By Chris Bright Coral is extremely vulnerable to heat stress and the unusually high sea surface temperatures of the past two decades may have damaged this biome.
Coral reefs are perhaps the greatest collective enterprise in nature.
Reefs form in shallow tropical and subtropical waters, and host huge numbers of plants and animals. Coral is extremely vulnerable to heat stress and the unusually high sea surface temperatures of the past two decades may have damaged this biome. That too is a likely manifestation of climate change. Coral usually recovers from a brief bout of bleaching, but if the syndrome persists it is generally fatal because the coral depends on the algae to help feed it through photosynthesis. Published records of bleaching date back to 1870, but show nothing comparable to what began in the early 1980s, when unusually warm water caused extensive bleaching throughout the Pacific.