[Coral-List] what does this new analysis tell us???
Douglas Fenner
douglasfennertassi at gmail.com
Tue Feb 8 20:13:44 UTC 2022
Forgot the reference: Roff, G. and Mumby, P. J. 2012. Global disparity in
the resilience of coral reefs. Trends in
Ecology and Evolution 27: 404-419.
And a reminder of the AIMS monitoring report:
https://www.aims.gov.au/reef-monitoring/gbr-condition-summary-2020-2021
(scroll down to the line graphs of coral cover over time for the north,
central, and southern GBR)
On Tue, Feb 8, 2022 at 8:53 AM Douglas Fenner <douglasfennertassi at gmail.com>
wrote:
> 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
>> https://coral.aoml.noaa.gov/mailman/listinfo/coral-list
>>
>
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