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'Dead Corals Don't Make Babies': Great Barrier Reef Losing Its Ability To Recover From Bleaching (cnn.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Successive ocean heat waves are not only damaging Australia's Great Barrier Reef, they are compromising its ability to recover, raising the risk of "widespread ecological collapse," a new study has found. The 2,300-kilometer-long (1,500 mile) reef has endured multiple large-scale "bleaching" events caused by above-average water temperatures in the last two decades, including back-to-back occurrences in 2016 and 2017.
The new study, released Wednesday in the journal Nature, examined the number of adult corals which survived these two events and how many new corals they created to replenish the reef in 2018.
The answer was as bleak as it was stark: "Dead corals don't make babies," the study's lead author, Terry Hughes, said in a press release. Scientists working on the study found the loss in adult corals caused a "crash in coral replenishment" on the reef, as heat stresses brought about by warming ocean temperatures impacted the ability of coral to heal. "The number of new corals settling on the Great Barrier Reef declined by 89% following the unprecedented loss of adult corals from global warming in 2016 and 2017," said Hughes. Scientists working on the report say they would expect coral recruitment to recover over the next 5 to 10 years, as more corals reach sexual maturity, but only in the absence of another bleaching event. However, with sea temperatures continuing to rise this seems a near-impossiblity.
The answer was as bleak as it was stark: "Dead corals don't make babies," the study's lead author, Terry Hughes, said in a press release. Scientists working on the study found the loss in adult corals caused a "crash in coral replenishment" on the reef, as heat stresses brought about by warming ocean temperatures impacted the ability of coral to heal. "The number of new corals settling on the Great Barrier Reef declined by 89% following the unprecedented loss of adult corals from global warming in 2016 and 2017," said Hughes. Scientists working on the report say they would expect coral recruitment to recover over the next 5 to 10 years, as more corals reach sexual maturity, but only in the absence of another bleaching event. However, with sea temperatures continuing to rise this seems a near-impossiblity.
I'm just as frightened and panicked and filled with righteous moral outrage as I was during the last 87 stories about how everything is doomed this week! We only have 10 more years to save the planet, not counting the previous final 10 years or the penultimate final 10 years before that! Elect politicians that agree with me because all the other ones are bad but the ones I like give really good lip service about pretending to care!
Please enlighten everyone about what happened to the corals in the Great Barrier Reed during the Medieval Warm Period. It was quite warm then, too, yet we still have plenty of corals today.
Oh, wait, we're not supposed to talk about that... I almost forgot.
- snruter rotsac
Dead corals don't make babies
It's the same with everything else.
With their "vast science backgrounds" lol. Denialist idiots will always be against any environmental story, it doesn't even matter what it is. They'd rather die than understand science.
In Soviet Russia, dead coral bleaches YOU!
That was your vacuum cleaner. Get a grip and use lube.
Not even dead ones?
Dump iron into the sea, lads. Iron into the sea...
Read this Wikipedia article about coral reef bleaching.
PLEASE tell me they can't recover.
" if you got your stories straight. " = Yes, every scientist in the world needs to get their data to align in marching lock step, like Fox News does. There has to be a choral unison of agreement, in all niches. Great point, moron.
Corals have been around for 500 million years and countles cycles of warming and cooling cycles during that time.
Every prior warming and cooling cycle has happened over thousands of years which gave species the chance to adapt via genetic mutation over multiple generations. What makes this one so different is that this has happened in mere decades which has left no time for adaptation to occur.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
to fix it, smells kinda musky. ?
[($)]
So what you are saying is, you are an evolution denier.
Science - do you speak it motherfucker? Some species evolve, some go extinct.
Every prior warming and cooling cycle has happened over thousands of years which gave species the chance to adapt via genetic mutation over multiple generations. What makes this one so different is that this has happened in mere decades which has left no time for adaptation to occur.
How do you know this? Do we even have measurement techniques that would have the resolution to determine warming and cooling at the level of decades 500 million years back?
I'm actually more worried about the damage to the reef from pollution
Who gives a fuck?
Well, 500 million might be a bit too much, but yes. Temperatures leaves traceable changes.
For example clam shells have temperature dependent rings much like trees.
So by digging up and comparing clam shells from a specific time you can get a rough idea of temperature changes.
But there are thousands of different ways so it is a lot of work to get accurate temperature estimations.
It's interesting how the frequency of news articles about environmental disasters seems to be increasing. Is this just because people are more interested in these stories nowadays or is the planet plunging itself in the deep pit of irreversible warming, becoming more unihabitable for people every day?
