Raised Beds

'Raised Beds' must be one of the most oddball topics to have demanded the attention of the Dead Good Blogging collective. No wonder only two of us have risen to the challenge this week, for where does one go with such a subject? My friend Terry Quinn has cleverly written about hammocks, and has done so in a most entertaining manner. As for me, I'm slipping beneath the waves in my approach to the theme, to look at the parlous state of the planet's coral beds and what is being done to try and reverse a disaster-in-progress.

vibrant coral

Up until the mid-1980s, the temperature of our oceans and seas had been at a fairly constant level as far back as records went. Then over the last forty years those sea temperatures have begun to creep up, seemingly in line with the increase of man made greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and in the last decade they have begun to rise at an alarming rate.

One of the most significant impacts went largely unnoticed for a while because it was out of sight, but the world's coral beds, home to one-third of all marine life, have started to die back largely as a result  of this sudden increase in sea temperatures. 

Without getting too technical, the effect is called 'bleaching'. It happens because when the water becomes too warm, the colourful algae that live symbiotically within the coral's tissue begin to produce reactive oxygen species, which are toxic and so the coral expels the algae and the coral tissue becomes transparent, revealing its white calcium carbonate skeleton.

When coral becomes bleached, it's a sign that it is sick and under stress, prone to disease, starvation and death. It is estimated that just in the last few years, a staggering 75% of all the world's coral structures have already been impacted to some degree by the bleaching process consequent upon warming waters.

In order to try and mitigate the ravages of this trend, conservation projects have been instigated by teams of marine biologists around the world to raise healthy corals in underwater nursery beds and to replant them on bleached coral structures (rather like a hair transplant) to give the original reef a chance to regenerate itself.

raising new coral beds

Typically, they nurture strains of coral that they believe will be less susceptible to rapidly warming waters. It is possible that the corals might have learned to adapt themselves if the temperature changes had been almost imperceptibly slow and over aeons, but the recent impact of man made climate change has been so sudden and so severe, the corals have not had a chance to adapt.

Sadly, the prognosis for corals is not a cheery one. Sea temperatures will continue to rise unless and until we can reverse global warming. Conservationists will continue to raise beds of healthy and more temperature-resistant corals for transplanting onto distressed structures in ever warming waters, but it could be a race that is destined to be lost. Let's hope not. 

Partly as a trailer for next week's blog about Desert Island Discs, today I have used as a starting point the titles of songs from my favourite British band of the modern era (namely The Coral, 2000 to the present) and shaped them into a poem that I hope connects with what I've been writing about above. I've called it simply...

Coral

Faraway worlds

oceans apart

wrapped in blue

It's in your hands

skeleton key

cycles of the seasons

Dreaming of you

Spanish Main

land of the lost

Watch you disappear

ghost of Coral Island

goodbye

Thanks for reading, S ;-)