Coral reef real estate collapsing in Caribbean
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Isabelle Côté, 778.782.3705, imcote@sfu.ca
Nick Dulvy, 778.782.4124, nick_dulvy@sfu.ca
Lorenzo Alvarez-Filip, +52 15518207820 (Mexico), l.alvarez@uea.ac.uk
Carol Thorbes, PAMR, 778.782.3035
Embargoed until 4 p.m. PST, June 9, 2009
Climate change is eating coral-reef fish out of house and home in the Caribbean. Its role in flattening coral reefs is reducing the region’s biodiversity and increasing its susceptibility to coastal erosion and flooding.
SFU biologists Lorenzo Alvarez-Filip, Nick Dulvy and Isabelle Côté are among five international researchers who draw those conclusions in Flattening of Caribbean coral reefs: region-wide declines in architectural complexity. The other authors are Jennifer Gill and Andrew Watkinson at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom.
The peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of London-B has just published their research online.
“What we call structurally complex reefs are a bit like Swiss cheese: they are full of holes,” explains Côté. She says climate change has completely flattened the Caribbean’s most complex coral reefs over the last 40 years.
“These nooks and crannies, both on the surface and inside the reef framework, are used by a great variety of reef fish and invertebrates, for shelter, to hide breeding nests, and for foraging.”
Drawing on 500 surveys to analyze 200 reefs, the researchers have discovered that increased coral bleaching, as a result of human-induced climate change, has wiped out complex coral reefs.
“Researchers have known for a long time that coral bleaching—the loss of coral pigment—kills corals,” explains Alvarez-Filip, a doctoral student of Dulvy and Côté now working at the University of East Anglia. He is the lead researcher on this project.
“We thought bleached corals’ dead skeletons continue to shelter reef inhabitants and shield coastlines from storms and hurricanes. Our team has shown that the dead skeletons are collapsing as fast as the reefs are dying.”
Dulvy notes this disturbing trend, combined with ongoing exploitation of various marine species, will speed up the decline of coral reef-dependent marine life and threaten the existence of nearby marine-life-eating coastal communities. These communities will also be more vulnerable to flooding.
Recently, some of this paper’s authors also reported the first evidence of declines in coral reef fish in the same Caribbean regions with decimated coral reef structures. “There is little doubt that the two trends—declining complexity and reef fish abundance—are linked,” says Côté.
“There’s a good chance that what we’re seeing in the Caribbean is happening even more extensively in deep-water coral and sponge reefs in Canada. However, we don’t have enough long term information to know whether they’re following the same trajectory as their tropical counterparts.”
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