Human activities are fundamentally altering the chemical makeup of local coral reefs, according to a study led by the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and published in Nature Communications.
Human activities are fundamentally altering the chemical makeup of local coral reefs, according to a study led by the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and published in Nature Communications. The research team discovered that 25 contaminants from agricultural, industrial and pharmaceutical sources accumulated in the soft tissues of coral around Maui. Additionally, in areas impacted by human activities, the energy and nutrient availability within the coral’s tissue decreases, making them significantly less resilient to environmental stressors such as warmer or acidic waters.
“Our findings suggest that monitoring the pool of chemicals within the coral tissues, called metabolomes, can serve as a powerful tool for tracking the hidden impacts of anthropogenic [human induced] disturbance on marine life,” said Zach Quinlan, lead author and research biologist at the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB) in the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology.
Quinlan and an international team of researchers tested the metabolomes of 380 lobe corals (Porites lobata) and rice corals (Montipora capitata) from 16 sites off west and south Maui. They found that human activities both within the adjacent watershed and in the marine ecosystem altered the composition of the corals’ metabolomes. In areas with more ecosystem disturbance, there was increased accumulation of contaminants and a decrease of nutrient and energy reserves in the coral tissues.
Read More: University of Hawaii
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