Life at the Edge: Great Barrier Reef Could Be World's 1st Gobal Ecosystem to Collapse

The Great Barrier Reef will be so degraded by warming waters that it will be unrecognizable within 20 years, according Charlie Veron, former chief scientist of the Australian Institute of Marine Science, at a conference in London: “There is no way out, no loopholes. The Great Barrier Reef will be over within 20 years or so. They would be the world’s first global ecosystem to collapse. I have the backing of every coral reef scientist, every research organization. I’ve spoken to them all. This is critical. This is reality.”

After being a highly successful life form for 250 million years, disruptions in the biological and communication systems of coral reefs have been found to be  the underlying cause of the coral bleaching and collapse of reef ecosystems around the world.

Coral reefs form the world's biggest single structure made by living organisms, Australia's Great Barrier Reef, which is visible from outer space (image). The reef is composed of over 2,900 individual reefs and 900 islands stretching for over 3,000 kilometers over an area of approximately 344,400 square kilometers.

An explosion of knowledge is helping to explain why coral reefs around the world are collapsing and what it will take for them to survive. The problems facing coral reefs are still huge, and increasing. They are being pressured by changes in ocean temperature, pollution, overfishing, sedimentation, acidification, oxidative stress and disease, and the synergistic effect of some of these problems may destroy reefs even when one cause by itself would not. Some estimates have suggested 20 percent of the world's coral reefs are already dead and an additional 24 percent are gravely threatened.

Corals, it appears, have a genetic complexity that rivals that of humans, according to research funded in part by the National Science Foundation. Their sophisticated systems of biological communication are being stressed by global change, and are only able to survive based on proper function of an intricate symbiotic relationship with algae that live within their bodies.

Pink_coral "We've known for some time the general functioning of corals and the problems they are facing from climate change," said Virginia Weis, a professor of zoology at Oregon State University. "But until just recently, much less has been known about their fundamental biology, genome structure and internal communication. Only when we really understand how their physiology works will we know if they can adapt to climate changes, or ways that we might help."

Corals are tiny animals, polyps that exist as genetically identical individuals, and can eat, defend themselves and kill plankton for food. In the process they also secrete calcium carbonate that becomes the basis for an external skeleton on which they sit. These calcified deposits can grow to enormous sizes over long periods of time and form coral reefs – one of the world's most productive ecosystems, which can harbor more than 4,000 species of fish and many other marine life forms.

But corals are not really self sufficient. Within their bodies they harbor highly productive algae – a form of marine plant life – that can "fix" carbon, use the energy of the sun to conduct photosynthesis and produce sugars.

"Some of these algae that live within corals are amazingly productive, and in some cases give 95 percent of the sugars they produce to the coral to use for energy," Weis said. "In return the algae gain nitrogen, a limiting nutrient in the ocean, by feeding off the waste from the coral. It's a finely developed symbiotic relationship."

What scientists are learning, however, is that this relationship is also based on a delicate communication process from the algae to the coral, telling it that the algae belong there, and that everything is fine. Otherwise the corals would treat the algae as a parasite or invader and attempt to kill it.

"Even though the coral depends on the algae for much of its food, it may be largely unaware of its presence," Weis said. "We now believe that this is what's happening when the water warms or something else stresses the coral – the communication from the algae to the coral breaks down, the all-is-well message doesn't get through, the algae essentially comes out of hiding and faces an immune response from the coral."

This internal communication process, Weis said, is not unlike some of the biological processes found in humans and other animals. One of the revelations in recent research, she said, is the enormous complexity of coral biology, and even its similarity to other life forms. A gene that controls skeletal development in humans, for instance, is the identical gene in corals that helps it develop its external skeleton – conserved in the different species over hundreds of millions of years since they parted from a common ancestor on their separate evolutionary paths.

There's still much to learn about this process, researchers said, and tremendous variation in it. For one thing, there are 1,000 species of coral and perhaps thousands of species of algae all mixing and matching in this symbiotic dance. And that variation, experts say, provides at least some hope that combinations will be found which can better adapt to changing conditions of ocean temperature, acidity or other threats. The predicted acidification of the oceans in the next century is expected to decrease coral calcification rates by 50 percent and promote the dissolving of coral skeletons, the researchers noted in their report.

"With some of the new findings about coral symbiosis and calcification, and how it works, coral biologists are now starting to think more outside the box," Weis said. "Maybe there's something we could do to help identify and protect coral species that can survive in different conditions. Perhaps we won't have to just stand by as the coral reefs of the world die and disappear."

Dr Veron’s comments came as the Zoological Society of London, the Royal Society and the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) held a crucial meeting on the future of coral reefs in London yesterday. In a joint statement they warned that by mid-century extinctions of coral reefs around the world would be inevitable.

Posted by Casey Kazan.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/view.php?id=38862&src=twitter-news

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6652866.ece

Comments

[Jim Beaner]

Wow, that is SO sad. Such a beautiful thing the reef is!

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[gerry]

and in twenty years time the reef is still there, getting a little tired of everyone saying the sky is falling, then they get a million dollar of tax payer funds and guess what, nothing happened and they get rich off our backs

[Devo]

It's evolution.

[savethereefs]

horrendous.

@gerry: yeah, it's all about the taxes. uber rich coral reef scientists and their minions stealing our tax money!

nimrod.

[Jerome]

The same mob predicted the demise of the GBR 20 years ago, only then it was going to be "in 20 years". Well here we are, and it's still there. Crown of thorns starfish, coral bleaching, we've heard it all before, and it's all bullshilt.

[cholera]

Too funny. Scientists getting rich of tax payer grant money. That is an absolute riot.

