A recent follow-up survey found that coral reefs in western australia have now returned to near-primitive health, even as some experts in the marine life community have expected serious damage, when early this year's rowley shoal (Rowley Shoals) showed initial signs of widespread coral fading.
Holmes (Tom Holmes), marine monitoring coordinator of the Office of Biodiversity, Nature Conservation and Scenic Spot Management in Western Australia, said that although his team was still working on the data, the corals there appeared to have recovered surprisingly well in the past six months.
Dr Holmes said :" We had hoped to see a wide death rate, but we did not see it... This is really a great thing. "
The survey, a follow-up survey conducted in April, found that as many as 60 per cent of corals on the Raleigh shoal reef had whitened since reliable satellite monitoring began in 1993, following the most extensive ocean heat wave.
Marine biology has long known that high ocean temperatures cause coral bleaching, which kills corals-as can be seen from the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Queensland, but little is known that albino corals do not death. immediately
"So when corals whiten, it's actually just a sign of initial stress ," Dr Holmes said. "
"Microalgae living in corals are expelled from the corals themselves, so the actual corals below are still alive. "
However, corals rely on these microalgae as food sources, without which they can not survive for a long time.
"If the stress persists for a long time and the corals are still white, they can cause death ."," Dr Holmes said
"But there are some cases of coral bleaching around the world... For a long time, this pressure has not persisted, and corals have been able to bring algae back from the water. "
He believes that the critical time interval between bleaching and dying provides an opportunity for coral reefs to recover in the Raleigh shoal. Raleigh Beach is the three coral atoll chains 300 kilometers away from the town of Bloem (Broome) on mainland edge of Australia.
