- Oldest corals lived 450 million years ago
- Corals alive today from 50 millions years
- Thousands of species can live on one coral reef
- Turtle, mollusc, coral, fish
- Medicines for Asthma, arthritis, cancer, heart disease
- 5.7 trillion pounds, fishing tourism
- Food, jobs, coastal protection – can reduce wave energy by 95% (protect against tsunamis)
- Coral polyps -> coral skeleton -> coral colonies -> coral reefs
- Coral polyp, mouth ,ring of tentacles
- Simple gut lined with long threads of tissue to digest food
- Calcium carbonate frame (limestone)
- Colonial, genetically identical
- Living veneer
- Hunters, tentacles covered in millions of sting cells to kill their prey
- Most of their food however is sourced from within
- Tiny algae symbionts that photosynthesise and produce glucose that makes up 90% of the coral’s food
- Temperature gets too high -> corals bleach
- Million symbionts in every square cm of the coral
- “Foundation species” algae are ”keystone species”
- Temperatures too high -> Coral regect algae living inside it = “bleaching”
- Plant cells react to high temperature, stop producing glucose -> start producing irritant to the coral
- Plant cells then ousted from the system, some corals belch clouds of the algae whilst some release them in small clumps
- Coral goes pale = clear tissues of the animal overlaying the white skeleton
- Ghost coral, all the structure still there but all the colour from the plant cells gone
- Farmers, security guards, chemists, artists
- Molecules found on the reefs prominent in new antibiotic and cancer treatment drugs
- Overfishing, sewage + fertiliser, coastal construction, oil, toxins, diseases, physical damage (boats, tourists, trawlers), changing chemistry, warmed waters, made storms worse – all compound and magnify each other “slippery slope to slime” – Jeremy Jackson
- No point trying to convince people to save the coral reefs if people don’t understand what they are first, where is comes from, what they do, how beautiful they are
- Mass spawning = all individuals in a species release all the eggs they’ve made in the past year on the same one night into the water column, packaged into bundles with sperm cells – bundles go to the surface of the ocean and break apart
- Meet eggs and sperm from other corals at surface, so you need lots of species so they can all meet their match, lots of cell division,
- Become swimming larvae, search bottom of reef to attach, build a skeleton, build mouth and tentacles,
- Coral polyp divides and reproduces itself continually, building limestone skeleton underneath, the structure of which can sometimes be visible from space
- Maybe 1000 species of coral on planet, but is the habitat for millions of other species of organisms
- Dead, bleached reefs occasionally have a baby coral arrive
- Possibilty for baby corals to survive and adapt to the changing harsher conditions that the adults couldn’t
- Corals prefer white and pink, and crevaces and holes (protect and won’t get trampled), hard surfaces to settle and attach
- Dendrogyra cylindrus, the pillar coral – listed as threatened species on endangered species list
- Metamorphosed corals
- Technology for conservation lacking behind advancements in other areas
- Almost took out an entire generation of corals, need to help them raise the generations of the future
sneesbee 