Caribbean Corals in Crisis: Record Thermal Stress, Bleaching, and Mortality in 2005

By C. M. Eakin, J. Morgan, S. Heron, T. Smith, Gang Liu, Lorenzo Álvarez-Filip, B. Baca, E. Bartels, C. Bastidas, C. Bouchon and 57 more. PLoS ONE, 2010

851 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Background The rising temperature of the world's oceans has become a major threat to coral reefs globally as the severity and frequency of mass coral bleaching and mortality events increase. In 2005, high ocean temperatures in the tropical Atlantic and Caribbean resulted in the most severe bleaching event ever recorded in the basin. Methodology/Principal Findings Satellite-based tools provided warnings for coral reef managers and scientists, guiding both the timing and location of researchers' field observations as anomalously warm conditions developed and spread across the greater Caribbean region from June to October 2005. Field surveys of bleaching and mortality exceeded prior efforts in detail and extent, and provided a new standard for documenting the effects of bleaching and for testing nowcast and forecast products. Collaborators from 22 countries undertook the most comprehensive documentation of basin-scale bleaching to date and found that over 80% of corals bleached and over 40% died at many sites. The most severe bleaching coincided with waters nearest a western Atlantic warm pool that was centered off the northern end of the Lesser Antilles. Conclusions/Significance Thermal stress during the 2005 event exceeded any observed from the Caribbean in the prior 20 years, and regionally-averaged temperatures were the warmest in over 150 years. Comparison of satellite data against field surveys demonstrated a significant predictive relationship between accumulated heat stress (measured using NOAA Coral Reef Watch's Degree Heating Weeks) and bleaching intensity. This severe, widespread bleaching and mortality will undoubtedly have long-term consequences for reef ecosystems and suggests a troubled future for tropical marine ecosystems under a warming climate.

Subfields: Ecology, Ocean Engineering, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/593ea18044853ba9c4d434118810db508183e9f8

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Citations in the corpus

Long-term reduced spawning in Orbicella coral species due to temperature stress (2014, background): “…stress is often induced by high temperatures and solar irradiance (Coles & Jokiel 1978, Fitt & Warner 1995, Brown 1997, Hoegh-Guldberg 1999, Eakin et al. 2010, Downs et al. 2013); it can also be caused by low pH (Kaniewska et al. 2012) and other stressors such as reduced salinity, pathogen…”
Reviewing the Effects of Ocean Acidification on Sexual Reproduction and Early Life History Stages of Reef-Building Corals (2011, background): “2 01 0 [2 8]”
How does climate change cause extinction? (2013, neutral): “For example, severe climate anomalies can cause bleaching and coral mortality [80], but bleaching itself does not always lead to mass mortality [81].”
Herbivory and the Resilience of Caribbean Coral Reefs: Knowledge Gaps and Implications for Management (2015, background): “During the past 2 decades, reefs throughout the Caribbean basin have experienced warm water events that are unprecedented in at least the last 150 yr, with major bleaching episodes in 1998 and again in 2005 (Eakin et al. 2010).”
Reef-Scale Thermal Stress Monitoring of Coral Ecosystems: New 5-km Global Products from NOAA Coral Reef Watch (2014, background): “revealed that the record-breaking 2005 Caribbean mass coral bleaching event and North Atlantic Ocean hurricane season were preceded by anomalously high SSTs in the tropical North Atlantic Ocean that started unusually early in March, 2005, and persisted through December, 2005 [1].”
Climate change impacts in Latin America and the Caribbean and their implications for development (2017, background): “Hurricanes have been found to cool waters, alleviating heat stress and thereby reducing the risk of bleaching (Eakin et al. 2010).”
Environmental Drivers of Variation in Bleaching Severity of Acropora Species during an Extreme Thermal Anomaly (2017, background): “In the context of bleaching, temperature stress is often measured in “degree heating weeks” (DHW, ◦C-weeks), a metric which summarizes the duration of time over which temperatures have been above the average temperature of the warmest summer month at each location (e.g., Eakin et al., 2010).”
Securing ocean benefits for society in the face of climate change (2013, background): “Unfortunately, both corals [64] and temperate seagrasses [65] are highly sensitive to warming; and the occurrence of coral bleaching from thermal stress may be exacerbated by ocean acidification [9,66].”
Deciphering Coral Disease Dynamics: Integrating Host, Microbiome, and the Changing Environment (2020, background): “On coral reefs, accurate forecasting programs to predict bleaching have become essential to marine resilience programs (Eakin et al., 2010) and are leading to the development of climate-driven, coral disease–forecasting algorithms (Maynard et al., 2011, 2015).”