WCS coral expert finds that some reefs were less sensitive to warming water over time
NEW YORK (May 2, 2017) – A new WCS study reveals evidence that some corals are adapting to warming ocean waters – potentially good news in the face of recent reports of global coral die offs due to extreme warm temperatures in 2016. The study appears in the latest issue of Marine Ecology Progress Series.
The study looked at responses to extreme temperature exposures in the same reefs over time, and found less coral bleaching in 11 of the 21 coral species studied. WCS Senior Conservation Zoologist Tim McClanahan, who has been studying coral responses to climate change since the extreme temperatures of the1998 El Nino, authored the study.
The study took place in two marine national parks of Kenya. Looking at two similarly severe warming events in 1998 and 2016, McClanahan found that the number of pale and bleached coral colonies declined from 73 to 27 percent, and 96 to 60 percent in the two parks with different background temperatures. Most of this change was due to about half of the most common species that did not bleach strongly in 2016. One rare species was, however, more sensitive than in 1998.
Bleaching takes place when stressed corals discharge beneficial algae that supply energy to corals causing them to turn pale or white and often starve. Worldwide, an estimated 60 percent of corals and 90 percent of coral species experienced bleaching due to unusually warm ocean water in 2016.
McClanahan says: “This was a rare chance to study bleaching responses during two separate times with very similar conditions. Adaptation is evident for some of the more important reef building corals but, sadly, many species are not adapting, so this is a good news-bad news story.”
But McClanahan warns: “Evidence for adaptation in the past is not evidence for adaptation in the future. Nevertheless, I suspect this adaptation to hot water started before my 1998 work and could have begun during the 1983 and 1988 El Niños, when coral bleaching was first observed in the region.”
Said Tim McClanahan: “Despite the many caveats and interpretation of these results, this study provides one of the first response-rate estimates for many common corals at the population level. It therefore provides a basis for future studies and improving model predictions and the types of evaluations needed to address the future health of coral reefs.”
Global awareness continues to grow about the immediate threats facing coral reef ecosystems, and a global commitment to address those threats. In February, at the Economist World Ocean Summit in Bali, Indonesia, the ’50 Reefs’ initiative was launched by the Global Change Institute of the University of Queensland and the Ocean Agency. The initiative brings together leading ocean, climate and marine scientists to develop a list of the 50 most critical coral reefs to protect, while leading conservation practitioners are working together to establish the best practices to protect these reefs.
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Attributing this to “adaptation” just looks garbage to me, especially given the huge difference in percentage of supposed surviving corals. What other factors were evaluated to explain the differences? What about sea levels, for instance?
This is just an excuse for the abundance of damage caused by rising temperatures. It is true that nature is adaptable. However, when faced with enormous odds stacked against it the adaptation usually loses pace resulting in
extinction, etc.
~Sarah Sobieski
Sarah- Your emotional response to an entirely natural phenomenon is utterly wasted. Corals have been around for millions of years and seen ocean levels that were much, much higher and much, much lower. During those millions of years they have likewise seen water temperatures much, much warmer and much, much colder. that’s why evolution made their reproduction mobile. the seas are full of spores just looking for a spot to land. They just don’t know if the spot will be good for a long time or just a good time.
Like people who settle at the foot of Mt. Etna because the land is fertile-they think short term and that has worked for them for millions of years.
If the damage is as abundant as you have been trained to believe, then you shouldn’t have any trouble listing some and demonstrating conclusively that it was CO2 that done it.
Sarah – For about 100,000 years, a period ended about 12,000 years ago, coral was really stressed by cold ocean temperatures and sea level over 400 feet lower than today. During that period, the Great Barrier Reef did not exist in its present location, which was of course, over 400 feet above the sea level. Ignorance of past climate change – millions of events – and past adaptations by life forms, is abundantly in evidence in your and in the vast army of CAGW alarmists’ comments on the current natural rebound from one of the coldest periods of the past 10,000 years, the Little Ice Age (1350-1850AD). Even with the modest recent warming, we are still in the coldest 10% of the past 10,000 years. Even many fools realize that Earth’s life forms overall do much better in a warmer vs. colder environment. Ask a Canadian about how it will feel during the coming glacial period (ice age) when, for another 100,000 years, all of Canada will be under mile-thick ice.
Coral reefs adapt to cycles of warming and cooling, and to rising sea levels, and have for millions of years. The Great Barrier Reef in Australia is the largest structure built by living creatures. It dwarfs the puny works of man like the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, and our modern cities, not only in size but in duration. It has outlived dozens of glacial & warming cycles.