-- Cheers!
It is time to do a proper late term abortion to the GBR asap!
But I basically come here exactly for their comments. It's a bit like reading rebuttals from religious nutjobs who get cornered more and more and come up with more and more ridiculous explanations for clinging to their beliefs.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No, they don't decrease previously recorded historical temperatures. They take into account changes in methodology. BEST proved that there was no untoward and illicit fiddling with the data.
Capcha: Tedious.
It truly is, with denier zombie claims.
Apparently leftist retards with mod points came to QQ.
It's not the heat that is bleaching the corals. That's a too-inconvenient scapegoat.
The real culprit is chemical poisoning from human activities near the reefs, most notably oil spillage and sunscreens.
Every prior warming and cooling cycle has happened over thousands of years which gave species the chance to adapt
Not only that, the gp is conflating coral reefs in general with the Great Barrier Reef in particular. The GBR is relatively young, and its modern form is only 8,000 years old. It is not invulnerable to change. The GBR contributed $5.68 billion to the Australian economy in 2011-12 and it generated almost 69,000 full-time equivalent jobs.
They need to engineer corals that will not only survive but help the existing corals survive the more hostile environmental conditions.
Restating for emphasis. You would rather die than understand science.
8000 years ago the Sabertooth Tiger and Wooly Mammoth were already gone.
But the Australian Aborigines had been there for 80,000 years already.
THINGS CHANGE!
You do know that genetic mutation can happen in one generation, right? And anything that doesn't kill 100% of a species in an extremely short span of time, will simply be evolved around?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Blame Bitcoin
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Last I saw, none of those were asexual species- which is what coral are.
Asexual species are hyperevolutionary because they only need ONE individual with ONE genetic mutation to colonize a whole new ecosystem.
Anything that does not kill off *every single coral* in one single event, will not make this species go extinct.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Consensus. You can't even spell it. And it's not lock-step of the data, it's a general aggregate of the science overall that does align very well if not in all possible nth degree extrapolations of the model. The model is very accurate overall.
The people quibbling over whether a moment's data in time is representative or not, you, are missing the bigger picture - it is happening, science has agreed on that. The exact extent cannot be known 100% accurately, but it's all bad.
You instead choose to dither in support of doing nothing, addressing none of it. Faggots like you are not scientists. Faggots like you are liars in defense of polluted monies.
I would be willing to bet that they encounter at least 10 to 20 degree changes every year based on the season. I seriously doubt a one or two degree change causes a mass die off.
Um, you seem to think mutations are almost intentional purposeful things that a living creature intentionally carries out to adapt to a problem.
That's not even remotely true, mutations are random events that are not always useful; so yes a mutation CAN happen in one generation, but the odds of one that just happens to fix a specific extinction threat issue in a single generation, are basically zero.
Otherwise, basically nothing would've ever gone extinct, ever.
Billion. With a B.
That is how long corals have been around.
If you think driving SUVs is going to be the death of them you are an idiot.
Almost all complex organisms reproduce sexually (some of them also reproduce asexually) , because it increases variability by mixing and matching and by harboring recessive genes. Sexual species have been observed to evolve faster than asexual ones.
Funny how every article that disputes AGW gets modded down. It's like some folks can't handle facts.
How long does it take for a coral community to recover from a death event? What about following man-made disturbances where the environment has undergone permanent change? What if the change is ongoing?
The Atlantic cod still exists as a species, but that's of little comfort to the folks who once had jobs linked to the fishery.
Likewise, your assurances that the coral species will probably not go extinct says little about whether the Great Barrier Reef will be around for our children to enjoy, or the fate of the ~70,000 associated jobs.
An idiot is a person who reads facts about coral bleaching from experts and, without any evidence, says that the corals will be just fine.
An idiot is someone who can, at their leisure, watch satellite footage showing the shrinking yearly minimum ice extent at the North Pole and claim that rocks falling into the oceans are making the sea level rise.
An idiot is someone who can, on their own computer, look up CO2 level data, average temperature data, hurricane formation, duration, and intensity data, then claim that global warming is a hoax.
An idiot is someone who can look at all sorts of indicators of climate change from many scientific fields, and claim that there is no consensus - therefore more research has to be done.
...an argument over something like this isn't complete without at least one mention of Hitler:
https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-innocent-sounding-topics-that-are-guaranteed-flame-wars/
No, you're a doody head!
85% of pregnancy ends in spontaneous abortion. I guess Jesus hates babies way more than liberals, huh?