Coral reefs

Description

Context

Thailand bans sunscreens from all its marine national parks over damage to corals.
Ingredients commonly found in sun creams were shown to destroy coral larvae, obstruct coral reproduction and cause reef bleaching.
The banned lotions ingredients are oxybenzone, octinoxate, 4-methylbenzylidene camphor or butylparaben.
Similar bans have been introduced by the Pacific island of Palau and the US state of Hawaii.

Corals exhibit characteristics of plants, but are marine animals that are related to jellyfish and anemones.
Coral polyps are tiny, soft-bodied organisms. At their base is a hard, protective limestone skeleton called a calicle, which forms the structure of coral reefs.
Reefs begin when a polyp attaches itself to a rock on the seafloor, then divides, or buds, into thousands of clones.
The polyp calicles connect to one another, creating a colony that acts as a single organism.
As colonies grow over hundreds and thousands of years, they join with other colonies, and become reefs.
There are soft corals as well, which are non-reef-building, and resemble bushes, grasses, trees.

Coral reefs are like underwater cities that support marine life.
According to the UN Environment programme, they provide at least half a billion people around the world with food security and livelihoods.
Coral reefs also act as ‘wave breaks’ between the sea and the coastline and minimise the impact of sea erosion.
In India, they are protected in the same way as the tiger or elephant, under Schedule I of the Wildlife Protection Act (WPA), 1972.

Climate change remains one of the biggest threats to corals.
This threat has been visible in the “bleaching” of corals.
Bleaching is a process during which corals, under stress from warm weather, expel the algae that give corals their brilliant colours and live in their tissues and produce their food.

The Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia, a UNESCO World Heritage site and home to one of the largest collections of coral reefs on the planet, has suffered six mass bleaching events due to warmer than normal ocean temperatures: in 1998, 2002, 2006, 2016, 2017, and now 2020.