Gorgonian soft corals on sea fan. Photographer Mary Lou Frost.Misguided Optimism for Coral Reefs

Why are governments and environmentalists airbrushing the dire state of the world’s coral reefs, asks Roger Bradbury writing an op ed for the New York Times. Reality is that the world’s coral reefs — the nurseries of tropical coastal fish stocks — are zombie ecosystems, crushed under the weight of overfishing, ocean acidification and pollution.

In this hard-hitting argument, Bradbury says that “by persisting in the false belief that coral reefs have a future, we grossly misallocate the funds needed to cope with the fallout from their collapse.” He continues:

Money isn’t spent to study what to do after the reefs are gone — on what sort of ecosystems will replace coral reefs and what opportunities there will be to nudge these into providing people with food and other useful ecosystem products and services. Nor is money spent to preserve some of the genetic resources of coral reefs by transferring them into systems that are not coral reefs. And money isn’t spent to make the economic structural adjustment that communities and industries that depend on coral reefs urgently need. We have focused too much on the state of the reefs rather than the rate of the processes killing them.

2500 Year ‘Reef Hiatus’

Researchers at Florida Tech write that coral reefs might be undergoing a total collapse similar to a “reef hiatus” that began 4,000 years ago and lasted for 2,500 years.

Doctoral student Lauren Toth led the study which drove 17-foot, small-bore aluminum pipes deep into coral reefs along the Pacific coast of Panama. Extracting cross-sections from the reefs, Toth reconstructed a timeline of the reef’s history.

We were shocked to find that 2,500 years of reef growth were missing from the frameworks,” Toth said in a release. “That gap represents the collapse of reef ecosystems for 40 percent of their total history.

In this case, the researchers take the same optimistic view that Bradbury condemns as unrealistic, saying: