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Bright white stress band on Porites coral.

Bright white stress band on Porites coral.
Bright white stress band on Porites coral.
Bright white stress band on Porites coral.
Bright white stress band on Porites coral.
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294094
Anne Cohen Lab
Bright white stress band on Porites coral.
Still Image
03/28/2017
graphics/Releases/2010StressBand.1280.jpg
Caption from Oceanus magazine, Vol. 53, No. 1, pg. 22:
A 3.6° F rise in ocean temperatures, combined with a stretch of unusually calm weather, caused coral reefs in the South China Sea to bleach in 2015. About 40 percent of the corals died. Below, a CT scan image of a piece of skeleton cored from a coral reveals a bright white stress band that formed when ocean temperatures rose during an El Niño in 2009-10. The cores provide a record of past bleaching episodes.
Image Of the Day caption:
When water temperatures get too warm, corals expel their algal symbionts, a process known as coral bleaching. Without symbionts to provide food, corals can starve and die. This computerized tomography (CT) scan of a sample of living coral reveals a bright white stress band across the top of the core. WHOI scientist Anne Cohen and her students have studied these unusual skeletal features and linked them to bleaching-induced starvation. This coral bleached but did not die during the 2009-2010 El Niño, which raised water temperatures on Palau by 1 degree Celsiusenough to cause bleaching across the entire Palau archipelago.
Caption from WHOI news release dated 03/23/2017:
The CT scan image of a skeletal core, a "biopsy" removed from a living Porites coral, reveals a bright white band that formed during the 2009/2010 El Niño. These "stress bands" are known to form during periods of prolonged bleaching. Cores that extend back in time can thus provide information about past bleaching events in the absence of direct observations.
Photo courtesy of The Cohen Lab, WHOI
© Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
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