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Miami Herald: Coral Bleaching, Disease Link Closer than Thought by Luisa Yanez

Report: Coral bleaching, disease link closer than thought

UM researcher discovers new information

By LUISA YANEZ

lyanez@MiamiHerald.com

Posted – Wednesday, October 07, 2009 11:00 AM EDT

The same oceanic temperature shifts that created Hurricane Katrina in 2005 also caused warm water to settle over parts of the Florida Keys, triggering mass coral bleaching that affected up to 90 percent of reef cover in the area.

Now, a study led by a University of Miami professor who studied the waters before, during and after Katrina has found that bleaching can make corals more susceptible to disease and, in turn, coral disease can exacerbate the negative effects of bleaching.

A paper in the October issue of the journal Ecology shows that when they occur together, this combination of afflictions causes greater harm to corals than either does on its own.

“Traditionally, scientists have attributed coral declines after mass bleaching events to the bleaching alone,” said Marilyn Brandt, a post-doctoral researcher at the UM’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and the lead author on the paper.

“This study shows that the interplay between diseases and bleaching can play a much larger role than we realized.”

Brandt and her colleagues examined coral colonies in the Florida Keys before, during and after Hurricane Katrina to determine the relationship between bleaching and coral disease.

The researchers found that the coral diseases they saw were related to bleaching, but in different ways. The prevalence of white plague disease increased during the bleaching, which Brandt said may have to do with increased susceptibility to the disease.

Because diseases happen on a much finer scale than mass bleaching events, Brandt suggests that management of coral ecosystems should involve more frequent monitoring to determine the underlying causes of coral damage.

“Understanding how these different stressors interact can help explain the mortality pattern we see after large-scale bleaching events,” Brandt said. “If we understand what’s causing the mortality, we can institute control measures that are more specific to the causes.”

New Scientist: Sewage Nutrients Fuels Coral Disease

Sewage Nutrients Fuel Coral Disease

This dated report is still important today.

January 11, 2004 New Scientist Print Edition


Nutrient-rich water damages Caribbean corals by encouraging the spread of infections, a marine study has found. This is the first experiment in the ocean to show how agricultural run-off and sewage may destroy coral.

It will also fuel debate about whether run-off from Queensland’s sugar cane and cattle stations threatens the relatively pristine Great Barrier Reef, home to almost one-fifth of the world’s coral reefs.

“We’ve found pretty convincing evidence of a nutrient effect. It’s really happening,” says John Bruno of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who was lead researcher on the study.

While nutrients may increase the severity of coral disease, the root cause of epidemics remains largely a mystery, says Bruno. Around 80 per cent of Caribbean coral has been lost to disease in the past 20 years, but the decimation occurred across the whole region, not just where pollution is a problem.

However, the nutrients from agricultural run-off and untreated sewage, or even natural causes that bring deep water to the surface, may be making epidemics more severe in the Caribbean. And the problem could worsen. “Even if current levels of pollution aren’t having much impact, imagine what it will be like in 100 years’ time,” he says.

Fungal infection

Bruno and his team looked at two common diseases of Caribbean coral: aspergillosis, a fungal infection that kills soft corals such as sea fans, and yellow band disease, a bacterial infection that kills reef-building hard corals.

In one experiment, the researchers grafted pieces of sea fan infected with aspergillosis onto healthy sea fans in reefs off Mexico’s Yucatán coast. Then, every week for three months, they attached a fresh bag of slow-release garden fertiliser a few centimetres from the graft.

The bags increased the nutrient concentration to between two and 10 times background levels, equivalent to a mildly polluted reef. Exposed to extra nutrients, about twice as much of the sea fan colony became infected with aspergillosis compared with colonies that received the graft but no extra nutrients.

Bruno and his colleagues also studied two species of the reef-building hard coral Montastraea. This can take hundreds of years to grow, so rather than infect healthy coral, the team studied ones that were already infected with yellow band disease. They ran a similar experiment and found that after three months, yellow band disease had killed up to 50 per cent more of the hard coral that had been fertilised with bags of nutrients compared with controls (Ecology Letters, vol 6, p 1056).

Upset balance

The infectious agents that cause the diseases probably feed off the extra nutrients, which are normally in short supply in tropical waters. Upsetting the nutrient balance on the reefs may damage coral in other ways, too. For example, some scientists argue that nutrients stimulate the growth of algae, which then take over space that would otherwise be occupied by coral.

“[Bruno’s] results are fairly conclusive,” says Peter Ridd of James Cook University in Townsville, Australia. But, he says, the nutrient level used in the study was generally higher than those seen on the Great Barrier Reef. What is more, although disease is a huge problem for the Caribbean reefs, the barrier reef is relatively disease-free.

