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

Fri Jul 22 01:06:34 UTC 2022

Hi Angie,

You are welcome to Cuban coral reefs studied 1970-1973, in "Los
escleractinios de Cuba":

https://www.google.com/search?q=Legacy+Book+Los+escleractinios+de+Cuba&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-1

If there are any problems, please let me know and will provide a pdf.

Cheers,

Vassil

Vassil Zlatarski
D.Sc. (Biology), Ph.D. (Geology)

On Thu, Jul 21, 2022 at 7:28 PM Pawlik, Joseph via Coral-List <
coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> wrote:

> Hi Angie,
>
> You can also see what coral reefs in the Caribbean looked like in 1987 and
> before, thanks to these videos saved by Dr. Zlatarski and re-mastered from
> VHS tape for posting on YouTube:
>
> https://youtu.be/QV-XJZdPbk0    Dry Rocks Reef, Florida Keys, 1987
> https://youtu.be/LIbmsHmuxWk   Grecian Rocks, Florida Keys, 1987
> https://youtu.be/DMa-82-bIwU     Cuban reefs, 1970s
>
> Regards,
>
> Joe
>
>
>
>
> **************************************************************
>
> Joseph R. Pawlik
>
> Frank Hawkins Kenan Distinguished Professor of Marine Biology
>
> Dept. of Biology and Marine Biology
>
> UNCW Center for Marine Science
>
> 5600 Marvin K Moss Lane
>
> Wilmington, NC  28409
>
> Office:(910)962-2377; Cell:(910)232-3579
>
> Website: http://people.uncw.edu/pawlikj/index.html
>
> PDFs: http://people.uncw.edu/pawlikj/pubs2.html
>
> Video Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/skndiver011
>
> **************************************************************
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: Coral-List <coral-list-bounces at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> on behalf of
> Angie Brathwaite via Coral-List <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>
> Sent: Wednesday, July 20, 2022 10:52 PM
> To: coral list <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>
> Cc: Eugene Shinn <eugeneshinn at mail.usf.edu>
> Subject: Re: [Coral-List] Vietnam bans scuba diving to protect a coral reef
>
> [This email originated from outside of UNCW]
>
> Alina,
>
> It’s absolutely fascinating to me to read what coral ecosystems were like
> in the year I was born...60% coral cover... in some places. Thanks for
> taking the time to pen that. This list is great as much for the historical
> notes as for current coral affairs...
>
> Peace
> Angie
>
>
>
> From: Coral-List <coral-list-bounces at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> on behalf of
> Alina Szmant via Coral-List <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>
> Date: Thursday, 21 July 2022 at 12:01 AM
> To: Douglas Fenner <douglasfennertassi at gmail.com>, Eugene Shinn <
> eugeneshinn at mail.usf.edu>
> Cc: coral list <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>
> Subject: Re: [Coral-List] Vietnam bans scuba diving to protect a coral reef
> A historical note about coral diseases: I started diving Caribbean reefs
> in earnest in 1970. Coral cover was very high (over 60 % in places suitable
> for coral growth) and diseases were so uncommon that they for practical
> purposes were ignored. Not that we weren't looking carefully at corals. I
> remember paying a lot of attention to corallivory and damselfish damage to
> corals, which are in the same scale of event as patches of coral disease.
> I clearly remember one patch of bleached white Orbicella faveolata at
> around 60 ft off La Parguera at The Buoy, a shelf edge reef we used to dive
> weekly at least. I photographed it because it was so unusual and I have
> never seen anything like that back then. When Antonius published about
> Coral Dhut Down disease in 1977 it was about an aquarium phenomenon.  In
> 1983 he published about the outbreak of black band disease in Belize and we
> were all intrigued because we hadn't observed it that I recall where I
> worked in Puerto Rico and USVI. Bleaching was a new phenomenon being
> observed in the IndoPacific except for an incident reported by Coffroth and
> others down in Panama in 1983 same year Glynn reported major bleaching in
> the Eastern Pacific. Diseases in the Caribbean became a thing quickly after
> that, as did major outbreaks of the snail Coralliophila abbreviata. I
> remember Peter Glynn showing us this snail species during the marine
> ecology summer course of his in 1964, but they were small and not common.
> By the time I became interested in them as an ecological force of coral
> destruction in late 1980s and 1990s they were everywhere and huge in the
> Florida Keys whete they systematicallyate up colony after colony of O.
> faveolata and Acropora spp! I proposed that overfishing of lobsters were
> the cause of the snail outbreaks. 50+ % of lobster diet is snails. But
> overharvesting of Panulirus in FL Keys removed all the large, strong
> mandible individuals from Florida reefs and snails escaped predation. Lab
> experiments we did with huge captive lobsters from Dry Tortugas showed that
> the big lobsters quickly ate the huge snails while the 1 lb lobsters toyed
> with them and then gave up. It looked like the snails were particularly
> abundant on corals that had previously bleached or looked unhealthy.  These
> corals also had more patches of diseased looking tissue. My presentation
> about the need to stop overharvesting of lobsters and to leave the big guys
> aline (basically a slot fishery model) got me threatening letters from
