There’s nothing like inflammatory rhetoric to get the blood flowing, but holocaust doesn’t actually seem such an inappropriate term to describe widespread deaths of coral reefs in the Caribbean and Indian and Pacific oceans. In the Caribbean, sustained record water temperatures weakened the coral, and a disease called “the white plague” dealt the death blow.
3 thoughts on “A Coral “Holocaust””
Comments are closed.
I can’t figure out how coral has survived the dinosaur extinction as well as a number of earlier, more severe extinctions if they are so vunerable to changing conditions. Maybe there are varieties (like those that live at deeper depths) which are more robust and which recolonize the other habitates with new species when things calm down.
Actually, what I think in how the corals survived the “dinosaur extinction” was probably due to gradual climate temperature change in the water if it is indeed the global warming that killed off the dinosaurs.
Also, there are evidence that there is a rapid “evolution” in the past twenty years in other creatures. Who’s not to say that the strongest of the corals will survive and then respawn? After all, it does take corals to regrow millions of years. It’s been millions of years since the dinosaurs walked the Earth.
How come we still have corals at all? We have been going through radical climate changes for the last 4.5 billion years or even if you just count the last(current) ice age (2 millions years with 10% being like the current warm interglacial period) how have they survived? In fact just thinking about it the present shallow water coral reefs in the carribean and australia and indonesia, they are only 8000 to 10000 years old because otherwise they would have 100meters above sea level during the last cold snap.
Does anyone know how much the sea levels dropped during the Little Ice Age or raised during the Medieval Warm Period?