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Coral Bleaching Stretches Across Barrier Reef's Northern Section

August 14, 2017
By EFE Ingles
Sydney — Coral bleaching has affected 95 percent of the northern section of the Great Barrier Reef, the world's largest coral reef stretching 1,429 miles in northeast Australia, resulting in a worse than expected situation, according to a study published Monday.

"We're seeing huge levels of bleaching in the northern thousand-kilometre stretch of the Great Barrier Reef," Professor Terry Hughes of James Cook University and study head told local radio station ABC.

The expert said they examined 520 corals, out of which only four appeared unaffected by coral bleaching, a process that has led the colonies of coelenterates anthozoa to lose their color as a result of environmental stress.

The coral chain, once characterized by their bright colors, has acquired nuances of a ghostly white stretching from the city of Cairns to Torres Strait.

In the Great Barrier Reef, which is a world heritage site, coral bleaching is the result of increase in temperature of the sea surface.

"It's too early to tell precisely how many of the bleached coral will die, but judging from the extreme level even the most robust corals are snow white, I'd expect to see about half of those corals die in the coming month or so," warned the expert.

Corals have a special symbiotic relationship with a genus of microscopic algae called zooxanthallae that provides them with 90 percent of their energy needs.

When the water gets too hot, the coral expels the zooxanthellae and is bleached to death within a period of about one month, but can survive and recover its color in case the water cools earlier.

Justin Marshall, an expert on the subject at the University of Queensland, told ABC that climate change is responsible for coral bleaching and criticized the government for ignoring the evidence presented since 1998 of the existence of the greenhouse effect.

"It has been inevitable that this bleaching event would happen, and now it has. We need to join the global community in reducing greenhouse gas emissions," insisted Marshall.

The health of the Great Barrier Reef, which is home to 400 types of coral, 1,500 species of fish and 4,000 types of molluscs, began deteriorating in the 1990s due to a warming of the sea water and an increase in its acidity due to an increased presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

c) 2016 EFE News Services (U.S.) Inc.

Image: File photo from 2005 showing coral bleaching at Heron Island in the Great Barrier Reef. (Acropora via Wikipedia)