
A controversial plan to save corals - oori
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160322-the-women-with-a-controversial-plan-to-save-corals
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birken
Personally I don't think bleaching is as big of a problem as acidification.
The natural selection process they are attempting to speed up happens
naturally anyways. Corals bleach, then the more robust ones which didn't
bleach overgrow them and the reef lives on.

Acidification is much worse, because you can't build calcium carbonate without
carbonate ions, and acidification lowers the quantity of carbonate ions in the
water. There is no natural selection for this, you can't build coral skeleton
without the proper building blocks. It just makes all corals grow much more
slowly, and thus when negative events happen it takes the reef much longer to
recover. If the pH goes down low enough, at some point corals just can't build
their structure anymore, which would be the end of the coral reefs as we know
them.

And the only way to prevent ocean acidification is to lower the amount of co2
in the atmosphere, which isn't happening and wont happen for a very long time.
It is going to be a tough century for the coral reefs.

Not-fun fact: The atmosphere is around 0.04% CO2, yet dissolved CO2 (either as
CO2 or carbonic acid) is _by far_ the largest dissolved gas in the ocean
because of the reaction which forms carbonic acid. See the graph of
atmospheric co2 vs ocean pH [1] to see how large the impact is.

1: [http://ocean.si.edu/ocean-photos/ocean-acidification-
graph](http://ocean.si.edu/ocean-photos/ocean-acidification-graph)

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sitkack
Listen Debbie Downer, the methane inversion that will happen in the oceans and
is already happening in the tundra will cause runaway global warming before
the reefs are dissolved.

The best case scenarios are 1) global collapse of civilization or (and the one
I am rooting for) 2) fusion power comes online and we use it to remove all of
the excess carbon from the oceans and the atmosphere.

~~~
tslug
I'm pretty sure fusion power will have another damaging waste footprint no one
is talking about, heat pollution. What do you do with it all? It's like
skipping the greenhouse gas that traps the heat and going straight for the
heat itself.

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jessaustin
_The trigger was always a sudden surge in ocean temperature._

Aaaargh! This is _not_ the only cause of coral bleaching! [Edit: removed
apparently-distracting sentence.] Blaming climate change for coral death is
sort of an "E: other" multiple-choice answer for when we've already eliminated
sewage, agricultural pollution, chemical pollution, fishing techniques like
cyanide, uncontrolled seaweed (often as a result of overfishing herbivorous
fish), sedimentation, etc. Blaming climate change is the favorite maneuver of
careless locals eager to blame the rest of the world for their dead reef.

~~~
markdown
Have you been to the Pacific Islands, thousands of miles from any continent
with industrialised agriculture? Swam in Vanuatu? Dived in Samoa? Snorkelled
in Fiji?

There is coral bleaching on a massive scale that can't be explained by any of
the reasons you mentioned.

Here in Fiji, last month we had ocean temperatures so high that thousands of
fish died. This is unprecedented in Fiji:
[https://www.newswire.com.fj/community/fisheries/fish-
kills-u...](https://www.newswire.com.fj/community/fisheries/fish-kills-
unprecedented-temperature-threatens-marine-eco-system/)

The same happened in Vanuatu: [http://eveningreport.nz/2016/02/09/vanuatu-
heat-wave-suspect...](http://eveningreport.nz/2016/02/09/vanuatu-heat-wave-
suspected-cause-for-sudden-death-of-fish/)

A week after that happened, the same warm seas spawned the second biggest
tropical cyclone ever recorded in the entire Southern Hemisphere, killing ~50
people.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_Winston](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_Winston)

~~~
jessaustin
I've lived on several Pacific Islands, and spent time on others. Sadly I
haven't made it to Vanuatu, Samoa, or Fiji. Your links seem to refer to fish
deaths rather than coral bleaching.

~~~
markdown
The coral bleaching is everywhere. Every reef I've ever seen is more dead than
alive with most of the coral bleached.

The links I provided were indeed fish deaths because they illustrate how warm
the seas have been recently. Coral bleaching occurs at lower temperatures than
fish death.

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sna1l
I feel like there is so much unknown here as well. Fat tail risk in these
kinds of experiments always seem to be ignored. A + B is not ALWAYS greater
than B

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zipwitch
Back in 2012 coral reef zoologist / mathematical ecologist Roger Bradbury,
argued that the coral reefs are already "zombie ecosystems" and we're better
off focusing our efforts on trying to understand what happened, rather than
futile efforts to save the coral reefs.
[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/14/opinion/a-world-without-
co...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/14/opinion/a-world-without-coral-
reefs.html)

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oori
Quote: "We have used selective breeding to create new dog breeds and improve
crop yields. Could it also help corals survive the ravages of climate change?"

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helthanatos
Wow... Someone doesn't want to let nature deal with nature

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ethbro
Which is fine, except for the large number of outcomes that lead to fishery
collapse and massive starvation.

Nature can do incredibly "smart" things, but it also has the benefit of
operating on orders of 1,000 / 10,000 / 100,000 / 1,000,000s of years. I'd
rather large portions of human population not be dead for most of that time
until a new equilibrium is established.

~~~
gozur88
>Nature can do incredibly "smart" things, but it also has the benefit of
operating on orders of 1,000 / 10,000 / 100,000 / 1,000,000s of years.

Actually, the latest evidence is that evolution happens in relatively small
time frames as conditions change. The problem is you're not _guaranteed_ a
handy mutation in that time frame - lots of species have gone extinct for lack
of a trait that would have allowed them to survive.

~~~
ethbro
Evolution of a single species and full ecosystem stabilization are two
different things. Even with rapid evolution over a small time frame, I can't
imagine the entire system finds a new equilibrium as quickly?

~~~
gozur88
Oh, that's probably true. Not _all_ species will adapt, and as the niches get
refilled things will be chaotic.

