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Course Hero uses AI to automatically extract content from documents you and others have access to, so you can better explore things like search results, document enrichment, and more. This preview shows 1-2. page 3 pages. Pacific coral reef with many corals Activities: Este Data Nugget tambien esta disponible en Spain: Corals are the animals that make up coral reefs. Coral reefs are home to many species of animals - fish, sharks, sea turtles and anemones use the coral as a habitat! Corals are white but appear brown and green because they contain a type of algae. Algae, like plants, use solar energy to produce food. The algae that live in coral cells are small and produce more sugar than they need. Excess sugars become food for corals. At the same time, corals are a safe home for algae. Algae and coral coexist in a relationship where each partner benefits the other, which is called mutualism: these species do better together than alone. When the water gets too warm, the algae can no longer live in the corals, so they leave. The coral then changes color from green to white, which is called coral bleaching. Due to climate change, the Earths air and oceans are warming. In warmer oceans, coral bleaching is becoming more common. If the water stays too warm, the bleached corals die without their algae counterparts. Scientist Carly works on a coral reef Carly is a scientist who wanted to study coral bleaching to help protect corals and coral reefs. One day, Carly noticed an interesting pattern. The corals in one part of the reef were bleached, but the corals in another part remained healthy. She wondered why some corals and their algae could still cooperate when the water was warm and others couldnt? Ocean water closer to shore (at the coast) becomes warmer than water further away (at sea). Corals and algae from offshore reefs may have adapted to the warmingCarly wondered if coastal corals could handle their algae better in warm water because theyd adapted to those temperatures. In this case, coastal corals and algae should bleach less frequently than coastal corals and algae. Carly designed an experiment to test this. She collected 15 corals from shore and 15 from offshore reefs in the Florida Keys. She took them to the aquarium lab for testing. She cut each coral in half and placed half of each coral in regular water tanks and the other half in heating tanks. The normal water temperature was 27 degrees C, which is the temperature experienced by both inshore and offshore corals all year round. The warm water in the tanks was 31 degrees C, a temperature that coastal corals experience but sea corals have never experienced before. Coastal corals may face higher temperatures in the future due to climate change. After six weeks, she noted the number of bleached corals in each tank. Featured Scientist: Carly Kenkel, University of Texas at Austin Flash-Kincaid Reading Grade = 8.0 This dataset contains two research papers related to the data. Article citations and PDF files are below. The laboratorys website can be found here. If your students are looking for more data on coral bleaching, check out HHMIs BioInteractive lesson activities, where students use real-world data to assess the threat of coral bleaching around the world. Also check out the two videos below! Another BioInteractive video suitable for secondary school teaching. It visualizes the coral bleaching process at different scales. The video contains a lot of complex vocabulary about cells and the process of photosynthesis. Save Save Save Save Save Save Save Save When corals lose their color it is called coral bleaching. Coral bleaching attracted attention after it was first observed on coral reefs in the South Pacific in the 1990s. coral bleachingfound in marine reef aquariums. The skeletal structure of hard corals is usually white, but they are colored by zooxanthellae algae. These tiny dinoflagellates (single-celled microscopic organisms belonging to the protist kingdom) live in the soft tissues of corals. These microalgae are photosynthetic and have endosymbiotic relationships with some corals as well as other marine animals such as bivalves, sticklebacks, some sponges and even jellyfish. Symbiosis refers to two different organisms living together in a mutually beneficial relationship. Zooxanthellae photosynthesize during the day. Coral polyps benefit from photosynthesis (a product of photosynthesis), while algae benefit from the waste nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon dioxide they produce and need to grow. At night, polyps feed on plankton and capture it with their tentacles. If the rate of photosynthesis is too high, corals can control the amount of zooxanthellae in their tissues by pushing them out. This is called coral bleaching, which is normal. However, when corals are stressed, it causes them to release more zooxanthellae than necessary, resulting in a loss of color because too many zooxanthellae are secreted andor the concentration of photosynthetic pigments in these organisms is reduced. Although long-term bleaching can cause partial or complete death of coral colonies, if the situation is not too severe and the stress conditions change, the affected colonies can recover their symbiotic microalgae and resume growth. Since stress seems to be the main cause of this problem, lets take a look at what events around the world are causing coral reef bleaching. The effects of El Niño and La Niña events are thought to be sources of coral bleaching. Global warming, which means climate change in the Earths atmosphere as a result

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