Atolls are interesting coral formations most abundant in the Pacific Ocean, but found in other tropical oceans as well. They are ring-shaped coral structures that grow around small islands when the island subsides, the sea level rises, or both. Eniwetok in the Pacific is one of the largest atolls, more than ten miles across, and began growing in the Cretaceous era when dinosaurs still walked the earth. Bikini, an atoll nearby, was used for atomic testing in the 1940s and 50s, and supplied perhaps the most famous photograph of an atomic blast. The eponymous skimpy bathing suit popularized about that time, was named for the blast/island because of its allegedly explosive effect on male eyeballs.
This post does not suggest we should be cavalier about the fate of corals, or that we shouldn’t bother monitoring them. Quite the contrary. But we should not misrepresent coral reefs’ adaptability or durability in order to manipulate public opinion. We should be as accurate as possible.
“Nevertheless, I suspect this adaptation to hot water started before my 1998 work and could have begun during the 1983 and 1988 El Niños”
I never knew that ’83 had the first El Niño?
That’s the first El Niño that they noticed. Bleaching events were common in the early 20th century warming, uncommon during the mid-20th century cooling period and then common again since 1980…
http://www.reef.edu.au/ohg/HG%20papers/Hoegh-Guldberg%20et%20al.%201997%20GBR.pdf
They routinely ignore everything prior to the early 1980’s and declare whatever is happening now to be unprecedented.
Something that has bothered me about the whole “CO2 levels haven’t been this high in millions of years” nonsense: If the Holocene Optimum and the Minoan warm period and the Roman warm period were warmer than today, doesn’t if follow that the oceans were warmer as well and thus throwing out more CO2 than now?
Antarctic ice cores generally lack the resolution to detect century-scale CO2 shifts.
Just because air temps were a little higher then doesn’t mean ocean temps were as well. There is no proof or real indication that ocean temps today are any warmer than previously this century. Beware of the Warmist B.S. machine that says that ocean waters are .1 C warmer or that ph has declined by .01. These “readings” are false in statistical terms as the base measurements are completely inadequate to deliver that accurate a resolution. They are more or less like Michael Mann’s tree rings- a deliberate fabrication via slight of hand statistical analysis that is hopelessly corrupt. It is pretend science by political activists.
At least with water temperatures, there are some actual measurements from the late 1800’s and early 1900’s.
There are no pH measurements from that period and very few now. Assertions of a 0.1 drop in oceanic pH over the past 250 years are entirely based on the rise in CO2.
They use the “cause” to calculate an “effect” and then claim that there is a cause and effect relationship.
Atmospheric CO2 does factor into the pH of surface seawater… But so do a lot of other things.
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/Zeebe.png
as most plant and animal life, it’s main purpose is to continue life, propagate.
Corals, polar bears and nearly every other species in the world today survived wrenching climate change at the end of the last glaciation. Climate change isn’t the problem, things like pollution and habitat loss are. CAGW has distracted us from problems that exist and might otherwise be solved.
I doubt either habitat loss or pollution matter much. The planet is currently adding 2 billion tons of biomass per year, increasing habitat for biodiversity. Tens of millions of acres of marginal farmland have been returned to the wild since the fall of the USSR. According to the EPA, six real pollutants they track have declined 71% since 1970 (excluding CO2, which is not a pollutant). I suspect many European nations and Japan have reduced emissions about as much as we have since the ’70s. As the developed world gets richer, they will deal with rising pollution, too.
The world is 71% ocean and the other 29% is where humans can potentially live. (Except that much of the non-oceanic surface area is uninhabitable – polar caps, swamps, forests, deserts, mountains, etc.) The surface area of the U.S. is less than 2% of the planet’s surface area. And in the U.S. we have covered maybe 2%-3% of U.S. surface area with infrastructure. That’s where we live, work, play and drive our cars. That amounts to about 0.04%-0.06% of Earth’s surface area. On that 0.04%-0.06% of Earth’s surface area the U.S. produces about 25% of global GDP.
We think everything revolves around us, but I suspect we’re barely more than a surface nuisance to Gaia.
Bikini Atoll Corals Recovering from Atomic Blast – Live Science
http://www.livescience.com › Planet Earth
15 Apr 2008 – Fifty years after the atomic blast that devastated the Bikini Atoll, vast expanses of corals in the area seem to be flourishing once again
I doubt it took 50 years. An atoll gets a constant stream of coral spores, etc.
Well there isn’t much to adapt to, so…
And how about the corals that were bleached, how many were being exposed during low tide?
Exactly. In the scheme of things, any climate change which is currently occurring (or which has occurred in the last 50 years) is miniscule and barely measurable.
