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[–]chottohen 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Urine causes bleaching too.

[–]weavilsatemyface 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Conspiracy tards: "You will never hear about this in the mainstream media!!!1!"

The mainstream media:

You don't get much more mainstream, and green, than The Guardian, and they covered this story at least twice:

And here is the actual report which is publicly available for anyone to read. Some conspiracy to keep it a secret.

This is what we have learned:

  • The reefs are surprisingly resilient, or at least, one species of coral is very resilient and fast growing. If this were a land plant, we might call it a weed.
  • When the water temperatures goes down again, bleaching stops and the coral can recover.
  • But repeated cycles of bleaching and die-back, followed by recovery, are still stressful.

So its a "good news / bad news" situation: the good news is that coral reefs can recover from stress, the bad news is that the stress will be back again and will likely keep increasing past the point of no return.

We shouldn't be surprised by this. When you have drought and a heat wave, land plants die back too. Just ask any farmer. When the heat wave and drought breaks, the survivors recover. But when it goes on and on, eventually you get this.

Coral is no different. It can recover to a point, but not beyond it, and only an idiot would think that just because it recovers now that means the long term threat is gone.