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A Solution for Coral Reefs in Peril
Alien54 writes "At the recent Coral Reef Symposium in Bali, Indonesia, scientists concluded that most of the world's ocean reefs have been killed or severely damaged with the remainder in certain jeopardy. Disastrous reverses in reef health threaten marine biodiversity, tourism, fisheries and shore protection worldwide. Reefs die for many reasons: rising water temperatures, sewage flows, eutrophication, disease, and negligence. A reef ecosystem that took hundreds of years to grow can be destroyed in a single afternoon by dredging, dynamite or cyanide fishing. But there is a solution. In pilot installations in Mexico, Panama, Indonesia, Maldives, Thailand, and Papua New Guinea, artificial reefs have been built where corals grow rapidly even in stressed environments. Applying a low voltage electrical current (completely safe for swimmers and marine life) to a submerged conductive structure causes dissolved mineral crystals in seawater to preciptate and adhere to that structure. Surviving coral fragments are mechanically attached, and end up doing very well indeed. During the 1998 warming, fewer than 5% of the natural reef corals survived. But on the artificial reefs, 80% of corals not only survived, they flourished. Corals from these reefs are now recolonizing the surrounding natural habitats."
This is the kind of technology our species needs to invest more time into. Bringing this planet back to life. Not that we should abandon our adventures into more efficient living for ourselves, but we owe it to our planet to keep it alive if we have the ability to do so.
In the distant future, when we venture beyond this rock, do we really want to leave behind a giant ball of toxic tar orbiting the sun? It seems like we're on the verge of doing just that...if we even make it that far.
I guess I'll switch my usual Filet-O-Fish for a Big Mac.
Actually, there was a recent article that discussed the fact that the symbiotic bacteria that made up corals was changing. So, though there's widespread bleaching of corals, it doesn't necessarily mean doom. The newer symbionts are much better adapted to warmer temperatures, so they should do better with the overall warming of the oceans.
What's probably happening with this artificial corals is that they're being colonized by the "clade D" symbionts right off the bat, which makes it look like they're thriving.
That's not to say that corals don't face other issues - pollution and disease most notably - but the situation may not be as dire as suspected.
That's pretty cool and might work in some places where the coral hasn't already adapted (admittedly a LOT of places). Coral has been adapting on its own to warming conditions though. Along the Panama coast, warm water caused extensive bleaching in corals that had formed a symbiotic relationship with one type of Symbiodinium algae, known as clade C. But corals that joined forces with another algae type, clade D, that can tolerate higher temperatures, did not become bleached. http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 96275
...and you've eaten your pen. simply stunning.
Wire laced with electrical current to simulate a reef? What's so natural about that? Maybe the reefs are supposed to die down to 5% every once in a while.
Remember the problems we have from preventing forest fires?
Davak
I thought the solution was in peril. Damn those sneaky barnacles!
You can only be young once, but you can be immature forever.
What happens when our entire ecosystem becomes "artificial"? The coral can't survive unless we're zapping the rocks they adhere to. I shudder to think how we're going to keep the elephants around...
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Reefs die for many reasons: rising water temperatures, sewage flows, eutrophication, disease, and negligence.
OK, Billy. Explain to me again what you were doing last week when you should have been feeding the reef!!!
Of course, Life magazine might get a circulation boost out of it.
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Isn't this just like sinking a ship to make a new reef, just that here instead of using an explosion to kick off decomposition, they're doing it electrically?? And with the sunken ships there's an "instant structure"....
UK Laptops
That's all we need: Franken-Coral.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Anyway, that pretty much sums up my pointless story. But it is very cool to see this 20+ year old idea actually used for something beneficial.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Good Lord - I've heard about this - cat juggling! Stop! Stop! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Good. Father, could there be a god that would let this happen?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Superb, extremely interesting and enjoyable overview of coral reef biodiversity, and very good at providing an overview of the threats faced by the reef, both manmade and natural. Cheap too, and free biscuits :-)
As their blurb states, "through understanding comes appreciation". Snorkling around the reef was one of the best parts of my recent world trip - apart from the sunburn I picked up by being too quick into the water. It was a huge shame the tour boat didn't much of a job of advising people of the threat we pose to the environment when out on the reef. If you fancy yourself as a eco-friendly geek, like me, you certainly would do well to visit Reef Teach.
ooooooh! What does this button do? - DeeDee, Dexters Lab.
The Plural of Coral is Coral. This might seem silly - I don't make the rules - but that's how it is.
