Coral Bleaching Research Papers

It was the smell that really got to diver Richard Vevers. The smell of death on the reef.

“I can’t even tell you how bad I smelt after the dive – the smell of millions of rotting animals. It was one of the most disgusting sights I’ve ever seen,” he says.

“The hard corals were dead and covered in algae, looking like they’ve been dead for years. The soft corals were still dying and the flesh of the animals was decomposing and dripping off the reef structure” (Slezak).

This isn’t the sight most people would imagine when visiting the Great Barrier Reef but it is the new normal with almost 90% of the coral in the GBR containing this look (McKirdy). Instead of the previous vibrant colors, they now contain a ghastly, white color that makes you think “Are they dead?” In a sense, they are. These corals are now considered bleached. It may seem like it is just centralized in just specific areas but this problem stretches much further than just with the Great B arrier Reef. You can find bleached coral all the way in Cuba and on the Eastern Coast of Africa. There are many ideas on how we can try to help this bleached coral but there seems to be one that works better than all of the rest.

Background on Coral Bleaching

“What is bleached coral?” you may ask. Well, coral bleaching is coral polyps that have lost the algae that gave them color. The

“Our globe is under new dramatic environmental pressure: our globe is warming, our ice caps melting, our glaciers receding, our coral is dying, our soils are eroding, our water tables falling, our fisheries are being depleted, our remaining rainforests shrinking. Something is very, very wrong with our eco-system” (Lamm) It may seem very overwhelming on where we should start to help our environment since it seems like such a big task. One small place that we can start is with helping our bleached coral which can help the whole state of our