WIKIPEDIA, US FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE-PACIFIC REGIONFrom 2014 to 2016, nearly 50 percent of the corals in Hanauma Bay Nature Preserve on Oahu, Hawaii, bleached and almost 10 percent of them died, researchers reported today (May 30) in PeerJ. The authors conclude that warm temperatures were responsible for the die-off, rather than other potential factors such as human use.
“This is a protected place and yet it’s not able to escape the temperature,” coauthor Angela Richards Donà of the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology tells The Guardian. “It was very distressing to see. It does not bode well for Hawaii’s corals.”
Donà and her colleagues surveyed several sites in the 40-hectare preserve in October 2015 and January 2016. In addition to bleached corals, they found another 13 percent to 22 percent of the corals were paling.
“This is another data point on the staggering breadth of damage across the global oceans,” Georgia Tech oceanographer Kim Cobb, who was not involved in the study, tells The Guardian. “You can run but you can’t hide from the train wreck that is coming. The recent bleaching has ...
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