Emergency Measures to Secure Heat-adapted Corals

Austin Bowden-Kerby of Fiji gave a Keynote Talk on Reefs of Hope at the Cairns Reef Resilience Symposium in Australia.

A Climate Emergency has emerged for Coral Reefs globally which potentially threatens ongoing Coral Breeding and Restoration programmes. Urgent and immediate action is required to secure brood-stock corals against sudden and widespread loss of bleaching resistant, heat adapted corals which these highly invested programmes depend on. An extinction-level coral bleaching event occurred in 2023 in Florida and the Caribbean, with nearshore temperatures as high as 38.4°C, resulting in the loss of uncountable numbers of corals and tens of millions of dollars in investment. With the recent surge in mean ocean temperature, https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/ the Southern Hemisphere winter of 2024 could be the last few months of survival for millions of corals on the Great Barrier Reef and southern oceans, including tens of thousands of bleaching resistant corals that might be used in ongoing coral reef adaptation and restoration programs. A rescue and mass evacuation effort to save and secure as many of these bleaching resistant corals as possible is proposed, focused on moving coral colonies from areas of extreme heat stress to cooler water reefs nearby, where these pre-adapted corals can more easily survive. This effort would provide insurance to the future of coral breeding and restoration programmes, and to the reef itself in rapidly warning seas. Time is running out for the very corals which have the greatest potential of surviving into the future.

Heat adapted coral populations of the extreme shallows are not well studied, being generally inaccessible during low tide. However, lack of data should not be used as an excuse for inaction. As the intensity of marine heat waves has increased, many heat adapted corals have undoubtedly already succumbed on many reefs, and what remains of these shallow water coral populations is largely unknown. An urgent response is justified and required.

Since the meeting, NOAA has issued a Climate emergency for coral reefs, with the fourth and most severe global coral bleaching in history. I returned to the site last week to find that we have mass coral bleaching hitting our precious hot pocket reefs right now at the PIR Malolo site, with loggers recording 35°C. An estimated 80% of the corals are either severely bleached or are already dead, and Crown of Thorns Starfish (COTS) are abundant and devouring the 20% or so that remain unbleached, so it is urgent that we engage in an emergency coral rescue and COTS removal program, moving corals to safety and out to cooler waters.

We ideally would be implementing these strategies globally, while some hot pocket corals still survive intact, because most of them will soon be gone. 2025 has the potential to become the year of greatest mass die-off of corals in history.

Read the full paper here.

Watch his presentation in Australia at 3.23.00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVU4D1UE9a4 (27 minutes).

Austin Bowden-Kerby will be the speaker at the upcoming 28th IEF Webinar on Saturday 1 June 2024. He will talk about Reefs of Hope, and you can ask him questions about his fascinating work. For more information and to register: https://tinyurl.com/IEF-ReefsOfHope