A coral reef ecologist has issued a warning about the condition of reefs in the Cayman Islands:
Corals in Cayman Islands have been declining at a precipitous rate according to recently done research by the Living Oceans Foundation.
Speaking during a public lecture that was held at St Matthews University recently, Dr Andy Bruckner noted that sites that had 60-80 percent living corals now had between 5-15 percent.
“These corals are being replaced by fleshy sea weeds, bioeroding sponges and other nuisance species — something known as a phase shift where a coral dominated reef changes to an alternate stable state that can persist indefinitely,” said Dr Bruckner.
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However, Dr Bruckner said that the Cayman Islands is however doing better than its Caribbean counterparts.“The Cayman Islands is fortunate to have some of the best reefs that remain in the Caribbean today. Most locations have large populations of the important predatory fishes like grouper, and much of the rest of the system is intact — we saw healthy populations of conch and lobster, large schools of important herbivores like parrot fish and many reefs also still have relatively high cover of reef building corals,” he told the gathering.
Read more from Living Cayman.
The Living Oceans Foundation is a US-based public benefit foundations “dedicated to the mission of ocean conservation and restoration”. At the Foundation’s website, you can find out about work they’re doing in the Bahamas (including the ongoing preparation of a habitat map) and in the US Virgin Islands (where habitat maps have been prepared for St. John and St. Thomas and for St. Croix and Buck Island).
[Photo: Steven Wagner ]
