Tomorrow’s Corals

It was Friedrich Nietzsche who wrote: ‘What does not kill me makes
me stronger.’ The aphorism offers good guidance during triathlon
training and, often, through the tough times in your private life. Does it
also apply to the ecosystems of Earth? We think it could. While plant
and animal life would be better off without humanity’s climate-altering
activities, our planet nonetheless shows resilience and the ability to
adapt. That’s hardly an excuse for inaction in the face of the climate
crisis, but it is certainly fascinating to predict how the major ecosystems
of our home Earth will look in the intermediate and distant future,
should atmospheric chemistry and climate change continue along the
trajectories seen today. Our main interests are coral reefs, and we want
to share some of our thoughts about their future based on our knowledge
of unusually stressed ocean ecosystems and evolution. Corals will live
on, though in very different form than the ones that thrive now; we also
think that the food web will become simplified and dominated by
different, much smaller fish.
How will the oceans transition to this new normal? It’s useful to think
about coral reefs on a gradient, from the least to the most disturbed. On
one end are the pristine, sun-flooded coral reefs well known and loved
by scuba divers. This is where impressive towers of hard and soft corals
cover almost every square metre of the seafloor, and countless species
of colourful reef fish frolic among the intricate three-dimensional
structures created by the corals. Because the multiple cracks and
crevices between the coral fingers help hide smaller fish from the
hungry mouths of predators such as groupers and sharks, the small fish
never venture too far from their coral homes. Witnessing such a reef is
an enthralling experience for the novice diver and expert marine
biologist alike.

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These ecosystems thrive in clear water, where nutrient levels are low.
Despite these low levels, coral reefs still grow significant amounts of
new biomass through two diverse nutrient pathways.
Corals are animals and, in the first pathway, they eat like any animal
would. A coral is, simply put, a small sea anemone with a skeleton.
Each coral takes the form of an individual polyp and lives in a colony
with many other tiny polyps. Each individual coral is a tiny filter feeder
that catches plankton (microscopic plants and organisms) for nutrition
with its tentacles.
But corals have another means of nutrition as well: they harbour
microscopic green algae within their tissue. Algae are aquatic plants,
and through the process of photosynthesis, convert sunlight into
biological energy, just like any green plant would. In this way, these
symbiotic algae power the coral and themselves. Because of the coral’s
dual ability to make a living, it’s called a holobiont, a ‘total organism’,
incorporating the best of the animal and plant worlds. Especially for
many hard corals, which build the most massive calcium carbonate
skeletons, the energy derived from photosynthesis makes up the
majority of the organism’s energy budget. Hence, clear water,
transparent to sunlight, is of paramount importance for the flourishing
of a classic coral reef.
Human interference has put all this at risk. In the age of billions of
humans, many live in industrialised societies, where multiple
environmental stresses are altering tropical marine ecosystems so that
they less and less resemble the pristine state of coral flourishing
described above.
One activity detrimental to the health of coral reefs is ‘coastal
development’, a term that sounds Orwellian to the conservation
biologist. ‘Development’ might seem to have a positive connotation,
but it actually describes the destruction of coastal ecosystems. Coastal
reclamation directly destroys reefs by constructing artificial islands on
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top of them. And even construction activity on or near the seashore can
damage coral reefs: a concrete seawall will filter rainwater flowing into
the ocean much less efficiently than an intact mangrove forest. Dense
coastal human populations with poor liquid-waste treatment in their
communities will make the ocean’s water more turbid and rich in
nutrients. These ‘developments’ knock out corals that need clear water
for sufficient light to reach their symbiotic algae. In the absence of hard
corals, other animals like the soft leather coral Sarcophyton can come
to dominate stressed coastlines. Not only does the reduced sunlight
harm the hard-coral holobionts; the excessive nutrients serve as
fertiliser for other marine algae, often arch-enemies of corals competing
with them for space on the reef. Reefs dominated by these algae are a
hallmark of many stressed ecosystems in the Caribbean.
The greatest threat to the stability of the planet’s biosphere is human-
caused climate change. The massive amounts of carbon dioxide
released into the atmosphere as we burn fossil fuels leads to a rise in
temperatures. Corals are among the organisms most severely affected
by rising ocean temperatures; their physiology is very finely tuned to
work at the temperatures of sun-drenched shallow tropical reefs, with
an optimum just a bit below 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees
Fahrenheit). Any temperature above that will cause the algae living
symbiotically within the coral to produce so much reactive oxygen as a
byproduct of their photosynthesis that their coral hosts suffer damage.
Responding to that emergency, corals repulse the algae from their
bodies. This is the right move in the short term: the corals remain
unharmed by the reactive oxygen. But in the long run they will starve
without the energy generated by their algal symbionts, and may
eventually die if they do not recover symbiont numbers in time. Since
the loss of the algae also leads to the loss of the beautiful colours of the
corals, this creates the tragedy on the reef known as ‘coral bleaching’.
Hard corals are among the most severely affected by this stress.