And I guess these guys aren't allowed to be off a little in estimates of reef demise? Thing has been around for who knows how long, and they are trying to thread the needle and predict it's death. "HEY! You said 20 years ago it would be gone! BURN THEM!!!!!"

[Adam]

I really hope this doesn't come to pass...but its a bit more likely than some people seem to think. Reefs in the Caribbean are already pretty much dead- at least the main reef building corals are. They have been decimated by disease, algae, and urchin outbreaks (no one knows for sure which of those are causes and which are the effects) And we have fossil records going back thousands of years for these reefs-and nothing of this sort has happened in the fossil record. So reefs can die.

[Todd P]

Well, it seems pretty unlikely that this could be the 'first' global ecosystem to ever crash. I mean, it's pretty well accepted that the continents were once in different places, mountains and seas have been created and destroyed, etc. And the dinosaurs disappeared for some reason. Too bad scientists have to resort to overstatement and hyperbole when delivering scientific information.

[Marcus]

To all the ignorant, uninformed skeptics, the current consensus of climate science community worldwide is that global warming is real and that unless we take action, there will be consequences. As the article quotes: “There is no way out, no loopholes. The Great Barrier Reef will be over within 20 years or so. They would be the world’s first global ecosystem to collapse. I have the backing of every coral reef scientist, every research organization. I’ve spoken to them all. This is critical. This is reality.”

[James]

In the last 100 years we've extracted and burned an amount of carbon that took 350 million years to bury. Coral can adapt to change(it did for 250 mil years) but not as quickly as we're making it. Continents drifting? Again that takes millions of years. Scientists getting rich off of taxpayers? How many rich scientists can you name? How many rich politicians?

We're rapidly bringing the earth back to the state it was in millions of years ago. Some species will be able to handle it and some won't.

[Tayb]

The earth is warming, that much is certain, but as to why it is warming? No one knows for sure. For every scientist that says humans are causing it there is a real scientist, not one bought and paid for, that claim that climate change is a natural cycle. Hell even NASA produced some evidence that the earth was warming at a natural rate coinciding with increased solar activity. I'm still waiting on someone to explain to me why the ice age happened and how the earth managed to warm and melt the ice naturally without the "an asteroid hit the earth and covered it with dust."

Global warming banter aside, the article completely fails to link global warming to this "communication problem." They aren't even sure if the communication is really the problem or why they aren't communicating but man made global warming is most definitely the cause? Color me a skeptic but that sounds like some shady math right there. How can you go from not being sure why this is happening, hypothesizing that it is a communication problem, admitting that there is "still much that we don't know", and then immediately blaming man made global warming? Where is the link? Did I miss that part?

Also, haven't we heard this story before several times? According to scientists who claim to be just as "sure" as these scientists are the reefs should have disappeared sometime last year and we should be in a fiery pit of doom. But, alas, scientists are wrong more often than they are right when it comes to predicting the future so I think I'll schedule a vacation to check out the still existing reefs in 2029. Always plan ahead.

[Joeri]

I believe the earth just goes through several cycles over and over again; from ice age to global warming and back to an ice age.

so yes, it's clear that earth just has cold and warm cycles, but still I'm sure that we're speeding up global warming with our pollution.

[Joeri]

Tayb, the first ice age was not caused by an asteroid but by large levels of oxigen that formed a chemical reaction with methane in the atmosphere.
The oxigen was released by one of the first living organisms on earth: cyanobacteria
The oxigen swallowed the greenhouse gasses and this caused the earth to chill. (Oxigen doesn't hold the greenhouse gasses as well as methane)
so a part of the earth froze, and sunlight was reflected on the ice instead of being absorbed by the earth) this caused the earth to chill more and freeze more
until earth's surface was completely frozen.

At a certain point in time, the ice started to melt because of outbursts of underwater (super)volcanoes.
These outbursts caused the water in the oceans to heat up and the oceans released a lot of CO2. The greenhouse gasses could thrive again and
global warming was going on, melting the ice,...

[Jasper]

Well well well. I visited the Great Barrier Reef last year and spent some time with a group of Marine Bioligists that have been studying the GBR for the last 7 years and have been submitting their findings to the Australian Institute of Marine Science.

For the last 7 years they have not measured any change in the water temperature. They have not measured any decrease in the size of the part of the reef they are responsible for.

This is contrary to what Charlie Veron has said. Who do you believe? Personally I will go with the guys on the water taking the measurements and writing the reports.

[Agent66]

But why would the coral be fading now when they've survived far harsher global climate changes over the last 250 million years? Weren't oxygen levels and global temperatures far higher only 100 million years back? And it can't be swiftness of change of global climate because they survived the meteor impact that killed off the dinosaurs and 70% of living species on the Earth 65 million years back (ref: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/features.cfm?feature=8 ).

Think these questions need to be asked before we accept statements like "20% of coral reefs are dead and 25% gravely threatened".

[gerry]

good to see that the general population actually wants to see verifiable data, if these "scientists" are so precise with their "20" year prediction please let us know what will happen in one year to a particular reef system. Sorry I actually want the facts verified before I go goose stepping in this direction been lied to too many times before

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[johan]

well I dove the Fla keys & lived on my boat in the 60's-early 70's they are die'n I thought a lot of it due to the const/diging
of the islands for condos.Now I have a house in Belize where I go for winter (I live in Holland)& I can tell you the 2nd largest
reef in the world is in bad shape bleaching & breaking up its a shocking chg
from my first time on the reef

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One of Australia's most remarkable natural gifts, the Great Barrier Reef is blessed with the breathtaking beauty of the world's largest coral reef. The reef contains an abundance of marine life and comprises of over 3000 individual reef systems and coral cays and literally hundreds of picturesque tropical islands with some of the worlds most beautiful sun-soaked, golden beaches.

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