Corals have survived and adapted for 500 million Years through 5 or 6 mass extinction events and numerous Natural Ice Age and Global Warming events. Corals are not in danger of extinction except by deliberate Human poisoning .
This “study” can be filed under, “No Schist Sherlock”…
Coral reefs can handle “highly acidic ocean waters”…
Sediment laden waters…
Rising seas (AKA deeper water)…
Glacial cycles…
Pollution…
Ocean zoning…
A lack of data…
Harsh intertidal zones…
Bad news about other ocean habitats…
Extinction…
An absence of scuba divers…
I’ve noticed that scuba divers tend to whine more than other groups about Gorebal Warming and Ocean Neutralization killing coral reefs. I have also noticed variations of this in several articles…
Maybe coral reefs don’t like scuba divers???
More sea level rise and deeper waters…
Heat…
More heat…
Coral reefs can even handle numerous predictions of their imminent demise…
Atomic bombs…
Chicken Little of the Sea doesn’t even bother them…
Offshore oil & gas drilling…
I’m really beginning to think that the only thing coral reefs can’t handle are too many scuba divers.
Coral reefs are amazingly undaunted by “a trend of widespread decline in coral reefs across the Caribbean”…
What is so special about Little Cayman’s reefs?
Here’s a SWAG… They are REMOTE.
Coral reefs even handled the much warmer Eemian (Sangamonian) interglacial stage…
Fortunately for coral reefs, there were no scuba divers 130,000 years ago.
More deep water and even more surprised scientists…
Why does it always shock the “scientists” when they discover healthy, thriving coral reefs?
It seems as if every newly discovered reef is healthy and thriving… particularly if it is in a remote area and not frequented by scuba divers?
How are these remote reefs miraculously immune to Gorebal Warming and Ocean Neutralization?
Coral reefs can even handle being denigrated as endangered species…
If Acropora cervicornis and Acropora palmata can interbreed to produce genetically viable offspring (Acropora prolifera), they are not distinct species and should not be listed as endangered species. Acropora is not endangered, prolifera should be a big, fat clue.
Coral reefs appear to be adapting quite well to climate change and Chicken Little of the Sea, if not adapting so well to scuba divers, snorkelers, agricultural runoff and fishing with dynamite.
Coral reefs really do seem to like warm water and lots of CO2 in their diets…
GBR calcification rates from:
De’ath, G., J.M. Lough, and K.E. Fabricius. 2009.
Declining coral calcification on the Great Barrier Reef.
Science, Vol. 323, pp. 116 – 119, 2 January 2009.
(Previously discussed here.)
According to Byrn et al., 2010, “Global ocean acidification is a prominent, inexorable change associated with rising levels of atmospheric CO2…”
The boron 10/11 ratio from Flinders Reef (GBR) demonstrates that seawater pH around the reef has generally ignored atmospheric CO2 over the past 250 years and that the coral has easily adapted to 0.2 pH unit swings every 50-60 years…
Declining pH has been “associated with rising levels of atmospheric CO2” since about 1990. Prior to 1990, rising and falling pH levels weren’t associated with rising or falling levels of CO2. (Station Aloha discussed here.)
However, the rising and falling pH appears to be inversely correlated with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)…
That’s really funny… Because the PDO supposedly can’t drive anything. It’s just an index of North Pacific sea surface temperatures and Flinders Reef is in the Coral Sea. The PDO and Flinders Reef are on opposite sides of the equator.
Good summary.
Divers do endanger corals, due to their sunscreen.
But reef-building organisms have survived every climate fluctuation that could be thrown at them for hundreds of millions of years. Corals themselves have been around for going on 600 million years, certainly from the Cambrian Period, ie 541 Ma. Even their living subclasses also date from the Paleozoic Era, ie before 252 Ma.
Yep. One of the most prominent features of the Permian Basin is a massive reef complex…
https://www.nps.gov/gumo/learn/nature/geologicformations.htm
No wonder Trip Funderwhatever wanted to blame AGW for killing corals. I wonder how long he’d been diving before he realized he was bleaching the coral. You can’t make that shit up.
“Coral flourishing at Bikini Atoll atomic test site”
Sounds positive, but soon that coral will grow to enormous size and start ravaging Tokyo.
https://youtu.be/TvQWBXJOgAI
LOL!
Amazing. All this verbiage about coral bleaching and hot water, and yet not one word of ACTUAL Temperature Data. Not in the original article, not in any of David’s quoted articles. (A couple of late referenced to temperature anomalies.)
Not much science here, just science like literature. Perhaps the corals merely hired a new interior decorator and changed color schemes?
