Three-year study seeks to evaluate the potential of artificial upwelling and identify depth and intensity scenarios that mitigate coral bleaching effectively with minimal risk of unwanted side effects.

A former Bermuda High School pupil was announced yesterday as Bermuda’s Rhodes scholar for this year.

In 2014, leading coral scientists put out a blunt report: reefs in the Caribbean were in such bad shape they were at risk of vanishing within two decades. And that was before the most recent global coral-bleaching crisis hit the region hard in 2015.

Supervisors can help to shape the lives and careers of their students and trainees. Sometimes, they become lifelong mentors and eventual collaborators, contributing to a new generation of scientific discovery. And students can forge meaningful relationships with those senior scientists even at the earliest stages of their science careers.

Researchers in Bermuda have released a new study on how corals absorb light in different conditions.

Read more at: www.csunbiosphere.org/2019/09/30/silbiger-tests-thermal-tolerances-of-coral-from-different-climates/

Earlier this year, BIOS senior scientist and coral reef ecologist Eric Hochberg published a paper in the journal Coral Reefs that put numbers to a widely accepted concept in reef science: that materials in seawater (such as phytoplankton, organic matter, or suspended sediment) can affect how much light, as well as the wavelength of light, reaches the seafloor. This, in turn, impacts the ecology of organisms, including corals and algae, that live on the seafloor and rely on that light for photosynthesis.

The risk of severe coral bleaching—a condition in which corals lose their symbiotic algae, called zooxanthellae—is five times more frequent today than it was forty years ago. Coral bleaching is a direct result of global warming, where rising temperatures cause marine heat waves, which place stress on the living coral animals, as well as the photosynthetic algae on which they depend for energy. This heat stress causes the algae to malfunction, at which point they are expelled by the corals, causing the organisms to lose their color and appear white (thus the term coral “bleaching”).

Upwelling regions account for just 1% of the world’s oceans, yet they are responsible for producing roughly half of the global fishing industry’s annual harvest—worth an estimated $362 billion as of 2016. These nutrient-dense, cool-water regions play a vital role in global ecosystems, supporting the growth of the seaweed and plankton that are the backbone of the marine food web.

Read more at FIU