Conservationists claim that climate change and agricultural run-off are already taking their toll on the barrier reef, and that some reefs closer to land have less coral coverage and less diversity than before. But some scientists, including Ridd, have argued that any run-off is likely to be far too dilute to affect the coral, and that the relatively small changes that have been seen on the barrier reef so far may be due to natural fluctuations in coral growth (New Scientist print edition, 4 January 2003).

But Clive Wilkinson, a coral expert at the Australian Institute of Marine Science in Townsville, says he is worried about the future of the barrier reef. “The nasty trilogy of disease, climate change and pollution are all acting together to knock out coral around the world. On the Great Barrier Reef, we’re not pressing the panic buttons yet. But we’re nervous.”

Naples Daily News: Scientists Examine the Decline of Florida Bay by Cathy Zollo

Scientists examine the decline of Florida Bay

Scientists Examine Decline of Fla Bay

 

This is a dated but significant story on the causes of the extensive loss of marinelife in Florida Bay.  

Sunday, October 17, 2004
By CATHY ZOLLO, crzollo@naplesnews.com

Twenty years after it began its downward spiral, the debate still rages about what is causing big problems in Florida Bay.

The western part of the bay is where the Naples Daily News first reported black water in the spring of 2002, but the problems are older than that by decades.

The crescent- shaped bay between the Florida peninsula and the string of Keys islands was once home to crystal clear water and lush sea grass beds.

Now the turtle grass that suffered a massive die-off in the early 1990s is being replaced by another species that likes nutrient pollution. The patch reefs just north of the middle Keys are barren of lobster that used to crowd under massive boulder corals.

Those corals are dead now, covered in a carpet of smothering green algae, the water often cloudy in an ecosystem that demands clear.

Black water, a phenomenon that scientists link to massive algae blooms and that damages life on the sea floor, has happened a few times since on a smaller scale than the 2002 event.

Professional scuba diver Don DeMaria, who’s been here through most of it, doesn’t wander up in the bay anymore.

He has enough problems in the reefs to the south where the water quality is better, but not much. This is an interconnected ecosystem after all.

DeMaria used to collect tropical fish for the aquarium market but gave that up because he just couldn’t see well enough in the increasingly murky water.

Now DeMaria collects sponges for researchers looking for compounds to cure cancer.
Those hold still and you can feel for them if you have to.

“Years ago all you had to contend with was the wind (to cause cloudy water),” DeMaria said. “Now you have to contend with the wind and the algae blooms.”

Depending on who’s answering the question about these problems, the answer is as complex as a scientific history lesson or as simple as basic math: take an environment that demands clear, pollution-free water, add nutrients from sewage and agriculture and you get the mess that is Florida Bay and the reefs south of the Keys. The latter are down to 7 percent live coral cover.

The history lesson that largely opposes that viewpoint goes something like this:

Florida Bay wasn’t always clear, besides which the redirection of fresh water that once ran to the bay has caused most of the problems. Higher salinity killed the sea grass that in turn decomposed and fed algae blooms.

That idea, held by scientists at the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary and Florida International University, holds that while runoff coming from the mainland contains nutrients, there is a question about what happens to those nutrients in the mangroves that fringe the eastern and central bay.

And there is still some debate about which happened first, the algae blooms or the sea grass death.

Brian Keller, science coordinator for the sanctuary and also a member of the Florida Bay Program Management Committee, said managers do look at water quality going into the bay. They just don’t happen to agree with other theories about what the water might be doing.

“We’re always concerned about the quality part of the quantity, quality, timing and distribution mantra for Everglades restoration,” Keller said.

That quality question is in play because the $8.4 billion project that is supposed to save the Everglades by increasing water flows through the river of grass will have those flows ending up in Florida Bay.

If the quality is not right, the bay could suffer.

Brian Lapointe, senior scientist at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution in Fort Pierce, said it already is — has been since the hypersalinity theory grew wings and led to a demand for more water for the bay.

Critics of the hypersalinity theory, Lapointe chief among them, say it missed the mark because more fresh water was already reaching the bay as early as the 1970s. It was called the Interim Action Plan, during which water that had until then been back-pumped into Lake Okeechobee to keep sugar cane fields dry was instead directed south to Florida Bay.

The interim plan’s goal was to keep the lake from crashing under massive algae blooms that resulted from the infusion of nutrients that came with the backpumped water.

It worked for the lake. Not so much for the bay.

Lapointe has been in the basic math camp since the early 1980s when he began a monitoring program for Looe Key, a reef just south of the middle Keys, that continues today.

