Coral flourescing, courtesy Jane McClanahan

During this time, most of the healthy, still-living reefs in the Caribbean turned pale, almost white.  It's a harrowing scenario called 'bleaching', a coral's reaction to increasing water temperatures. Writes the Wall Street Journal on October 29, 2005 after reviewing the Discovery Land Company problem, "Coral is sensitive to even slight rises in temperature.  Warm water bleaches reefs by killing organisms that live inside the coral, draining reefs of color and making them more susceptible to disease and permanent damage.  Since coral reefs shelter coastlines and generate sand, such damage can excacerbate erosion and flooding."

Dr. Michael Risk, a renowned coral reef ecologist who has been a strong critic of the developer after studying their EIA, made the initial case that the developer's EIA really said nothing about the coral reef, and therefore side-stepped the most important environmental issues.

Cervino and McClanahan are here to add further specialization to Dr. Michael Risk's assessment of the developer's EIA.  They are here, because, according to Dr. Cervino, "This is one of the most basic scientific conclusions that one can make.  This is something I teach in marine biology 101.  Corals live in nutrient starved ecosystems, you increase the nutrients and the coral reef will die."

Example of healthy Porites on the Guana Cay Reef. Photo Dr. James Cervino/Guana Cay October 2005

Later, Janie writes me and proposes the question. "Why will building a golf course kill the reef?"
 
She says, "Every coral reef in the Caribbean is being put under stress by abnormally high water temperatures caused by global warming. As a result of these stressful conditions, the immune systems of the coral animals are become extremely weakened, thus making them more susceptible to pathogenic infection."

She continues, " Golf courses require grass, which requires fertilizer. Although Discovery may claim to be implementing a system in which runoff will not have any effect on the environment, this is not possible in any way. When dealing with golf course operations, fertilizer runoff is an unavoidable part of the equation. This is a problem because any fertilizer used on golf course green, whether it be labeled "organic" or not, will have the same effect on the marine habitat when it leaches through the porous limestone on which Guana Cay rests. What is good for plants on land is also good for plants in the ocean - green, filamentous, thread-like algae as well as slimy, lettuce-like algae will proliferate and begin to smother everything, namely, coral structures which make up the basis of the reef ecosystem."

Fertilizer is a certain killer for coral reefs, but even freshwater safe enough for humans to drink contains too many nutrients for a coral reef.  Since Guana Cay is a porous limestone islet, all the leachates of the golf course and marina will simply soak into the sandy rock and eject out into the reef.
 
Talking about algae and corals together can be confusing, because corals also need algae, another kind of algae called zooxanthellae, to survive.  Embedded within the cell-tissue of corals exist these symbiotic zooxanthellae.  Janie, however, is referring to macro-algaes, which exist in small numbers in healthy reef systems, but not as symbiotic components of the coral polyps cell tissue.  She continues,
 
"This algae loves to grow on sick, dying coral and exposed coral skeleton. Normally, the corals would have a chance to recover from the stress of hot water temperature, but if they are immediately overgrown with increased algae, they have no chance and will die.

We hear about this fact infrequently, because the hotels, tropical countries and travel industry responsible for 'news' about these tourist destinations are keen to hide the following fact: large mega-developments across the Caribbean are responsible for the death of most Caribbean nations' coral reefs.  In just the last forty years, the reefs of countries like Jamaica have degraded into algal pea green soup.
 
I ask Dr. Cervino what too-many-nutrients in the water does to the coral itself.  Explaining that nutrients affect both the symbiotic and non-symbiotic algaes, he says, "Too many nutrients does not really effect the coral host polyp, as it effects the symbiotic algae or zooxanthellae living inside the coral host tissue. Ammonium nutrients become toxic to the algae. This impairs photosynthesis...causing a breakdown in light absorbing chemistry. What that means in lay terms is that it prevents the coral from making sugars and obtaining energy needed for growth and making skeletal material.  Ammonium or nutrients also cause unfavorable macro-invasive-algae to grow, thereby smothering all of the corals that are trying to grow and compete with sunlight."
 
I ask him, "Is coral bleaching a measure the coral polyp, or the algae takes to be able to withstand rising water temperatures, maybe like a tree shedding leaves, or is it a symptom?"

This Montastraea in recovery is fully bleached yet still alive as a result of thermal shock...it's hanging on so slightly.

He says, "The algae are residents living in a hotel, the host coral. Once the temperature becomes too high, the algae or zooxanthellae divide exponentally...meaning too fast...and increase in size. It is sort of like when someone fills a balloon with too much air....however, unlike the balloon, the coral does not explode, the zooxanthellae are spit out or expelled outside of the mouth of the coral polyp each hour in clumps. The coral then loses its color. This also happens when corals are exposed to chemicals such as cyanide, and bleach and sediment smothering.  So, in normal conditions you can look at it like shedding leaves, as the coral maintains a steady state population by getting rid of sick damaged or old zooxanthellae by way of expulsion or spitting them out. I also guess you can look at this as farming and maintaining a steady state population within the host animal."

