Amid the increasingly gloomy picture being painted regarding the future
of reefs around the world, it is nice to see a bit of good news in the
coral category every now and then.

Since there is a limit to how large a single post can be, i'll split it
up into several smaller messages.

-Ross Mayhew
http://www.schnr-specimen-shells.com/

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/06/asia/coral.php

A coral reef endures against the odds
By Jonathan Adams
Published: October 6, 2008

KENTING NATIONAL PARK, Taiwan: At this seaside resort on Taiwan's
southern tip, annual typhoons blast sludge and sediment onto fragile,
shallow-water coral reefs. Hotels and villages sprinkle the reefs with
sewage. A nuclear power plant boils them with discharged reactor-cooling
water. Snorkelers and scuba divers trample on the reefs, sometimes
breaking off chunks of coral as souvenirs.

And in 2001 a huge cargo ship sank off Kenting, destroying the coral it
landed on and spewing more than 1,000 tons of fuel oil down the coastline.

As if all that were not enough, rising sea temperatures have increased
the frequency of "coral bleaching," which can be fatal if it lasts much
more than two to three weeks.

Yet in an age when such environmental stresses are killing off coral
reefs worldwide, Kenting's reefs are doing surprisingly well. One
scientist here said Taiwan might even turn out to be a "Noah's Ark" for
corals.

"This is the era of global temperature change and ocean warming is a big
problem for coral reefs," said Fan Tung-yung, a coral expert at Taiwan's
National Museum of Marine Biology and Aquarium, in a telephone
interview. "But Kenting is a refuge."

A research paper by John Bruno and Elizabeth Selig, published last year
in the scientific journal PLoS One, comparing reefs throughout the
Pacific and Indian oceans found that average coral cover (the amount of
sea floor covered by live coral) was about 22 percent, whereas Fan said
coverage off Kenting was 40 percent. Last year, when a coral bleaching
spell wiped out many other reefs in the Asia-Pacific region, Kenting's
survived - and bounced back quickly.

The reefs' relative stamina has drawn interest from marine biologists
worldwide. Now, American and Taiwan scientists hope to make Kenting part
of a U.S.-led global "early warning system" for coral reef monitoring.

Such a system would help Taiwan's scientists and officials better
protect their reefs. It would also allow scientists to gather data to
explain why some reefs - like Kenting's - are so robust, while others
are languishing.

"The reefs of Kenting are very impressive in terms of their overall
coral cover and coral diversity," Peter Edmunds, a coral expert at
California State University at Northridge who has inspected Taiwan's
reefs, wrote in an e-mail. "They offer a unique and very important
opportunity to understand the reasons why some reefs seem to be
surviving better than others throughout the world."

[continued next post]

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