A modest new lab at the Rosenstiel School is the first of its kind to tackle the global problem of climate change impacts on corals. Fully operational this month, this new lab has begun to study how corals respond to the combined stress of greenhouse warming and ocean acidification.

One of Australia’s greatest conservation challenges in protecting the Great Barrier Reef and other natural assets is staying one jump ahead of both the movement of protected species and the emergence of new and unforeseen threats.

Approximately 250 million years ago, vast numbers of species disappeared from Earth. This mass-extinction event may hold clues to current global carbon cycle changes, according to Jonathan Payne, assistant professor of geological and environmental sciences.

Coral reefs in much of the Pacific Ocean are dying faster than previously thought, according to a study released Wednesday, with the decline driven by climate change, disease and coastal development.

Corals in the central and western Pacific ocean are dying faster than previously thought, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers have found. Nearly 600 square miles of reef have disappeared per year since the late 1960s, twice the rate of rainforest loss.

In a setback for efforts to protect endangered coral reefs from oil spills, researchers in Israel report that oil dispersants — the best tool for treating oil spills in tropical areas —are significantly more toxic to coral than the oil they are used to clean up.

Phenotypic flexibility enables multicellular organisms to adjust morphologies to variable environmental challenges. Such plastic variations are also documented in reef corals. Coral colonies are made of multiple genetically identical physiologically integrated modules (polyps).

In the longest running study on how fish populations in coral reef systems recover from heavy exploitation, researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and others have found that the fish can recover, but they need lots of time – decades in some cases. The study appears in a recent edition of the journal Ecological Applications.

Australian researchers have studied and documented the effect of the "sundried tide", a force of nature that can silently wipe out coral reefs.

Slow recovery after change predicts the system is near the catastrophic tipping point