The developers plan, which resembles a 'green plan' for responsible development, curiously avoids mention of this relationship.  In fact, everything the developer plans to do will create - quickly the nightmarish conditions that Dr. Cervino mentions.
 
I ask McClanahan, "Regarding the symbiotic relationship between the coral polyp and the embedded algae...why has this ecosystem evolved to require a nutrient-poor diet?  What actually happens when the nutrients rise over the degree you mentioned in your post? Is it the embedded algae or other algaes already present in the reef?"

A Fully bleached C natans. Photo Dr. James Cervino/Guana Cay October 2005

She says, "Corals and symbiotic zooxanthellae algae form a relationship which is mutualistically beneficial to both the coral and the algae. Many other symbiosis occur in nature, such as nitrogen-fixing bacteria in roots of legumous plants, or Vibrio bacteria symbiosis in the light organs of squids. Coral-dinoflagellate may be the most complicated and delicate of them all.  The scenario is defined by the host-symbiont exchange of nutrients, such as carbon and nitrogen. Simplified, it goes like this: algae are single-celled plants. Plants are autotrophs, needing only sunlight, carbon dioxide and water in order to make energy in the form of sugars.

An Acropora palmata with lesions of white band disease on the remaining tissue. Other areas on the colony showed signs of thermal stress. All of these corals were affected and killed during the 80s with WBD. Photo Dr. James Cervino/Guana Cay October 2005

Coral cells, the host, are in constant need of an energy source, just as all animals are.  So the algae use light and carbon dioxide in order to produce sugars, and oxygen, which is basic photosynthesis. The coral host uses any extra sugars that the zooxanthellae produces for it's own energy needs, as well as using the oxygen produced by photosynthesis for it's own respiration. In turn, corals release waste products - ammonia and carbon dioxide. Conveniently, those are the perfect nutrients for zooxanthellae to use - seeing as ammonia contains nitrogen, which plants love. The coral host also relies on it's symbiotic dinoflagellates to help the coral grow it's calcium carbonate skeleton. So the coral-zooxanthellae relationship is like it's own recycling center, with no waste product when it is running efficiently.
 
If the zooxanthellae are damaged in any way and cease to produce sugars for the coral host to use, the coral host immediately suffers, essentially by starvation. Some things that cause zooxanthellae damage, thus coral starvation, are: temperature-induced bleaching (due to global warming. this is the biggest threat to corals worldwide, seeing as, according to NOAA, about 27 percent of U.S. coral reefs are gone and another two-thirds will be lost within the next 30 years. And that is a conservative estimate.  Some other things are: infection by a bacterial pathogen, different chemicals such as cyanide or copper, sedimentation drifting onto the coral, too much darkness, or too much light-intensity."

A spectacular 3 00 year old Montastraea coral. This is the major reef builder in the Caribbean.  This colony experienced bleaching before, however, it seemed to have bounced back a few times according to the growth patterns that you can see here.

Dr. Cervino and Janie arrive back at the lab in New York.  He explains, "In the water, all we do is collect the mucous from the coral tissues and take pictures."
 
At the laboratory, they employ tiny needles to extract tissue from their collection of corals after vacuuming off whatever is on the surface.  They take DNA analyses of the surface layers of the corals, and then separate and grow the cultures on a media.  They separate every species using microbiological techniques, and then "...we inoculate healthy corals, and find out which of these corals has diseases."

Discovery Land Company's coral rebuilding structure has already failed, and has turned into an algal mess, carrying all the warnings scientists are saying about DLC's impact on the genuine coral reef. Photo Dr. James Cervino/Guana Cay October 2005

In the laboratory, Dr. Cervino and McClanahan confirmed the following: the Guana Cay reef is one of the healthiest in the Caribbean.  But it is also undergoing stresses - coral bleaching from rising temperatures, harm from Disney's cruiseship dredging site.  To construct Discovery Land Company's mega-development will mean the reef is dead in a few years.

In the developer's EIA, the coral reef is hardly mentioned at all. When it is, it mentions silly things like building interpretive trails or of adding reefballs. Why would a healthy reef need reefballs?

Sadly, the kind of experience represented by scientists like Dr. Cervino and McClanahan were never consulted while building the case, and EIA, for the developer.  Kathleen Sullivan-Sealey, who heads the environmental monitoring team, allegedly built a concrete structure off the shore of Baker's Bay that was designed to grow corals (from feeder corals attached to the structure) during the developer's construction phase.

The same concrete structures that Sullivan-Sealey mentions in her EIA are used in an experiment on the leeward side of the Baker's Bay property. The project is a miserable failure. All the starter corals are dying and the the structure is an algal disaster. Photo Dr. James Cervino/Guana Cay October 2005

According to Dr. Cervino, who dove and examined Sullivan-Sealey's coral experiment, Sullivan-Sealey's experiment is a complete and dismal failure.  He says, "Say goodbye to that reef.  Dr Sealey put in an artificial reef, got funds for it, and they sunk these concrete metal structures and all of these corals are dead· it's overgrown with macroalgae and all the corals were dead.