The coral reefs of Florida have seen a long steady decline for more than 100 years and a lot of research and effort has been done to try understand the root causes of this degradation and how it can be mitigated. Despite all of the protections, coral restoration work, and coral spawning work, the coral reefs are on the cusp of losing one of its most iconic species, the pillar coral.
dendrogyracylindrusis unique among all coral species with thick, large rounded branches that can grow up to ten feet tall, with several of these together forming colonies that can reach the size of a small tree! One of the ways that pillar coral spreads can happen when one of these large tall branches fall over and new branches sprout up from its side, with the thick skeleton and shaggy polyps and tentacles forming a unique dense living mass growing on the reef.
Unfortunately, the pillar coral’s slow and steady strategy of growing sturdy colonies on the reef in order to survive in areas of high water flow and through heavy storms has meant that this coral doesn’t reproduce very quickly and they have steadily declined in numbers over the past several decades. More recently over the past couple of years a highly lethal disease has been decimating the last vestiges of stony corals in and around Florida, with a nearly 100% mortality rate for all stony corals除了Elkhorn和staghorn珊瑚Acroporagenus.
柱珊瑚已经是加勒比海珊瑚礁最稀有物种之一,甚至在佛罗里达州稀有的物种,但佛罗里达州dendrogyra受到特别艰难的打击。由于它在礁石上的出现非常可识别,因此少数孤立的大型殖民地是当地的珊瑚研究人员和潜水员多年来众所周知的,其中许多人具有性格,甚至是他们自己的名字。
唉支柱珊瑚殖民地以前knwon为“Archie’, ‘Bunny’, and ‘Lonesome Larry’ have succumbed to the rapid tissue loss afflicting most stony corals in the area and the species has now been declared extinct in Florida. Even if not all of the pillar corals are dead yet, it’s only a matter of time – with no mature colonies around there’s no sliver of hope that new recruits will settle out onto local reefs and it can take a decade or more for pillar corals to reach sexual maturity.
The situation for pillar corals in the wild is extremely grim, and with all of the threats that coral reefs face including warming temperatures and acidification, there is no indication of whether the reefs of Florida will be healthy enough to sustain pillar corals again, at least in our lifetimes. It’s notall不过,末日珊瑚的厄运和忧郁仍然存在于加勒比海的许多地方,佛罗里达水族馆已经拥有少量的圈养人群,他们设法在一个专门设计的水族馆系统中产生了这些人群。
在抗气候变化和疾病的繁殖珊瑚上,付出了很多努力,dendrogyra是从这种遗传增强和监督育种计划中真正受益最大的珊瑚物种之一。并非所有的希望都失去了支柱珊瑚的未来,但是对于科学家和研究人员来说,肯定会花费大量工作来找出一种新一代的方法dendrogyra如果以及何时可以恢复佛罗里达礁的“超级志”,以便他们可以再次支持标志性的支柱煤。[[WLRN这是给予的