LENG Damaged brain corals, top , clearly look washed out compared to a health stand, below Reef Check Take a good look. Just as unrelenting pressure causes some people to develop gray hair, so environmental stress causes coral to bleach - turned pale or completely white. And last year, reef systems world-wide paled on an unprecedented scale.
Reefs can be remarkably resilient.
And depending on how healthy they are, bleached corals sometimes survive for months. But they will die if the damage is particularly severe or if the habitat does not return to normal. When he assembled a small team of marine biologists in May 1998, Soundararajan's plan was to survey the diversity of reef fish in the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. Its coral reefs support about half the 1,200 species of fish that thrive in the surrounding waters. But the group was in for a shock.