Coral Bleaching occurs because of two different reasons.
First it happens when the densities of zooxanthellae decline and the other time it occurs is when the concentration of photosynthetic pigments within the zooxanthellae fall.
The reason this bleaching is a very bad thing is because if the bleaching is not too bad the coral will recover over time maybe over a span of a few months.
But if the bleaching is terrible it will never recover and the coral will eventually die.
Scientists have come up with a few ideas on why this is happing to our coral reefs.
First of all one major similarity between all the ideas is that the extreme ocean temperatures are the leading reason, the higher than normal temperatures is making it difficult for them to live healthy because it is a change in their habitat.
Not only the high temperature forces bleaching if there is any sudden change in temperature getting colder will also induce bleaching.
These temperature changes do not even have to be that large it only takes 2 degrees Celsius increase over a span of 5- 10 weeks to cause bleaching and it only needs to drop 4 degrees to cause bleaching.
This relates to our course because we had a chapter on coral bleaching. Chapter three went in depth on corals and coral bleaching and that was the first time I have ever heard about this problem amongst our coral reefs. However this is not the only problem that they are going thru. This is just one of the many threats to the coral reefs around the world.
