[Coral-List] Vietnam bans scuba diving to protect a coral reef

Eric Hochberg eric.hochberg at bios.edu
Mon Jul 18 17:54:17 UTC 2022


Hi Gene,

NASA's EMIT sensor just launched a few days ago to the ISS. It's aim is to map sources and spread of dust. The focus is minerology, but there's always tangential science to be done. Can the things that tag along with the minerals also be identified/mapped?

https://earth.jpl.nasa.gov/emit/

Best,
Eric

On 7/17/22 6:00 PM, Eugene Shinn wrote:
Thank You Doug for helping me make my point. When humans become ill research is initiated in order to determine which bacterium, fungi, toxin, or virus is causing the illness. COVID-19 provides a good recent example. We know COVID is caused by a virus that has been identified. We are shown its name and there are SEM photos showing what it looks like. Can we do the same for many of the various coral diseases? Of course not. What we are given is a slew of things associated with various coral diseases. For example, there is a long list such as, ballast water, divers, anchors, boats, touching, fertilizers, and also there is iron, copper, mercury, lead 210, pesticides, and Beryllium 7 transported in the atmosphere. I agree that elevated water temperature is leading to bleaching but do we know if there is also a microbe or toxic element facilitated by the warm water? I don’t know. I agree this may be splitting hairs but if it were humans in-stead of corals there would be millions devoted to finding the exact cause or causes. You and I both know that no agency is going to fund that kind of research. In addition, which journals would publish research results that counter the prevailing paradigms? That’s why I mentioned the oil experiments as examples. If those simple experiments had resulted in coral-death science journals would be happy to publish the results. It’s just human nature and politics. I was once privy to some oil toxicity experiment results from studies conducted at Texas A and M. Many showed little effect of crude oil on the test organisms. Processed oil is another story. I was overseeing that work representing the American Petroleum Institute that funded the research. I knew all the grad students conducting the experiments and none wanted to publish the results. They feared it would affect their careers or future job opportunities. The main reason I mentioned the oil experiments earlier is because the effect of crude oil on marine organisms was what the multimillion-dollar Australian Barrier reef hearings in Australia were all about. It had to do with whether the government was, or was not, going to allow drilling in the vicinity of the barrier reef. That should not surprise anyone. Those hearings went on for more than two years. Clearly knowing the effect of oil on corals was considered very important. I sat in the witness box for more than two days answering the Lawyers questions. What I saw guiding it all was not so much science but mainly strong emotions. In the end the drilling was not allowed but I certainly learned a lot about people. It helped me decide it was time to change jobs. Today not much has changed. All of this happened in the early 1970s at least a decade before the present crop of coral researchers and activists were born.

I did not know then that my long experience with coral reefs would again lead to my next career involving coral reefs. I joined the U. S. Geological Survey not knowing that in addition to other subjects it would also involve coral reefs not only in Florida but also the the Caribbean, and the Marshall Islands. As list readers know Staghorn and Elkhorn forests (A. /cervicornis/, and A. /palmata/) in Florida and the Caribbean began declining in the late 1970s peaking in 1983. That decline continues today and involves many more species. There were plenty of divers in 1983 but coral decline did not involve divers touching them. At the same time the spiny urchin /Diadema/ began dying all over the Caribbean. Clearly touching had nothing to do with their Caribbean-wide demise. Ironically in the beginning their demise pleased many divers. They were no longer being stuck by those painful pincushions and few knew they were vital for coral reef health. However, that soon changed. Many of us assumed it was human development and sewage causing coral disease in the Florida Keys. Remember there were no fast-food restaurants, few motels and no dive shops in the keys when I began diving in the keys. As human population and businesses began to prolificate it seemed logical that coral diseases were related to population growth. Because of that supposed connection I put together a research group and began installing monitoring wells both on land and under water on the premise that sewage from septic tanks and shallow disposal wells were the sources for something (we did not know what) that sickened Corals and /Diadema/. While learning everything we could about Keys ground water and its movement We also began to learn about similar problems throughout the Caribbean. Coral reef demise soon became an even larger mystery. Everyone seemed to have their own theory about the cause of coral demise. Rising water temperature had not yet been suggested and admittedly systematic temperature monitoring did not yet exist. Cold fronts and cold water was clearly killing nearshore corals. Harold Hudson started a wide spread temperature monitoring program when he joined the Marine Sanctuary and modern temperature monitoring devices became available.

One day I saw an article about African Dust. It was an article about Dr. joe Prospero who had begun to monitor atmospheric dust on the Island of Barbados in the eastern Caribbean. He had begun the study in 1965 looking for dust from outer space. What he found instead was red/brown soil dust that many called Saharan dust. I had known Joe and his work back then and considered it a purely academic project. Later I had an experience with dust in the Keys while on vacation in the summer of 1973. I could hardly see land while offshore in my boat. I did not know what it was. Joes dust graph graph in the article showed dust had increased that year in his dust trap out in Barbados. I next read about Charles Darwin’s experience with dust landing on the Beagle during his famous voyage. It had sickened many of the ship’s crew*. At this point I will skip a few years forward because this is a long much more involved story which is described in my Memoir, “Boot Strap Geologist.” *

As many already know, with initial funding from NASA I was able to put together a larger project consisting of a coral biologist, a geochemist, and two microbiologists to study what was being carried in African dust. There are many publications on the subject. During the study we found toxic metals, radioactive elements, pesticides, and around 200 species of viable bacteria and fungi (and many more viruses). I learned that asthma was rampant in the windward islands where there was no industrial activity. Human health was being affected by African dust in those islands. Even the military became interested because our microbiologists had cultured several live species of /Bacillus species/ in the dust but fortunately not /Bacillus anthraces,/ the one that causes anthrax. The attack on the World Trade Centers and the anthrax letters that followed elevated interest in our research. We were contacted by several other agencies. I retired from the USGS in 2006 because strangely the funding for our work abruptly ended. Fortunately the USF College of Marine Science which was next door adopted me and provided a new office. I did not lose interest in dust and its various effects on the environment. Because of what is happening today I continue to monitor reef health, and the reemergence of /Diadema/ disease that is presently happening again in the eastern Caribbean. With the changing climate and drying up of lake Chad and other water bodies in the African Sahel, dust storms have become more severe. They are now mentioned on the Weather Channel and other weather reports. Also there are now many more satellites that display images of African dust storms. There were only a few satellites back then and their images were not as sharp as todays images. Many more agencies are now aware of the possible effects of African dust and dust storms have increased in recent years. We are in the middle of dust season as I write this post. To my knowledge the health of coral reefs has not improved and you can be sure divers are not touching /Diadema./ This time their locations and progression through the Caribbean is being carefully mapped. You can track it’s progress on a map at, “Diadema Response Network.” This time the disease began up wind and up current in the eastern Caribbean but has recently moved down current to the Florida Keys. The only good news is there is now a concerted effort to determine exactly what microbe/virus or chemical may be causing their demise. Gene




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