Earth Justice protects our oceans ecosystems by safeguarding marine species, promoting sustainable fisheries and healthy ecosystems and building a resilience to climate change. Coral reefs are the heart of warmer ecosystems and they are declining at a rapid pace in the last hundred years. This is due to overfishing, habitat fragmentation. pollution, and the ocean warming and acidifying.
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__twitter.com_earthjustice_status_1112384056258256904-3Fs-3D12&d=DwMFaQ&c=heEcP2AsrLOv4XP8e7I9NA&r=kz5pEMguWhacPtBw6XuituaV84j9P3aSGcgla6A9K3Q&m=hY9zymhZ9AdeprahKmr3tTqWZb5KE_-ed9A8p8vWeBA&s=Ye7NJW42BW3hNoDz0WBFzI_Nakm3_KcClD-cdAJWIfI&e=
The ecology field trip course of 2017 led by Dr. Bridgeman and Dr. Turner in Marsh Harbor, Bahamas. The students learned how to identify and document certain corals and reef-building species. around the shores of Great Abaco Island. Coral reefs are a critically important life-support system for our planet and are also particularly good locations for the study of such foundational ecological principles such as competition for space, predation, and symbiosis.
https://tubino.smugmug.com/Bahamas-2017/Videos-long/i-KDVTqR8
https://www.coralreef.gov/
Lemon sharks relay on mangroves for a major of reasons, first they lives in mangroves for the first 13 years of their life and second they return to the mangrove they were born in and give birth to their young. A threat to these sharks are the removal of the mangroves for hotels, resorts, etc., and the sharks will return to the same mangrove to give birth whether or not the mangrove is there. This leaves the baby sharks with no protection and survival rates are decreasing.
Below is a video-link that describes a relatively new and very aggressive disease named stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD), and a special response team in Florida named Force Blue. The disease was confirmed near St Thomas by UVI scientists and has not been observed elsewhere in the USVI.
Monitoring Coral Reef Habitat
