Tuesday, July 14, 2009
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University of Queensland
U21 Online Forum
From here you can interact with fellow delegates from all over the globe, discuss the program, your areas of interest or just get to know one another better.
Feel free to express your views and opinions or just find out what others hope to gain from this years’ event.
Labels
- Biodiversity (4)
- climate change (1)
- coasts and marine (1)
- Energy Futures (1)
- expectations (1)
- Quantity and Waterways (1)
- Response Planning (1)
- Social Implications (1)
- survey (1)
- Water Quality (1)
- world resources (1)
My group is from Group 4 Heating and the group members include Sarah Westoby, Laura Canevari, Shalina Bhagat, Johan Arnberg, Beatrice Alenius, Melissa Low, Ben Kuo and Heewon Jung.
ReplyDeleteWe were assigned Biogeochemistry (the most difficult one!) and decided to concentrate on corals.
We basically discussed about issues pertaining to corals and specific adaptation strategies that can be considered. The question is as follows:
Develop a specific adaptation strategy for reducing the negative outcomes of your example.
Our solution to this question was to identify solutions to manage other factors that may possibly threaten the resilience of corals rather than coral adaptation. These include education of fishermen, restricting land reclamation, control land use, implement laws and regulations and enforce them, implement Marine Protection Areas (MPAs), promote eco-tourism, use technology to create artificial reef systems and reef rehabilitation, prevent eutrophication (that may cause algae blooms that threaten the existance of corals) and to assist coral colonization.
These solutions, as we have discussed, are not uncontested. There will be significant challenges faced when trying to implement them. However, they are pertinent in trying to save the biodiversity of our oceans. Corals constitute a major source of biodiversity in the oceans and riparian areas. They sustain many fish species as breeding ground and are precious to the oceans. There is an urgent need to offer alternative methods to fishermen (especially in the less developed nations) who use dynamite, cyanide fishing and trawling (all of which are inadequate or destructive) and to educate them about the negative effects of such ill practices. Providing them with economic incentive can be another alternative.
There also needs to be greater political will in restricting land use (revegetation, stormwater collection, treatment of sewage before release into the sea) near the oceans and in restricting land reclamation, which essentially clouds the sea water and blocks out sunlight necessary for coral survival. This adversely affects the biodiversity of our oceans.
All in all, corals constitute an important part of earth's biodiversity. A loss of coral species would mean a huge loss to humanity and the possible knowledge we can derive from them. As such, our group hopes that this discussion may give more insight into what is needed to save coral reefs and also to push for better and real solutions to save and enhance biodiversity.
Creating greater awareness about marine protection is also important. Marine Protection Areas can possibly be a way to do so.
Hi guys, did you consider coral bleaching due to acidification from increased CO2 dissolution or straightforward temperature increase in near surface ocean waters?
ReplyDeleteCoral bleaching is mainly caused by thermal stress, not acidification. Our focus was mainly on acidification. As you might know coral have calcifying structures made of calcium carbonate. Increased concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere have resulted in higher carbon dissolution rates in the oceans. Due to changes in ions concentrations corals are now finding it harder to calcify and use the minerals dissolved in water. As a result their growth rates have diminished, decreasing the resilience of corals to natural disasters and also to coral bleaching and hence their ability to recover.
ReplyDeleteCoral bleaching on the other hand is caused by thermal stress and can occur in two forms: loss of symbiotic zooxanthellae or loss of photosynthetic pigments within the symbiont. There is a hypothesis that argues that coral bleaching is a natural acclimatization process
(like leaves of trees falling seasonally) that prevents corals from oxygen intoxication in times when solar exposure is very high. The problem is that rates of recovery are being affected by acidification and also rates of bleaching are increasing due to increasing temperatures, theatening corals from possible recovery.
It has been found that certain clays of symbionts (clay D in particular) have higher thermal tolerance. However it seems that they also decrease rates of growth of corals because they provide with less energy to corals than other clays. Some corals are changing clay types as an adaptation strategy, but this could be fatal as it would decrease their rate of recovery from other natural disasters (eg. a storm). To sum up, it seems that both coral bleaching and acifdification are to an extent decreasing rates of growth of corals, which affects their ability to recover from disasters and to compete with algae.
Hope this helps providing you with an answer, Laura