By Paige Brown
1. Corals are collectives, like ant colonies. Most corals are composed of hundreds to hundreds of thousands of coral individuals.
2. Corals don’t just live in tropical, shallow waters. There are deep water corals that live in dark cold waters.
LSU’s Dr. Harry Roberts, Boyd Professor and former director of the Coastal Studies Institute in the Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences, studies rare deep-water Lophelia coral communities in the Gulf Coast. Read more about Roberts’ explorations here.
3. Coral reefs support more species per unit area than any other marine environment. (NOAA Ocean Service Education).
4. Coral reefs serve as barriers for the coast, protecting wetlands, ports and harbors.
5. Coral reefs are some of the most diverse ecosystems on earth.
6. Some of the best records of sea level change from late Pleistocene to modern times come from information housed in corals. Dating of raised coral reefs in Barbados and New Guinea have produced sea level curves that are widely used by those who study the history of “ice age” to modern events.
Read more here about ancient corals providing information about sea level rise.
7. “Growth banding” in some species of coral are much like tree rings. Changes in environmental conditions can be interpreted from the numbers and width (density) of banding.
8. Geochemical studies of coral “growth bands” can be used in studies of ocean pollution or other changes in the ocean environment with time, on the level of decades to centuries.
LSU’s Dr. Kristine DeLong, assistant professor of geography, uses information housed in coral core samples to study ancient climate and changing oceanographic conditions. Read more about her research here.
9. Study of coral skeletal density through time is being used to help estimate the effects caused by ocean acidification. Ocean acidification is aggravated by climate change and growing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
10. Corals along with calcareous algae are capable of building massive wave-resistant structures over time that may be hundreds of miles long, like the Great Barrier Reef off eastern Australia and the barrier reef off Belize in the Caribbean.
LSU’s Dr. Kam-Biu Liu, George W. Barineau III Professor in the LSU Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences, studies the history of hurricanes using sediment cores extracted from the Blue Hole in Belize. The Blue Hole is a submarine sinkhole and quiet basin surrounded by coral reefs. A ring of coral reefs protects a valuable sediment history housed at the bottom of the Blue Hole. Read more about Liu’s research here.