject: RE: Julian Sprung's email.


> Similar observations have been made on the faviid Plesiastrea versipora
> (Ritchie
> et al., 1997, Proc. 6th International Conference on Coelenterate Biology,
pp.
> 403-408) after artificial damage (with a toothbrush) which removed about
50% of
> the tissue.  Polyps were observed to be damaged but to withdraw into the
> calices.  Colonies treated this way regained normal rates of
photosynthesis and
> respiration (per algal cell) in 7 days, regenerated to the point where the
> skeleton was completely covered and the polyps appeared normal in 2 to 4
weeks,
> and survived at least a year.  Regeneration was seen in aquaria and also
in
> corals returned to the field after brushing.
>
> Regards,
>
> Rosalind Hinde
>
> At 10:47  15/09/00 +0200, you wrote:
> >Hi all,
> >I don't know if these messages were supposed to be on the list or
not...but
> >I'd like to add my own "two cents worth".
> >The phenomenon of tissue regrowth from residual tissues found in corals
> >with deep set calices has been recorded as well for free living fungiid
> >corals by Paul Jokiel and Dave Krupp as pertaining to "fresh water kills"
> >as well as colonial species as Cindy pointed out. Sorry I missed the SICB
> >meeting would have liked to hear more.  In our own work on fungiids here
in
> >the Red Sea we (Yossi Loya and myself) also reported how experimentally
> >induced tissue damage as well as "tissue only" explants caused the
> >development of new anthocauli. We also noticed similar phenomena of
tissue
> >regrowth in some Acroporid and Faviid species following apparent tissue
> >denuding. It seem that these corals are proving to be quite resilient.
Many
> >questions arise such as  are the tissues regrowing to fill the original
> >calices or  do they use the calices as guides for further perhaps light
> >calcification? Are we sure that during these stresses tissues are not
> >simply retracting into the calices as reported by Bown et al 1994 for
heat
> >stress in Coeloseris.
> >At any rate I agree that this a fascinating area and hope to hear more
> >about it in Bali.
> >Cheers
> >Esti Kramarsky-Winter
>
>
***************************************************************************
> ***********
> Associate Professor Rosalind Hinde,
> Head of School,
> School of Biological Sciences, A08,             email:
> rhinde at bio.usyd.edu.au
> University of Sydney, N.S.W. 2006,              tel.   :    +612-9351-2277
> Australia.                                                           fax
> :     +612-9351-4119
>
****************************************************************************
> **********
>



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