Musings of a Musical Biologist

I’ve talked about corals in one of my older posts, its purpose, the various shapes it can form, and how crucial they actually are for the survival of the entire marine ecosystem. There are many reasons why corals are dying; climate change, trawling, which is a type of technique to catch fish, which involves pulling a fishing net through the sea bed behind one or more boats, overfishing and so many more. In this post, I want to focus on coral bleaching, why it occurs, and if there is anything we can do to help save the lifeline of the oceans.  Many of you may be wondering what coral bleaching actually is. Well, when corals are stressed by changes in conditions such as temperature, light, or nutrients, they expel the symbiotic algae living in their tissues; zooxanthellae, causing them to turn completely white. Corals don’t actually die due to bleaching, they are under a lot of stress, since they lost their source of food, the zooxanthellae.  This topic is tied in with climatic c...

A group of corals are known as colonies. Corals are large structures, held together by Calcium Carbonate. This calcium carbonate is extracted from the seawater to create a durable exoskeleton to protect their soft bodies. There are about six thousand species of coral around the world, with some species growing in warm shallow waters near coastlines and others thriving on the dark, cold seafloor of the open ocean.  Each individual coral is referred to as a polyp. Coral polyps live on the calcium carbonate exoskeletons of their ancestors, adding their own exoskeleton to the existing coral structure. As the centuries pass, the coral reef gradually grows, one tiny exoskeleton at a time, until they become massive features of the marine environment.  Coral polyp bodies are usually clear. The bright colours that characterize many corals are actually various types of algae growing in the polyp’s tissue. Several million zooxanthellae live and produce pigments in just one square inch of...