Coral bleaching in Indonesia: Chris Wolfe

I chose an article about coral bleaching in Indonesia. I chose this article because both of my parents are scientists. My dad has taken a group of students to a very small island in the Bahamas for a week long marine biology trip since before I was born. I have gone every
year of my life except the last two. I know a majority of every fish,
creature, coral, and sponge that lives around that island. Over the
years I have seen the decline in living coral, and the abundance of
their limestone skeletons sweeping the ocean, from miles of huge,
dramatic, elegant elk horn coal, into graveyards. I think because I
have witnessed this first hand I have taken an interest to it. What a
lot of people don't know is that coral is an animal. A head of coral
is a limestone skeleton filled with small polyups, corals are cnidarians, just the same as jellyfish or hydras. I chose this article because I don't think this issue is addressed or as commonly known as it should be, or say an endangered bear or bird would be. In this article it says that
a large-scale bleaching event due to high ocean temperatures
appears to be underway off the coast of Sumatra, an Indonesian island.
Bleaching occurs when the coral becomes stressed for any reason. When
it becomes stressed, for an unknown reason, it expels it polyups. I
learned from this article that along with global warming effecting the
coral, ocean acidification is also contributing to it. The article
says that it is partially due to rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the
atmosphere and that it could prove more devastating in the long-run to
coral ecosystems than elevated sea temperatures, which I found
intriguing. It also says that 60 percent of corals were bleached and follow up assessments revealed one of the most rapid and severe coral mortality events ever recorded with 80 percent of some species dying.

Chris Wolfe