[Coral-List] condition of reefs

shashank Keshavmurthy iamshanky15 at yahoo.com
Tue Jul 22 00:36:52 EDT 2003


dear listers,
By now all of you must have heard about the
Caribbean coral reefs. 

Can it be that corals were never fully
healthy.........

"Corals have never recovered from stress” and
that supports the hypothesis of healthy looking
corals……….
I think that we never see a recovery after a
major bleaching phenomenon; it is very simple
that coral have withstood the inevitable intense
stress, but not definitely recovered.
If corals have really recovered than how one can
explain the effct of other stressors like
competition from within different coral species
for space and other species like algae for
domination, fishing stress, sedimentation, toxic
pollutants, predation, current patterns,
nutrition, plankton availability and recreational
stress the coral are facing year round and other
occasional stressors like storm damage, UV,
salinity, temperature etc.
Also there is yet to be solved problem to
determine precisely the cause of most of the
coral diseases/syndromes.

So I think that the term "Coral Recovery" has
been misused over the years of Coral monitoring
work.....
I believe that most corals have learnt to live
with this type of environmental disaster.  All
this time it has been just 3 categories; healthy,
bleached/diseased, dead corals. But we have been
missing one of the most important categories that
I feel should be major focus of research and that
is "Healthy looking corals". The previous
categories can easily distinguished by naked eye.
And here lies the problem.
I hope more and more people will try to study
what is happening to Healthy Looking
Corals....from outside as well as inside.....
Just a thought.....
Cheers
Shashank

=====
"the role of infinitely small in nature is infinitely large"-Louis Pasteur                

Keshavmurthy Shashank
Kochi University, Faculty of Agriculture
Lab. of AQUa. Environ. Sci. (LAQUES)
Otsu 200, Monobe, Nankoku-shi
783-8502, Kochi, Japan
alt. id: shashank at cc.kochi-u.ac.jp

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