[Coral-List] Ship wrecks and reefs??

[Dean Jacobson]

To add some Marshall Islands observations, I did see one Acropora that recruited onto iron (a wheel) on Enewetak atoll. However, there was an enormous amount of US military iron (trucks, plane engines, etc.) dumped nearby into the pass at the west end of the Enewetak runway, and there was no coral to be seen there, even after many decades.  There is a similar truck dump in Majuro lagoon (the Marshallese were unwilling to buy the surplus vehicles after WWII, so the Americans dumped the lot) which I should visit.  In the nearby lagoon patch reefs of Enewetak, coral was in terrible shape, but this may have been due to COTS.  (I have photographs of these sites.)
 
Cheers,
Dean Jacobson
College of the Marshall Islands

From: John Ware <jware at erols.com>
To: "coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov" <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> 
Sent: Thursday, November 29, 2012 9:54 AM
Subject: [Coral-List] Ship wrecks and reefs??

A quote from: Black reefs: iron-induced  phase shifts on coral reefs.
Linda Wegley Kelly et al., ISME, Mar 2012

"Here we use a combination of benthic surveys, chemistry, metagenomics 
and microcosms to investigate if and how shipwrecks initiate and 
maintain black reefs. ...  Together these results demonstrate that 
shipwrecks and their associated iron pose significant threats to coral 
reefs in iron-limited regions."

Contrasted with this from Alina Szmant's e-mail of 26Nov:

"FYI, every place I dive where there is metal structure (old ship hulls, navigation pilings etc) they are covered with nice looking corals of all species."

Am I the only one that sees some sort of disconnect here??
John


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