You have it wrong in the title and wrong in the last line or article.
Healthy corals grow quickly--up to ten times faster than normal when exposed to the Biorock Process, even in poor water conditions.
Could this possibly be used in aquariums? It would be interesting to grow corals in an accellerated rate in an aquarium.
Does the phrase "Wipe After Yourself" mean anything to you? The human species, more than any other, has been directly responsible for vast amounts of pollutants spewed into the environment. So, yeah, it is our problem to solve because we are the ones who caused it.
the slowing of reef growth has something to do with earth's waning magnetic field and this occurs naturally right before a pole flip?
Maybe the reason tank raised corals grow so well in home aquariums but dont propagate as easily in the wild is because with all those corals in proximity to each other in such a small water space they exchange the symbiotic bacteria quicker that allows them to tolerate more difficult conditions. i see some of my corals releasing them every night as brown stringy waste but to see them reuptaked into other corals you would need a microscope.
Maybe its the fratellis.
Maybe chunk found the police!
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
I had this "Future Technologies" book when I was a kid, and it explained how we could create pressure-safe undersea domes using this exact technology. Steel grid dome, apply electricity, wait for the minerals, then wait for the coral, eventually you'd have a water-tight, hollow dome. I think this book also talked about a nuclear reactor in every home, so maybe it wasn't 100% accurate. Still, nice to see some technologies actually being applied.
Nicer still, if the philosophical evil which teaches people that causality is merely an arbitrary construct could be abolished. Then maybe these cyanide and dynamite fishers would learn that you cannot both have and eat your cake.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
"Plants and animals die every day, and have for millions of years. All of a sudden it's a problem we need to solve?"
They have but we are the equivalent of a massive meteor strike. We accomplish in one generation what used to happen in a million years. Since we supposedly have the power to think and claim to be capable of moral choices I'd say just throwing our hands up in the air is a pretty lame and lazy excuse.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Since artificial reefs are usually sunken wrecks I wonder if the iron constantly leaching out of these wrecks is the key element to the reefs vigor. I know oceanographers have found that sea water is generally very iron poor and that experiments with iron "seeding" have produced phytoplankton blooms.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Coral is my girlfriend and this thread keeps getting weirder.
;)
That's because its all a bizarre dream. I mean, really. You have nothing better to do than post amusing comments on slashdot. You don't _really_ have a girlfriend!
they found specific insecticides in the great barrier reef that were killing coral. The scientists located the companies that produced them, found the farmers that purchased them in specific quantities and then had to go far inland to tell them they were killing off the great barrier reef.
They had since gotten that situation under control but the fact remains that the farmers in north dakota are killing off all the corals in the caribbean and noone is doing anything about it. But its going to turn the water green and kill the tourism industry in the caribbean eventually. Apparently the water near the florida keys is already changing from its blue color to a greenish. The sad thing is that even if we stopped today, there is so much insecticide and fertilizers draining through the land between north dakota and the gulf that it would take decades to completely filter out. The way the reefs die is that the insecticides are weakening the coral which allows algae to gain a foothold. one the algae starts it gets fertilized by the fertilizer and takes over.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
phytoplankton blooms in a reef. Its what turns water green and blocks out the light. Iron seeding promotes algal growth. You typically want to use that in temperate regions instead of tropical. I've talked with some of the world's foremost coral experts and they said though that they thought it could be successfully used to pull greenhouse gasses out of the atmosphere though.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
Being a diver, the 5% number by the poster was suspect to me immediately since no location I've been at (Hawaii, Aruba, Cozumel, Florida) has seen numbers close to that. Yes, a large percentage of reefs are threatened, but certainly not 95% wiped out.
The 5% number is, according to the article, referring to the Maldive islands, a chain to the west-to-southwest of India, not worldwide.
Yes, I'm not kidding about this.
There has been a practice to sink the cleaned-up remains of old ships to use them to create artificial reefs. I believe that has been done off the coast of Florida with great success, and other parts of the world are doing this also.
turn people into reefs.
http://www.eternalreefs.com/
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
I've been storing hundreds of gallons of polychlorinated biphenyls in the back of my shop for years. Now maybe I can dump them into the big drink again without suffering the wrath of that damned coral-hugging MIT hippie in his little Zodiac.
Potassium Cyanide fishing is a technique used to "stun" fish rather than killing them so they can be caught live and either used in aquariums or served fresh from live tanks (popular in Asia). Potassium cyanide kills the reef where it is applied, but not the fish (the level absorbed by fish is non-fatal to them).
