In French Polynesia, dedicated teams are working to restore the extensive coral reefs around the 118-strong island group, and there is a range of environmentally responsible tours for visitors who want to take a look for themselves.
Puerto Rico has no glass recycling programs in place, meaning that used bottles usually end up in dumpsters. Puerto Ricans are very proud of their beaches, and Medalla Light wanted to give something back to the island with this effort. The goal was to educate and create awareness about the importance of marine ecosystems to preserve our beaches. Without corals, there are no beaches as we know them today.
Coral Reefs are important to the planet, but their numbers are declining. Angela Martinez Quintana, who received her Ph.D. at UB, has been studying ocean habitats in depth. Her research focuses on coral reefs, their impact on the environment, and their restoration.
Fire corals resemble typical stony corals but are actually close relatives of jellyfish; hence their wicked sting. They have the ability to grow either as sheets—expanding as a flat coating across rocks and other surfaces—or as “trees,” sprouting upward with a stem and branches. More than 40 years ago, Jeremy Jackson, an ocean biologist with the American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, proposed that this plasticity would give fire corals an edge as Caribbean reefs experienced global warming and hurricanes. Edmunds now concludes Jackson was right.
That means scientists are vastly underestimating Earth’s microbiome, microbiologist Pierre Galand of Sorbonne University in Paris said at a May 31 news conference. The new count of bacteria living in the Pacific Ocean’s coral reefs alone falls within current estimates for the total microbial diversity of Earth, suggesting that there exponentially more bacteria living on the planet than previously thought.
