Take your canvas bag to the supermarket

Tim Minchin's environmental anthem film clip recorded for BBC's comedy shuffle:-)

The coral triangle

The Coral Triangle is a large area that spans approximately 2.3 million square miles of ocean. It encompasses the following six countries in the Indo-Pacific: Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, the Solomon Islands, and Timor-Leste. It is famous, because living in its waters are the highest diversity of lustrous and colourful corals, sea life, and marine plant species in the world.

View The Coral Triangle in a larger map

Coral reefs and Coral Bleaching

It has become relatively common knowledge that over the last several years the Earth’s temperature has increased in response to rising carbon dioxide levels. One consequence of this rising temperature is that the symbiotic algae living within many corals are dying, which causes coral bleaching. In 2005 the most severe bleaching event ever recorded in the tropical Atlantic and Caribbean occurred (Eakin, et al., 2010). It was found that this tragedy was due to the average regional temperature being the highest it had ever been in over 150 years (Eakin, et al., 2010).This increase in temperature was a very important observation, not only because it demonstrated the effects of high temperatures on coral ecosystems, but also because it illustrated another very important point: many of the coral’s algal symbionts are not just being eliminated due to increasing temperatures, but also due to extreme environmental fluctuations (Rowan, and Knowlton, 1997).

Right now in order to salvage the remaining coral reefs scientist and researchers are going to great depths to further investigate the causes behind this environmental devastation. A collaboration of 22 different countries performed a very comprehensive documentation of coral reefs, which was based on basin-scale bleaching to date (Eakin, et al., 2010). This documentation indicated that as many as 80% of the coral reef sites studied had become bleached and over 40% had died (Eakin, et al., 2010). As a result of this study, even more evidence was compiled to preexisting experimental findings to suggest that there is a high correlation between the levels of coral bleaching and coral mortality (Jones, 2008). Therefore, we fear (along with so many others) that such sever bleaching events may cause irreversible and long-term damage to coral reefs worldwide and consequently have a negative impact any many organisms living in the same ecosystem. What do you think can be done to prevent the symbiotic algae in coral from dying out so as to protect the coral reefs from coral bleaching?


References

Eakin, C., Morgan, J. A., Heron, S. F., Smith, T. B., Gang, L., Alvarez-Filip, L., & ... de la
Guardia, E. (2010). Caribbean Corals in Crisis: Record Thermal Stress, Bleaching, and
Mortality in 2005. PLoS ONE, 5(11), 1-9. Available from http://ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=59287795&site=ehost-live&scope=site [accessed 28 March 2011]

Jones, R. J. (2008). Coral bleaching, bleaching-induced mortality, and the adaptive significance
of the bleaching response. Marine Biology, 154(1), 65-80. Available from http://ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=31379666&site=ehost-live&scope=site [accessed 28 March 2011]



Video Reference
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60jof35WuAo

Acidification of the Ocean

Same Tropical Coral Reef Before (left) & After (right)

What does acid mean to you? Acids react with bases to become neutral. They are generally sour and react with calcium carbonate and have a pH of less than 7. Acids are dangerous to our oceans if you didn’t know. Burning of fossil fuels increases the greenhouse gas levels such as water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and especially ozone although it protects us, if there is too much of it, it becomes a bad thing. 

The increase of greenhouse gases changes the chemical composition of seawater making it more acidic. This is a very bad thing! Acidification of the ocean hurts most living things in the ocean, including plants. Animals whose have shells made of calcium carbonate (such as lobsters, crabs, mollusks and scallops) get broken down by the excess amount of acid. The shells of these animals deteriorate and they break down, and if they break down enough, they die. Since coral is made up of calcium carbonate, they deteriorate and die also when the acidity of the ocean increases. Humans use all of these habitats for food and other things directly impacting the marine habitat that is a treasure. By decreasing the amount of acid we put into the ocean and the amount of greenhouse gases we produce, we might be able to save the last few standing coral reefs and help to build better habitats for the animals of the ocean.

References
Definition of Acid
Greenhouse Gases
Conservation.org
Tropical Coral Reef Picture

Warming Of The Ocean

Have you ever thought of what the consequences of global warming on the earth would be? Pretty drastic if you ask me. Not many people think about the ocean as being subjected to global warming since it is such a big body of water, nothing really happens, right? Wrong. The ocean is a place where there is so much diversity, life and wonder and when things change too much, there can be trouble down below. Especially when the planet starts to warm up. For the past decades, the Earth has been slowly increasing in temperature and absorbing about 80% of the Earth’s heat due to climate change. There are many problems with this change that people may think is insignificant because our ocean is so big, but is really one of the most important parts on the planet. 

One of the main problems is coral bleaching. This occurs when the ocean temperature rises. The coral, who have small invertebrates living in them called zooxanthellae who live symbiotically in the coral tissues assisting with the collection of nutrients through their photosynthesis. When the temperature increases just one or two degrees for just five to ten weeks, this induces the corals to bleach and if the conditions stay like this for long periods of time, or get worse, the corals won’t have enough time to recover damaging them forever. The result of this is fish will die, or have to migrate elsewhere depleting the population of the organisms who populate a coral reef, and less animal diversity. Save the coral reefs and pollute less so global warming isn’t such a big effect on the life on our planet.

On the left is a healthy coral and on the right is a bleached coral

References
Climate change signals
Conservation.org
Coral Bleaching

I thought this image was kind of interesting. It is a picture taken from a website called "Darwinism in Ruins"