Dynamiting is used to stun fish (by the concussion), so it mainly kills reef by breaking it and stirring up sediment that suffocates the reef. I've always heard of this as grenade fishing, but I suppose it depends on what you're using as the explosive.
I'm surprised shrimp and lobster trawling wasn't mentioned - trawling kills more reef every year than any other method I know of (something like 2-3x the area of the United States yearly, or between 6 and 10 million square nautical miles, depending on source). Maybe those numbers are down, or else maybe the Cyanide/Dynamite numbers are way up and they want people to take notice. I think the cyanide numbers were only about 300000 square nautical miles last year (it was something like 330000, but the marine awareness and presevation class I attended was way back in February).
Now if only someone could figure out a way to replenish the stocks of large ocean fish that have been reduced by 90% since 1950.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I coached high school debaters on their ocean topic last year, and artificial coral reefs were a popular point of contention. I won't really go into detail here, but don't rely on that website as your source of information. The Coral Reef Taskforce is nothing more than a front for the creators of BioRock. The whole webpage is a large advertisement. Other makers of artificial reefs and many professional scuba diving organizations also don't really care for BioRock because it is ugly, expensive, and potentially dangerous (I guess there's a risk of shock).
In any case, I'd love to see solutions put in place to save coral reefs, but I'm not so desperately enthusiastic that I'll heed the words of a website infomercial that proclaim BioRock to be the best solution.
The article doesn't really explain why the growth was better on the artificial reefs. Is it due to the electric current somehow stimulating coral growth?
Or perhaps it's due to the fact that these structures are very open and allow a lot of water flow throughout the structure of the reef (thus allowing greater nutrient flow to the corals).
The attachement argument alone doesn't seem to be the only explanation: I use super-glue to attach corals in my aquarium and that works very quickly.
Perhaps similar effects could be acheived by slight electrical stimulation of already existing reefs? More experimentation needs to be done.
I hope that they're right, however, in their observations. It would be great if we could save some reefs. Coral reefs are among the most beautiful and diverse eco systems on the planet. It would be a shame to lose them because of our carelessness.
Of course, any time you see an article that begins along the lines of "scientists have concluded" or "scientists agree" you can pretty much bet that it's a reprinted press release of some group, there's an agenda attached, and your bullshit detector should go into high gear. That's not to say that there's a nonzero probability of truth, just that you should be extremely cautious.
There aren't many "conclusions" in science - even in the areas that lend themselves to the most concrete of measurements (such as physics), refinements and changes never seem to stop. In areas like biology and climatology where the relationships between the data sources and even the data itself are extremely complex and difficult to understand and interpret, it's pretty safe to call bullshit on anyone who claims to have an answer so perfect that we can "conclude" inquiry into the area.
Unfortunately (for serious environmentalists), many of these bullshit artists are found in the environmental movement where they are perfectly safe because the mere act of questioning them is treated as heresy. One can even speculate that the environmental movement has merely taken over the "the world is ending; you must follow us to be saved - and by the way, if any of you goddamned heathens question us, we'll burn your heretecal ass at the stake" meme from organized religion. This is also often phrased along the lines of "the situation is too serious for debate [or more research]! We must act [spend / offer up tithes to the goddess Giaa] now!" There has always been (and probably always will be) a large group of people whom, for some bizzare reason, want to believe the world is about to end and that they (the annointed / enlightened ones) must Act Now to save it. Organized religion has exploited this for centuries, and now the bulk of the environmental movement has jumped on the bandwagon.
Serious environmental research and debate is crucial for us having a nice place to exist and that's important (and worth protecting, spending money on, etc), but watching a bunch of sheep run around bleating about the end of the world (or the crucial coral reefs) makes me nausious. That being said, I'm all for reducing pollution and keeping an eye on things, but not under the auspices of alarmist sensationalism.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
Does it strike anyone else as... interesting... that the Director of the "Global Coral Reef Alliance" is also the registrant of, and one of the pricipals of, the commercial organization they're proposing as the solution?
Hmmm.
"...and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys."
Details and references here. (I replied with some comments about this, but I didn't have an account so they have 0-ratings, so I got an account to post this. Hope its not too bad form to comment in multiple places.)
I remember reading in my college Chemistry book about a similar process in which one could literally "grow" concrete slabs by submerging an electrically-charged mesh into a calcium/mineral-rich solution (a.k.a. ocean water).
Anyone else hear of this more recently?
Global warming is neither science, nor politics. It is a religion.