iONiUM quotes a report from The Sydney Morning Herald: More than one-third of the coral reefs of the central and northern regions of the Great Barrier Reef have died in the huge bleaching event earlier this year, Queensland researchers said. Corals to the north of Cairns -- covering about two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef -- were found to have an average mortality rate of 35 percent, rising to more than half in areas around Cooktown. Bleaching occurs when abnormal conditions, such as warm seas, cause corals to expel tiny photosynthetic algae, called zooxanthellae. Corals turn white without these algae and may die if the zooxanthellae do not recolonize them. "It is fair to say we were all caught by surprise," Professor Hughes, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, said. "It's a huge wake up call because we all thought that coral bleaching was something that happened in the Pacific or the Caribbean which are closer to the epicenter of El Nino events." The report says, "The northern end of the Great Barrier Reef was home to many 50- to 100-year-old corals that had died and may struggle to rebuild before future El Ninos push tolerance beyond thresholds."pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;"
a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status='Huge+Wake+Up+Call'%3A+Third+of+Central%2C+Northern+Great+Barrier+Reef+Corals+Dead%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F1TOm3IA"img src="https://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a
a class="slashpop" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F16%2F05%2F30%2F2119223%2Fhuge-wake-up-call-third-of-central-northern-great-barrier-reef-corals-dead%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook"img src="https://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a
a class="nobg" href="http://plus.google.com/share?url=https://science.slashdot.org/story/16/05/30/2119223/huge-wake-up-call-third-of-central-northern-great-barrier-reef-corals-dead?utm_source=slashdotamp;utm_medium=googleplus" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href,'', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"img src="http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png" alt="Share on Google+"//a
/div/ppa href="https://science.slashdot.org/story/16/05/30/2119223/huge-wake-up-call-third-of-central-northern-great-barrier-reef-corals-dead?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/Azf0a67UVJ8" height="1" width="1" alt=""/
