EILAT, Israel — Rugged red mountains tower over the aquamarine waters off Eilat in southern Israel. A group of divers plunges beneath the waves on a warm winter morning, bound for a crag encrusted with coral known as Japanese Gardens. The hypnotic reverie of the undersea world shatters with the shock of spotting a bone-white colony. Scientists have long considered the corals in the Gulf of Aqaba to be uniquely resilient to extreme temperatures, and have taken to calling them “supercorals.” Bleaching had never before been documented here. For the first time on record, however, last summer’s record-smashing heat wave brought these corals to “the threshold we’ve been talking about all along,” Maoz Fine, a Hebrew University of Jerusalem professor studying coral resilience and one of the leading Israeli scientists monitoring the gulf ecosystem, told Mongabay. He and his colleagues first received reports of bleached corals in August 2024 and are now studying the episode’s severity and extent. “There’s no doubt that we need to wake up, because climate change is having an impact — here all the more so,” he said. Coral reef ecosystems are likened to submarine rainforests: diversity of life in stupefying abundance. As oceans warm due to human-caused climate change, corals — colonies of jellyfish-like animals called cnidarians — eject the photosynthetic zooxanthellae that live symbiotically within their cells, and turn a ghastly white. While not a death sentence, the weakened corals, which form a cornerstone of nutrient-poor tropical ecosystems, are left highly vulnerable. Many die.…This article was originally published on Mongabay
Even the Gulf of Aqaba’s ‘supercorals’ bleached during 2024 heat wave
