Alert is made by the Center of Excellence for the Study of Coral Reefs, an Australian entity that in 2018 had already warned of the disappearance of surface corals.
The number of corals in the Great Barrier Reef in Australia has decreased by more than 50% since the 1990s, warns a study released on Tuesday.
“We found that the number of small, medium and large corals in the Great Barrier Reef has decreased by more than 50% since the 1990s,” said one of the study’s authors, Terry Hughes, of the ARC – Center of Excellence for the Study of Reef Coral (CoralCoE), an Australian entity that in 2018 had already warned of the disappearance of surface corals.
Andy Dietzel, also of CoralCoE and lead author of the study, points out that although there have been many studies over the centuries on changes in the structure of human populations, or of trees, there is no equivalent information about changes in coral populations.
“We measure changes in colony size because population studies are important for understanding the demographics and reproductive capacity of corals,” he explained.
So the CoralCoE team assessed coral communities and the size of their colonies along the Great Barrier Reef (which spans more than 2,300 kilometers on Australia’s east coast) between 1995 and 2017. And concluded that there is a depletion of coral populations.
According to Terry Hughes, the decline occurred both in shallow and deeper waters and “in practically all species,” but “especially in branches and table-shaped corals”.
Read more at TSF
