18
September 2003
Ecology: Coral grief
More than 100 million people depend on coral reefs for their livelihood in the Indian Ocean region, but these reefs were heavily damaged, and most shallow corals killed, by the sea warming that followed the 1998 El Niño event. The rate of recovery of the "bleached" corals, and the risk of further episodes of ocean-warming in the future, are of vital importance to the populations in the region, but are notoriously difficult to predict. The best estimates had predicted that repeated lethal episodes are likely to come in a few decades, but a new approach that seamlessly combines historical data on sea surface temperatures with numerical models has come up with more disturbing predictions. The critical time for many sites is in fact just 10–25 years, and a geographical pattern emerges that suggests that several of the world's poorest countries will be affected soonest. This new modelling approach includes the varying abilities of corals to adapt to temperature changes, and thus shows that it is not necessarily those sites that will experience the greatest temperature increases that will suffer the greatest coral mortalities in the near future.
Predicted recurrences of mass coral mortality
in the Indian Ocean
CHARLES R. C. SHEPPARD
Nature 425, 294–297 (2003); doi:10.1038/nature01987
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