Coral

Antioxidant capacity is a critical component of stress tolerance because in a range of organisms, including corals, stressors such as high water temperature, poor water quality and even pathogen infection, produce an increase in damaging, highly reactive oxygen molecules (free radicals) inside the tissues.

The ability to tolerate environmental stress varies between individuals, so the team associated with the Australian Institute of Marine Science set out to find the most stress-tolerant of the common reef-building coral Acropora millepora.

Coral reefs are particularly vulnerable to the ocean acidification process, because reef architecture is built by the accretion of calcium carbonate, called calcification, which becomes increasingly difficult as acid concentrations increase and the surrounding water's pH decreases.

With up to 10m tides, the Kimberley region in north Western Australia has the largest tropical tides in the world, creating naturally extreme and highly dynamic coastal habitats that corals from more typical reefs could not survive.

Researchers at the University of Western Australia's Oceans Institute were thus surprised to find that corals from the region are just as sensitive to heat stress and bleaching as their counterparts from less extreme environments elsewhere.

Image at the top:  Great Barrier Reef, Australia. An intertidal 'micro-atoll'. Photo: Isobel Bennett.

Coral colonies of P. cylindrica have a unique internal solution to the problem of forming their skeletons and building reef structures in the face of rising ocean acidification.

In the past, coral research has focused on radar and sonar mapping of the seafloor. With this kit, which is being used for the first time, biological samples can also be collected for analysis.

Currently on board the Okeanos Explorer’s Hohonu Moana, the compact kit can quickly extract tissues and preserve the sample’s DNA for analysis. This enables scientists to archive large amounts of the genetic material. Doing so can reveal important information about the evolutionary relationships amongst species.

Developed by roboticists from Queensland University of Technology, this is the world's first robot designed to search and destroy (so to speak) the dreaded crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS). It does this by seeking them out, identifying them and then administering a lethal injection of bile salts.

Its creators, Dr Matthew Dunbabin and Dr Feras Dayoub, equipped the robot with GPS, stereoscopic cameras for depth perception, thrusters to improve stability, pitch-and-roll sensors as well as the pneumatic injection arm.

Corals depend on symbiotic algae to survive and build coral reefs. Increased ocean temperatures due to climate change can cause these symbiotic algae to be expelled from the coral, an event known as bleaching, which often leads to death.

Scientists from University of Miami placed corals in tanks and subjected them to increased water temperatures to gain insights into how they may react to global warming by replicating ocean conditions that would lead to both mild and severe coral bleaching.

PENRO chief Charlies Fabre has issued a warning to visiting scuba divers after at least two photos had been posted on Facebook by an environmentalist who frequented Apo Island showing a diver using a poker and touching corals. It turned out that this was a somewhat common practice among some scuba divers.

Fabre said he would ask the Protected Area Superintendent Efren Rombawa, who is also the chief of the Community Environment and Natural Resources Office on Apo Island, to look into the matter.

It was the first thorough exploration of the cold, oxygen-rich waters north of Bodega Head, a small promontory that lies along the California's Sonoma coast just 70 miles north of San Francisco. Submarine canyons, such as Bodega Canyon, extend from the continental shelf to the deep sea – making their exploration a difficult but worthwhile endeavour. The canyons are important because they act as a refuge for important species of fish and provide a habitat for sensitive species of deep-water corals and sponges.