[Coral-List] what does this new analysis tell us???
Douglas Fenner
douglasfennertassi at gmail.com
Tue Feb 8 19:53:57 UTC 2022
Yes, but both of these studies are based on the quantitative
results of 10's of thousands of reef monitoring or surveying sites. The
people who did those studies did NOT make that data up. That's one thing
for sure. The data was real. And we can choose to ignore it if it doesn't
fit with our life experiences, or we can try to deal with it. I think we
need to try to deal with it.
One of the things I've thought of sometimes when Gene is telling us
about Florida reefs, is that although I have absolutely NO doubt he's
telling us the truth, and it is good to be reminded, Florida is not the
world, and the reefs there, if anything, in their construction, are unusual
for coral reefs around the world. They're not like an atoll (the world has
about 400 atolls), the living parts are usually called the "Florida Reef
Tract" presumably in part because they don't look like a lot of other
reefs. As far as I know, the areas that have living coral are tiny patch
reefs.
The Caribbean has been the site of probably more research per sq km
of reef than most anywhere else in the world. The western Atlantic has a
set of species that is virtually unique in the world, very few fish species
and no known native reef coral species are in common with the
Indo-Pacific. And now it turns out, it may not be representative of the
rest of the reefs of the world.
Notice that all your memories but one that you quote are from the western
Atlantic, the Caribbean and Florida. Remember Mike Risk pointing to the
paper from Indonesia which reported on a lava flow, which incinerated
anything alive it hit and produced a whole new surface. If I remember,
within 6 years, it had a thriving coral reef ecosystem with lots of coral
cover. I've read people writing that the Coral Triangle is going down hill
steeply. That doesn't fit with my experience in the Philippines at about
200 dive sites. Granted, I've always thought that people there showed me
the best sites, I do not claim they were randomly chosen or
representative. And I haven't been back for about 15 years or so. But
those sites showed no signs of the degradation that is apparent virtually
everywhere in the Caribbean (Cozumel, Mexico, one of my old haunts, has
probably degraded less than most in the Caribbean, Tom Goreau tells me it
has lost some coral cover which has largely been replaced with sponge). In
the Philippines, one place I saw early on, there was nothing but dead coral
rubble. I asked the resort dive people and they said a typhoon destroyed
it. I came back 11 years later, and couldn't find it, until I realized
that the mass of near 100% glorious, diverse, coral cover in front of my
nose was it. It had completely recovered. The AIMS monitoring results
show the same effect, on a vastly greater scale, and quantitatively.
Please look at those graphs, and see the radical loss of coral cover that
had all of us scared to death. And notice that the coral cover completely
recovered. That is completely unlike any location in the Caribbean.
Discovery Bay, Jamaica, over 40 years after it lost its coral cover, still
hasn't recovered.
A review by Roff and Mumby put their finger on it. The western
Atlantic has far less resilience than the Indo-Pacific. Reference below.
They try to figure out why, and the why may still be an open question. But
the evidence is that the Caribbean and Florida have not recovered, yet in
the Indo-Pacific, often reefs do recover. And there have always been
plenty of natural disturbances, the clearest example being cyclones,
typhoons and hurricanes (basically the same thing except which way they
rotate differs north and south of the equator). These cyclonic storms have
been happening for time immemorial, surely much longer than coral reefs
have existed, probably at least a couple billion years. They can
completely flatten coral reefs, and they do that some reefs somewhere every
year. Yet coral reefs are still here. How can that be?? Coral reefs can
recover from them. Coral reefs are dynamic instead of static, they are
continually in recovery from one thing or another. But most natural
disturbances are brief and allow time for recovery, human disturbance, like
sedimentation, nutrients, overfishing, are continuous, no time for
recovery. Caribbean reefs have lost that ability to recover, Indo-Pacific
reefs have largely not. My impression is that some reefs in the Indian
Ocean have recovered from the 1998 El Nino mass bleaching, but others have
not. So it isn't universal. But the new graphs of world coral cover tell
us that lots of reefs have been able to recover enough that world coral
cover has been roughly steady at about 30% for decades. Surprising, yes.
