[Coral-List] some good coral news

[Robert van Woesik]

Hi Bruce,

Nice to hear from you. Awesome footage.
In a 2015 publication http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.12851/abstract
we identified 12 locations in the Indo-Pacific that we think will be climate-change refuges. The Solomon Islands was one. Let's hope we are right. The study opens up a much needed dialogue on where we should invest conservation effort. This study also moves away from local marine protected areas as the only management option, and leads the way toward the use of global sanctuaries as a more comprehensive management strategy.

All the best

Rob van Woesik


Robert van Woesik, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Biological Sciences
Florida Institute of Technology
Melbourne, Fl 32901, USA

Director of the Institute for Research on Global Climate Change
Fellow of the International Society for Reef Studies (ISRS)


-----Original Message-----
From: coral-list-bounces at coral.aoml.noaa.gov [mailto:coral-list-bounces at coral.aoml.noaa.gov] On Behalf Of BRUCE CARLSON
Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2016 3:40 PM
To: coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov list <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>
Subject: [Coral-List] some good coral news


“Blue Acropora of Mane Island” 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjYxrrZAdNo

With all the gloom and doom about coral bleaching the past two years, I would like to share a good news video story about one coral colony that my wife and I have been observing periodically over the past 23 years in the Solomon Islands.  We went back to the Solomons last December and snorkeled over to this reef with some trepidation wondering if the reefs in this area had succumbed to the recent world-wide bleaching events.  Fortunately, this reef was unaffected.  In fact, we saw no evidence of bleaching anywhere in the Solomon of December 2015.

This short video is partly a story about this particular colony of Acropora yongei, but I also realized when I was viewing the video that there was another embedded story.  I set up the GoPro 4 camera and just let it run recording 4K video.  At first, there are only a few fish in the scene, but within a few minutes both the number of species and biomass of fishes increases significantly.  I counted 36 species and later in the last frame I found one more making the fish tally 37 species.  That is a lot of species captured in one small “window”.  The list of species appears at the end of the video.  

Who knows how long these Solomon Island reefs will continue to persist, but at least for now they are thriving.

Bruce

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