Sickly Soft Corals

The hard-bodied corals that are the most familiar site in reefs around the world aren't the only corals being destroyed by global warming. Soft corals, another integral part of reef environments, are simply melting away, thanks to Earth's rising temperature.

Unlike their hard brethren, soft corals, like the Cladiella pictured above, don't produce calcium carbonate skeletons to protect themselves (instead, they use spiney skeletal elements called sclerites).

Environmental stress, such as rising ocean temperatures, can damage both kinds of coral, causing them to expel the microscopic algae that live in their tissues and provide them with an ample source of energy. (The colony picture above shows signs that it is suffering from high temperatures and has lost some of its symbiotic algae.)

Hard-bodied corals die and leave their ghostly-white skeletons behind, but soft corals simply melt away, says marine biologist Hudi Benayahu of Tel Aviv University.

Benayahu has studied coral reefs around the globe and has noticed a dramatic die-off of soft corals in recent years. Where once they were found in about 50 to 60 percent of the study sites, only about 5 percent now remain, Benayahu said.

Of one Japanese soft coral site, Benayahu noted that "there was a massive disappearance of soft corals. You can't imagine this was the same site. Just two years passed and the entire area was deserted, lifeless."

-LiveScience Staff

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Credit: AFTAU