Live and learn.
The world in some ways is now a small place, humans are now well into
the process of destroying SO much of it, not only on land but in the oceans
and even the atmosphere. That is undeniable. But this new evidence may
(may) indicate less corals have been lost that we often think. What the
original coral cover was like, IMHO (in my humble opinion) is not really
well established, there was far too few early studies. Fact is, if you go
diving and collect data, you can only cover a tiny area. There are loads
of reefs in the oceans out there that have received little or no research,
and almost all of those are in the Indo-Pacific, because it is gigantic,
even though coral reefs are a tiny proportion of the world oceans. No one
person has seen a majority of the world's coral reefs, and only a few have
seen a large number of them, my guess is people like Jack Randall and
Charlie Veron may have seen the most, I'm certainly not among them, though
I've seen some. So the rest of us have necessarily seen a very
unrepresentative sample of the world's coral reefs.
More powerful that the graphs of the world's coral reefs I think,
are the AIMS monitoring records of the Great Barrier Reef, itself not a
small place. And those records clearly show that huge loss of cover
followed by its recovery. It does not document any changes or stability in
community composition, no one claims that. But it shows that the reports
of the GBR being half dead, are from a past snapshot in time, and no longer
true. It has come back, Phoenix-like, from half dead (not by individual
corals coming back to life but the birth and growth of new individual
corals). That is the reality, I don't know anyone who disputes it. Nobody
has better data on the course over time of the corals on the GBR, as far as
I know, and it is plain for all to see.
That appears to be the reality, and I think we need to reflect
that. Which means we need to do a better job of making what we say reflect
reality. I think. Yes it is disconcerting to have our world view
challenged. So goes science and life. Mountains of data challenge the
views of those who said there was no global warming. Mountains of data
challenge the views of those who say there is no evolution, that God made
earth and the life on it exactly as it is today. Mountains of data
challenge the view the earth is flat. Maybe, just maybe, one of our more
cherished views, will need revision. The Great Barrier Reef and the
Indo-Pacific corals are not dead.
What happens in the future to coral reefs is quite disconnected to
what has already happened. But the Caribbean and Florida are surely a
window into what the future for the rest of the world's reefs are going to
experience in the next 20-30 years, by all accounts. The fact that not all
the reefs are already dead does not prove that corals will be just fine in
the future. And all the many observations and measurements documenting the
demise of reefs are real. Though some like those on the Great Barrier
Reef, may turn out to be followed by at least temporary recovery. Our
problem is that the places we have personally seen, and the places we have
studied most, are not either representative or a random sample of the
world's reefs, and so the very real info we have about the decline of
individual reefs is not totally representative of the world's reefs. The
data from the GBR appears to me to prove that, the world data now suggests
it.
So we live and learn. Cheers, Doug
On Tue, Feb 8, 2022 at 7:04 AM Phillip Dustan via Coral-List <
coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> wrote:
> Dear Listers,
> Coral monitoring began using transects that we first used to understand
> the distribution of corals on reefs. Scientists found that corals grow in
> patches dictated by the prevailing environmental conditions. These patches
> were frequently expressed as long bands or groves dominated by a few
> species that ran parallel to the shoreline or perpendicular to the
> prevailing seas. Tom Goreau's Ecology of West Indian Coral Reefs 1:
> Species Composition and Zonation as well as Pacific accounts by the likes
> of John Wells and others pointed this out beautifully. Coral cover in some
> zones was, and still may be, very high approaching 100% but it depends on
> the methodology. Does one count the intercolony spaces between Acropora
> palmata branches or foliose Agaricia plates? This was the great debate of
> the 1970-80's, "How best to measure coral cover"- lines, points, chains,
> photos, quadrats,........the quest was on for the ultimate measure. Some
> of us revisited out old study sites to look for change out of curiosity.
