Coral Reefs of the Red Seaby Razan Abakar | 04-09-2018 06:16 |
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 If you were diving in the Sudanese or Egyptian Red Sea, you wouldn?t have even known there was anything going on! The reefs would have looked just the way you?ve always known them – bright, colorful, and full of life! Why is that? And what is coral bleaching anyway? Corals tend to respond to stress by losing their color. The tiny coral animals (close relatives of jellyfish) are responsible for building the bush- or boulder-like calcium carbonate skeletons that are easily visible to divers (and which are easily broken if you are not careful with your fins). On their own, these calcium carbonate structures are white. What gives corals their bright colorations are the pigmented microscopic algae that live inside the colorless coral tissue that covers the surface of the skeletons. But color is merely a pleasant side-effect of the algae?s main and very important function. Similarly to the way plants create food for themselves, these algae use solar energy to make their own food and feed the coral animal in whose tissues they live. In other words, in exchange for some basic nutrients and a place to grow, the algae provide the coral with the majority of the food it needs to stay alive and keep growing. But, for reasons that scientists are still working hard to understand, when coral is under heavy stress, it kicks the algae out of its tissues, thus appearing white to the eye. This means that a bleached coral is not just white, it is also starving. And, if the stress continues long enough, the coral dies, and its white skeleton is overgrown with brown slime. Sudanese reefs in particular are currently in a fortunate position. Low pressure from human activities such as fishing and tourism means that Sudanese reefs are more-or-less de factoprotected. Reefs in Sudan do in fact boast a much higher abundance of fish, especially of sharks and other important top predators, than their Saudi neighbors. Unlike Egypt with its heavy tourism development, Sudan still has the opportunity to put in place an unencumbered science-based management plan to maintain the healthy state of its reefs before the encroachment of coastal development or the growth of diving tourism. All it would take is some political will. Source: http://www.andariya.com
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