He says the blooms happened first, and they smothered more than 100,000 acres of turtle grass.

They followed releases of nitrogen-rich water from the Shark River Slough that feeds western Florida Bay.

In a paper he recently published in The Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, Lapointe said he used nitrogen isotopes to trace the source of the nutrients at Looe Key.

He found that when it rains a lot, the signature is from sewage.

When water releases are high from the mainland into the bay — and flow through the channels between islands to Looe Key — the signature is from agriculture.

Though progress is under way to install a sewer system in the most heavily populated parts of the Keys, the job isn’t complete, and many homes still rely on septic tanks that leach nutrients into Keys waters.

Key West has sewers and treats its waste water to remove nutrients before pumping it into an injection well. Stock Island is getting sewers and, as soon as Key West Resort Utilities that is doing the job reaches 100,000 gallons a day, it will go to the same advanced treatment as Key West. The city of Marathon just got 900 homes onto sewer lines with its Little Venice operation, and Islamorada and Key Largo are moving along with plans and a sewer system.

Still, there is the runoff from the mainland to consider.

The Modified Water Deliveries project — called Mod Waters — will be completed in 2006. At that point, engineering changes will flush an additional 4,000 cubic feet per second in a sheet flow of water through the southern Everglades and into Florida Bay.

While the increased water and managed flow might be good for the’Glades, the water quality, or lack of it, will harm the bay and the reefs, Lapointe has said.

Water managers acknowledge that more water means more nitrogen.

Though the National Academies of Science in August 2002 called for more research into Lapointe’s nitrogen question, local water managers have been a bit slower to acknowledge the problem.

But Deevon Quirolo, who, along with her husband, Craig, founded Reef Relief, said there is a glimmer of hope. Reef Relief, a grass-roots effort to save dying reefs, has been fighting alongside Lapointe for such recognition and got their first hint in June that things were going their way.

In a letter, Chip Merriam, deputy executive director of water resources for the South Florida Water Management District, said the district is looking at the possible impacts of nitrogen on the bay and reefs.

“We are definitely making headway,” Quirolo said. “This is one of the most difficult challenges we’ve had. It’s a good fight and an important issue, one that will have a huge impact on the survival of the reef.”

Fly Rod & Reel Online: Florida Legislature Passes Bill to Better Protect and Restore Coral Reefs

http://www.flyrodreel.com/node/12185

Submitted by Ted Williams on Sat, 05/02/2009 – 07:40.

Tallahassee – May 1, 2009 Today the Florida legislature unanimously passed a bill (HB1423) regarding the Florida Fish & Wildlife Commission which included provisions to better protect and restore coral reefs from boat groundings and anchoring in southeast Florida waters.

The provisions, originally in a bill filed by Representative Ron Saunders (D) – Tavernier, was amended to a bill by Representative Troutman (R) – Winter Haven, by Senator Constantine (R) – Altamonte Springs, and passed by the full house and senate. It authorizes the Department of Environmental Protection to establish methods for calculating damages to and access civil penalties for the damage of coral reefs in Martin, Palm Beach, Broward, Dade and Monroe counties. Penalties range from $150 to $1000 per square meter depending on the extent and location of the offense. Penalties would double if in a state park or aquatic preserve and for repeat violations. First time damage of reefs of less than one square meter would result in a warning letter by the Fish & Wildlife Commission.
“This legislation will go a long way to protect and restore the daily damage from boaters grounding and anchoring on coral reefs,” said Paul Johnson, President of Reef Relief. “Coral reefs take millennia to form, but can be physically destroyed and degraded by careless boaters not familiar with their presence nor importance in a generation.”

 

The bill provides definitions for coral reefs and authorizes the department to enter into settlement agreements requiring parties responsible for injury to or destruction of coral reefs to pay a third party to fund projects related to the restoration of the reef.
“We thank the leadership in the legislature and cooperation among the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission in bringing this good bill to completion,” said Johnson. “We look forward to working with the boating public and these agencies to better educate and implement this new law.

 

Take Action Now!

Please take a minute to email or call these legislators and agency heads to thank them for this added protection for Florida’s coral reefs:

Senator Lee Constantine – constantine.lee.web@flsenate.gov (407) 331-9675

Representative Baxtor Troutman – baxter.troutman@myfloridahouse.gov (863) 298-5220

Representative Ron Saunders – ron.saunders@myfloridahouse.gov (305) 853-1947

DEP Secretary Mike Sole – michael.sole@dep.state.fl.us (850) 245-2140

FWCC Executive Director Ken Haddad – ken.haddad@MyFWC.com (850) 487-3796