> Then, reefs began to die and coral monitoring became the mantra- Monitor
> reefs for conservation. Reef monitoring EXPLODED! In some places it
> became institutionalized. Fixed vs "random" sampling was the new dilemma;
> How many transects, photos, points- the search was on again for the
> "ultimate" measure.
> All the while reefs were winking out episodically. A rash of disease, or
> mass bleaching event would strike and coral cover would drop accordingly.
> Corals would regrow is the interval between acute stress was long enough.
> All the while though, oter factors continued to "eat away" are live corals.
> In places where I have remeasured the same reef, I have witnessed losses of
> over 90% in the Florida Keys where the zones were richly covered. On
> Dancing Lady Reef in Discovery Bay, Jamaica, the cover of Orbicella spp on
> the fore reef slope dropped from over 50% to less than 10 and from +25% to
> near 0% on the fore reef terrace (
> https://biospherefoundation.org/project/coral-reef-change/). This was just
> a single species and the reef was heavily covered with other species. My
> studies in NW Bali, Indonesia revealed a 44% loss from a single bleaching
> event as measured with repeat transects. The Bahamas yielded similar
> results due to bleaching combined with hurricanes. OVerall, the Florida
> Keys has lost over 38% cover since 1996 using repeated marked video
> transects.. My point is that these studies are all with repeated measure
> methods and they all reveal the same ecological slide into loss of
> ecological integrity. Detecting change is not the same as tabulating coral
> cover.
> A number of years ago I asked Listers if there were any healthy reefs
> in the Caribbean. It generated a raft of replies, but none positive. Maybe
> a few were missed and there are whole expeditions roaming the seas looking
> for healthy reefs now so they can be "protected". And liveaboard dive boats
> roam ply the tropics promising pristine adventures on ever increasingly
> more remote reefs (which are running out). Coral reefs are tough. They
> used to be hard to kill by natural means, but humans are a different story.
> Until we deal with how humanity integrates itself into the Biosphere, no
> reef or any other natural habitat for that matter, will be safe from
> humanity's global reach of destruction.
> We may be making a few tenuous steps in the right direction but you just
> can't put a happy face on any of this......
> Phil
>
>
> On Mon, Feb 7, 2022 at 7:00 PM Eugene Shinn via Coral-List <
> coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> wrote:
>
> > I agree with Alina Szmant's comments. I began diving in the Florida Keys
> > in the 1950s. Also visited many Caribbean reefs in the 1980s and 1990s.
> > All I saw was reefs going down hill after 1983 including those at San
> > Salvador which is located well east of the Main Bahama banks reefs. See
> > a portion of the dying Florida reefs
> > here:<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnIzLTi0HGs
> > <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnIzLTi0HGs>> Eugene Shinn
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Coral-List mailing list
> > Coral-List at coral.aoml.noaa.gov
> > https://coral.aoml.noaa.gov/mailman/listinfo/coral-list
> >
>
>
> --
>
>
>
> Phillip Dustan PhD
> Charleston SC 29424
> 843-953-8086 office
> 843-224-3321 (mobile)
>
> "When we try to pick out anything by itself
> we find that it is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords
> that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe. "
> * John Muir 1869*
>
> *A Swim Through TIme on Carysfort Reef*
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCPJE7UE6sA
> *Raja Ampat Sustainability Project video*
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RR2SazW_VY&fbclid=IwAR09oZkEk8wQkK6LN3XzVGPgAWSujACyUfe2Ist__nYxRRSkDE_jAYqkJ7A
> *Bali Coral Bleaching 2016 video*
>
> *https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxOfLTnPSUo
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxOfLTnPSUo>*
> TEDx Charleston on saving coral reefs
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwENBNrfKj4
> Google Scholar Citations:
> https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=HCwfXZ0AAAAJ
> _______________________________________________
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> Coral-List at coral.aoml.noaa.gov
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>
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