Generally speaking, that’s what coral bleaching is.
http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/coral_bleach.html
Regarding temperatures… The Great Barrier Reef has grown faster as the climate has warmed up from the Little Ice Age…
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/GBR_Temp.png
The Holocene Climatic Optimum (8,000 to 5,000 years ago) was 1-2 °C warmer than it is today… Coral Reefs thrived.
The previous interglacial stage, the Sangamonian/Eemian (~135,000 years ago) was 3-5 °C warmer than it is today… Coral reefs thrived.
The Mesozoic Era was as much as 10 °C warmer (maybe more) than it is today, atmospheric CO2 was far higher and the average pH of the oceans was significantly lower, yet… Coral reefs thrived.
Great work, David! I always enjoy your writing: full of factual evidence plus good-natured humour. Keep on doing what you do.
Protecting reefs is important work. It has nothing to do with AGW, of course, but more importantly limiting destructive fishing practices and over-fishing reef building symbiots, reining in pollution affecting near-shore reefs, limiting sediment deposition, banning coral mining, etc.
All for these things — there is nothing to be done about sea water surface temperatures affecting shallow-water reefs — we are not in charge of that.
Yep.
Aside from all the arguments in recent years about whether most coral reefs are “bleaching” or not, and if so why, I would just like to register my objection to the term “bleaching”, which is extremely misleading and prejudicial.
There is no “bleach” in coral reef “bleaching” (like “there’s no crying in baseball”). Bleaching implies a chemical-induced pollution event, not a normal biological process engaged in by corals. It certainly sounds much scarier and more evil than the actual biological event is.
By the way, corals have not only survived and thrived throughout the “ice age” of the Pleistocene, but corals are far older than that .. with large deposits here in my home state of Florida that date back to the Eocene (up to 54 MYA), and in other parts of the world, corals are known to date back to the late Cambrian, about 500 MYA, and throughout geological history corals have suffered multiple extinction events, yet still managed to keep coming back.
In Florida there are coral quarries onshore from times when sea level was higher and drowned reefs far offshore from times when sea level was lower. When the seas rise and fall, coral reefs move.
Coral is very resilient.
I see what the problem is here. You have used observations of a REAL system. What a mistake!
You should have used a model…
No wait there’s a 2000 litre fish tank that says otherwise.
“Study: some coral reefs are adapting to ‘climate change’ just fine”
Who came up with that headline? Less than a degree of warming since 1850 and we buy into the term “Climate Change”?
Everyone who’s at odds with Global Warming/Climate Change might as well just roll over and play dead.
Sea level drop is lethal to coral which is exposed.
Coral of the same spices is living healthily in the warmer average temperatures as those north of the Great Barrier Reef.
The mmgw cartel are drowning in propaganda.
Our children just won’t know what coral bleaching is!
From the article: “NEW YORK (May 2, 2017) – A new WCS study reveals evidence that some corals are adapting to warming ocean waters”
You would get the impression from this statement above that all the oceans of the world are warming, but this is actually a localized warming of water in the Pacific ocean caused by El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), not by human-caused global warming/climate change.
BINGO!
I saw on a PBS special on Australia’s coral reefs that it is the Crown of Thorns starfish that is destroying all the coral. The farming in North Eastern Australia is sending fertilizers and silt into the coastal waters and over fishing is causing a population explosion in the starfish population. Every decade a wave of these starfish cause huge areas of coral to be wiped out by the starfish. Bleaching is only a small percentage of the corals destruction. Google crown of thorns starfish & Great Barrier Reef to read more about this. Why are they blaming Climate Change on coral destruction?
Because fat cat investors in windmills need their government subsidies.
I look forward to the time when the water is warm enough for coral in Donegal.
The main cause of bleaching appears to be sudden reductions in sea level, as occurred on the Great Barrier Reef during the last El Nino.
When global warming itself is insignificant, how come coral reefs adapting global warming? Scientists must come with real causes for coral reefs destruction and recovering.
We must not forget the fact that local climates present high inter-annual, inter-seasonal, inter-day variations. Also these follow the natural variation in rainfall and temperature.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Last I heard, it wasn’t the warming that was killing the corals, it was lower tides. Or crown-of-thorn starfish. Or pollution. Or actually all that alarmist noise was nonsense – the corals were doing just fine.
Point of fact: in 2011 I visited my favorite little nook of the Anadaman Sea, only to find the beautiful hard corals I’d always relished seeing nearly wiped out. Estimates had 97% of those corals – over an area the size of the nation of Turkey – severely bleached. Half of them would die. Local divers had seen the 5-degree temperature spike in their dive computers. Had watched the coral light up in fluorescent colors as they released their symbiotic algae. Then watched them whiten and die.
