Great Barrier Reef corals dying fast from bleaching
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MORE corals are dying and others are succumbing to disease and predators after the worst-ever bleaching on Australia’s iconic Great Barrier Reef, scientists said yesterday.
A swathe of corals bleached in the northern third of the 2,300-kilometer-long biodiverse site off the Queensland state coast died after an unprecedented bleaching earlier this year as sea temperatures rose.
And researchers who returned to the region to survey the area this month said “many more have died more slowly.”
“In March, we measured a lot of heavily bleached branching corals that were still alive, but we didn’t see many survivors this week,” Andrew Hoey of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University said in a statement.
“On top of that, snails that eat live coral are congregating on the survivors, and the weakened corals are more prone to disease. A lot of the survivors are in poor shape.”
Researcher Greg Torda said of the reefs surveyed near Lizard Island off Cairns — a gateway to the giant ecosystem — the amount of live coral covering them fell from about 40 percent in March to under five percent.
It is the third time in 18 years that the World Heritage-listed site, which teems with marine life, has experienced mass bleaching after previous events in 1998 and 2002.
The researchers said even though they were still assessing the final death toll from bleaching in the north, “it is already clear that this event was much more severe than the two previous bleachings.” They expect to complete all their surveys by mid-November.
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