Temperatures are rising!
No secret here: the ocean has been steadily warming, and recently, it's been heating up more than it has in the past decade. Thanks to the Experiment funding, we are now able to capture this data in Costa Rica with our own permanent system.
One explanation for this warming, especially in the Pacific Ocean, could be the onset of an El Niño phase. When El Niño is in a positive phase, it tends to bring warmer waters to the Equatorial Pacific. However, this time, it's not confined to the Pacific; it's happening globally, and it appears to be more intense than ever, particularly causing severe coral bleaching.
Collecting this kind of oceanographic data and generate long time series is fundamental in order to understand and predict changes in the marine ecosystem. That’s why a couple of weeks ago, we installed our second smart mooring system in Bahia Tomas, located in Guanacaste. This deployment was a huge success and an incredible milestone for our project, since now we’ll be able to monitor these abrupt changes in water temperatures and see how this phenomenon is affecting the coral reefs located in this specific site and compare with others in the region.
We returned to Bahia Tomas for the first maintenance field trip after 3 weeks of its intial installation and apart from the routine tasks involving intense brushing and removal of any biofouling growth, we visited the reef of this secluded bay. The corals from the reef exhibited good conditions overall despite these extreme high temperatures, and they look to be recovering or at the beggining of a bleaching event. Because of this, it’s really important to continue the visual record of observations, as temperatures are predicted to keep rising overtime. Having this mooring system here will allow us to assess important long time data series that will show us the ocean dynamics here and also, the correlation between these parameters and the coral reef’s health.
While we wait for the sytem in the Pacific to capture enough data, we see some trends in the time series of the first smart mooring system located in the Cahuita National Park in the Caribbean coast. We can see how both, the surface and bottom temperature, reached values above 30°C in the last couple of months, which is pretty high. We can also see that these two parameters are positively correlated, with an r coefficient = 0.9972, this tells us that, as the surface temperature rises, the bottom temperature also rises. This condition could lead to possible coral reef bleaching so we have to stay alert and monitor how corals will stand this water temperature changes and determine if these colonies are more acclimated to these environmental conditions.
The situation coral reefs are living worldwide is absolutely tragic specially because we’re having multiple bleaching reports in different parts of the world, mainly the Caribbean coasts of Mexico, Panama and Florida. What we’ve seen in Costa Rica is particularly sad, big patches of corals completely bleached and some of them already dead. This means that millions of other organisms lost their refuge and habitat. We need to understand that the whole ecosystem is connected, and if we lose one specific link in the ecological mechanism we can lose everything.
That’s also why we’re developing this project, because we think that monitoring oceanographic parameters could give us an idea of what our future would look like and also be prepared for possible coral bleaching events and therefore determine which species are more resilient to environmental changes and could possibly be used for restoration projects.
NOT EVERYTHING IS LOST...
There’re still healthy corals despite the climate situation we’re living in, this means that some of them are acclimating to higher temperatures. Corals located in the Cahuita National Park are an excellent example. They are in pretty good condition. Also, we have incredible news, the Raising Coral Team recorded on the night of september 5th the first spawning of Acropora palmata ever recorded in the Caribbean of Costa Rica, this event lasted around 25 minutes and it involved a lot of hard work from the team so it has been an incredible milestone to achieve. The spawning occurred in Manzanillo, which is a little bit far from where the smart mooring system is, but still we can have an idea of the different oceanographic parameters that induce corals to spawn that day, for example, surface temperature was 30°C at 7:00 pm.
Here's basically where technology and marine ecology meet, and that’s our main goal with our project!
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