As for “some corals are doing fine”… ever heard of the passenger pigeon? At that time , there were those who mocked alarmists too. Pointed to the ever dwindling flocks to say some were “doing just fine”. Until all of them were dead.
@deviateW,
I recommend you should read THE BIBLE on the past history of coralic doom on the iconic 2,300 Km (1,400 mile) long Great Barrier Reef (Australia).
http://www.pnas.org/content/109/44/17995.full
It claims a loss of coral cover from the beginning of observable time in 1985 through 2012 at 51%. Out of that only 10% (= 5% net) was attributed to bleaching* whereas the massive broadly described greater losses were from tropical cyclones and predatory starfish.
* Of all varieties of bleaching, and without mention of various other known causes of mortality!
<b<You asserted:
“Local divers had seen the 5-degree temperature spike in their dive computers”
If you meant in degrees F (clue in your American spelling?), even that seems to be a tad unusual. Do you have a link to the source of that astonishing data including a definition of ‘spike’; like do you mean momentarily or daily or what?
You also wrote:
“Had watched the coral light up in fluorescent colors as they released their symbiotic algae. Then watched them whiten and die.”
Are you implying they whitened at some time after their symbionts departed? How long did the observers sit there watching the corals actually die? Australian coral reef mortality experts assess the ultimate damage many months after the observed bleaching. For instance, the final assessments for the GBR 2016 mass bleaching have not yet been published!
Bob Fernley-Jones
Very interesting! I have heard before that corals are adapting, as all organisms do. Some reefs can even regenerate depending on their depth and initial complexity. It’s sort of an evolutionary arms race between the corals and the warming ocean temperatures. Unfortunately, the rate at which the oceans are currently warming makes it seem that the warming temperatures are going to win this race.
@ Berhead,
In the case of the Great Barrier Reef which has had four recognised mass bleaching events as from 1998, the underlying SST linear warming rate since 1900 is less than a tenth of a degree C which is observed to be well within holobiont recovery/adaptation capability in itself.
http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/climate/change/timeseries.cgi?graph=sst&area=GBR&season=1202&ave_yr=T
Anomalies (noise) such as notably with big El Ninos and erratic ocean circulations are relatively massive and coincide with mass bleaching events.
Sorry less than a tenth of a degree C per decade
Thanks for the link!
Water temperature has been increasing at less than a hundredth of a degree C per year on the Great Barrier Reef. There was no bleaching reported in 2015 and yet in 2016 there was the greatest mass bleaching ever reported, despite that there was only around half a hundredth of a degree F warming “caused by CO2” since the year before. (See link above for data)
Bob Fernley-Jones
Groan, sorry,
I’m tired, read about two hundredths of a degree F above!
I know that a lot of the articles I’ve read, attribute the increased frequency of bleaching events to the pollutants along with the warming with some indication that increased extreme weather events due to the climate change is also a contributing factor. I clicked on the link, I didn’t realise that water temperatures were increasing so steadily, I’ll have to read up on that.
What warming? Are you referencing the claimed 0.01C that the Argos buoys are alleged to have found?
“Bleaching takes place when stressed corals discharge beneficial algae that supply energy to corals causing them to turn pale or white and often starve.”
___________________________________________
So the question is how to supply ‘pale[d] corals’ with the right type of algae for better adaption on the new conditions.
Kind of ‘coral gardening’.
There is still a big mistake: Climate change can not heat the water in the oceans.
The water in the oceans are heated by ultraviolet and visible solar radiation that have penetration into the water and geothermal heat.
Neither the air temperature nor the infrared radiation can heat them because the heat supplied is used to evaporate the surface water (latent heat).
Stephen Wilde (Royal Meteorological Society) explains this in detail:
“However the effect of downwelling infrared is always to use up all the infrared in increasing the temperature of the ocean surface molecules whilst leaving nothing in reserve to provide the extra energy required (the latent heat of evaporation) when the change of state occurs from water to vapour. That extra energy requirement is taken from the medium (water or air) in which it is most readily available. If the water is warmer then most will come from the water. If the air is warmer then most will come from the air. However over the Earth as a whole the water is nearly always warmer than the air (due to solar input) so inevitably the average global energy flow is from oceans to air via that latent heat of evaporation in the air and the energy needed is taken from the water. This leads to a thin (1mm deep) layer of cooler water over the oceans worldwide and below the evaporative region that is some 0.3C cooler than the ocean bulk below.”
In what sense, pray tell, are corals now “adapting” to changes in a climate which has changed continually for 600 million years, to current changes which are in no way exceptional?
Does Climagesterium orthodoxy require inversion of the arrow of time?