Scuba diving Hanny Rivera collecting samples of bleached coral.

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iBase ID

415689

Creator

DeCarlo, Thomas

Title

Scuba diving Hanny Rivera collecting samples of bleached coral.

Type

Still Image

Date

04/18/2006

File name

IMG_4852-1.jpg

Notes

Caption from Oceanus magazine, Vol. 53, No. 2, pg. 17:
Graduate student Hanny Rivera takes a tissue sample from a bleached coral. When ocean waters warm, corals lose their colorful endosymbiotic algae, and their white skeletons become visible beneath their transparent tissue.
Image Of the Day caption:
MIT-WHOI Joint Program graduate student Hanny Rivera removes a tissue sample from a bleached coral on Jarvis Island in the equatorial Pacific. Anne Cohen's lab received an NSF RAPID response grant to investigate biogeochemical and ecological impacts of the 2015-2016 El Niño, one of the strongest on record. When researchers visited the island in November 2015, ocean temperatures were 4°C higher than normal, which caused most corals to lose their symbiotic algae. The process, called "bleaching", often results in the corals dying from starvation, but an estimated 80 percent of Jarvis corals were still alive. The researchers hope to return in May as El Niño conditions diminish to assess whether nutrient-rich waters of the Equatorial Undercurrent have sustained the corals and allowed them to recover.

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