Plunge into the shallows off the Florida Keys, Hawaiʻi or the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and you are likely to meet a ...

Coral bleaching isn’t just an ocean crisis. Here’s how the global event endangers food security, local jobs—and the land ...

Seaweed, a major competitor with coral for space on the reef, began colonizing the bleached skeletons. Kopecky wondered if the skeletons’ presence was setting the reef on a pathway toward a more algae ...

The skeletons left behind after bleaching appear to offer protection to algae, which then edge out the slow-growing coral.

Coral skeletons seem to protect young algae from herbivores that would otherwise keep it in check. The animals can’t get in all the crevices, so the algae gains a foothold from which to spread.

Algae grow faster than coral, so without the balancing effect of herbivory they can easily overrun a reef, preventing new corals from settling and shading out those colonies that do.

Tropical coral reefs encrust the coastlines of islands and continents near Earth’s equator but this zone, which has offered sufficient light and warmth for corals to evolve over hundreds of millions ...

Fossils found in northern Africa and Germany suggest that many of their relatives were already living with symbiotic algae in the Devonian Period, which lasted from 419 to 359 million years ago. The ...

Without their algae, corals can survive for short periods of time, but are more susceptible to disease and warm temperature events. In a best-case scenario, healthy tissue remains deep in the coral ...

"When the water temperature is elevated, the algae can produce harmful toxins and so the coral expels them, leaving the translucent tissue with the white skeleton below it." ...

Microplastics were also found in all of the other layers of the coral—surface mucus and tissue—and the majority of these microplastics were tiny fragments that were mostly blue, black or white.

So they were eating all the algae that would smother the dead coral skeletons, and make it impossible for the corals to come back, which is what happens in other places like the Caribbean," Sala ...