> lobsters fishermen.
>
> To summarize my several decades of observations: coral diseases were
> unusual in the Caribbean until early 1980s when first vestiges of bleaching
> were showing up ( an exception is the Acropora die offs in some areas that
> are still unexplained). By then, overfishing on most Caribbean reefs ( more
> people, more overfishing) was already extreme and prey animals such snails
> and damselfishes started really impacting coral health by direct predation
> or algal lawns... huge algal lawns growing on the top of centuries old
> massive head corals. Bleaching began to be severe after the 1987 event, and
> coral tissue loss due to post-bleaching mortality and diseases on the
> affected corals took off.
>
> I interviewed for the job as the director of the undergraduate marine
> science program at the University of Miami in 1986 or so while I was
> research faculty at RSMAS. Funding for coral reef research was slim back in
> those days, and soft money jobs were stressful!  The head of the search
> committee,  a primate biologist with little interest in coral reefs or
> marine science for that matter, asked me what I would do (like for
> research) if all the coral reefs started to die? I remember glibly replying
> that maybe then there would finally be lots of funding for coral reef
> research, and phrophetically I was right. Sadly, funding didn't show up
> until corals and reefs were already in poor shape, si for the past 30 years
> or so and especially over the past decade, Caribbean researchers have
> largely been trying to understand different ecosystems and communities than
> those I was first exposed to in the summer of 1964 and began my own
> research in 1970.
>
> Thus done be surprised about sparse coral disease work in the old days. No
> one would have been funded to study them back then.
>
>
>
>
>
> Dr. Alina M. Szmant,  CEO
> CISME Instruments LLC
>
>
> -------- Original message --------
> From: Douglas Fenner via Coral-List <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>
> Date: 7/20/22 9:23 AM (GMT-05:00)
> To: Eugene Shinn <eugeneshinn at mail.usf.edu>
> Cc: coral list <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>
> Subject: Re: [Coral-List] Vietnam bans scuba diving to protect a coral reef
>
> I suppose one more little point.  I fully agree that more money and effort
> need to be devoted to coral diseases.  A lot more is already being directed
> there these days than in the past.  Evidence of that can be found in the
> 582-page huge tome entitled "Diseases of Coral" published in 2016,
> reference below.  It is a gigantic effort produced by some 67
> contributors.  Piles and piles of information on coral diseases and related
> topics.  Way too much for me to wade all through and digest.  And that
> didn't happen without a LOT of hard work and financial support.  Contrast
> that to when I started working on coral reefs decades ago, almost nobody
> was working on coral diseases back then.  I'd be willing to bet that
> the study of coral diseases has increased since 2016 as well.
>        I think it would be unrealistic to expect humans to spend as much
> money on coral disease as is spent on human diseases, particularly a
> worldwide pandemic that has killed many millions of humans, disrupted lives
> and economies world-wide, etc etc.  I also point to a lot of effort being
> put into the new Stony Coral Tissue Loss disease that started in Florida
> and spread to the Caribbean.  Papers on that topic are coming out rapidly.
>        It is true that progress in terms of finding out the causes and
> finding cures for coral diseases has not gone as rapidly as many would
> like.  But it is not for a lack of effort or smarts or excellence among
> those studying coral diseases.  Coral diseases are particularly difficult
> to figure out, that is just an aspect of their biology we don't control.
> Not every disease is easy to conquer, such as cancer, diabetes, and obesity
> in humans.  At least that's the way it appears to me.
>        In general, I completely agree that the amount of effort and money
> that is being directed at saving coral reefs has been entirely inadequate
> to the task.  Always too little, too late.  But then the task is
> particularly difficult because for nearly everything that needs to be done,
> there are groups of people who feel threatened by those conservation
> efforts and fight their implementation.  And in lower-income areas, where
> most coral reefs are, people have little or no alternatives, they must do
> what they do for survival.  And we live in a time when there are a lot of
> other important threats that humanity needs to deal with.  Evidence of the
> pushback is obvious with climate change, quite successful, one day we hear
> that US leadership attempts to take action on climate change was stopped,
> the next day Europe has record high temperatures and is on fire, and
> climate change produced mass coral bleaching is considered the greatest
> future threat to coral reefs.  The problem in a nutshell.
>
> Woodley, C. M, Downs, C. A., Bruckner, A. W., Porter, J. W., and Galloway,
> S. B. (Eds.) 2016. *Diseases of Coral*. Wiley. 582 Pp.
>
>
> Cheers, Doug
>
>
> On Mon, Jul 18, 2022 at 4:34 AM Eugene Shinn via Coral-List <
> coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> 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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