Wildlife

Great Barrier Reef Suffers Most Severe Bleaching to Date

February 2020 was the hottest month on record since records began in 1900, Terry Hughes, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, told Reuters.

“We saw record-breaking temperatures all along the length of the Great Barrier Reef, there wasn’t a cool portion in the north, or a cool portion in the south this time around,” Hughes said.

“The whole Barrier Reef was hot so the bleaching we have seen this year is the most extensive so far.”

Hughes added that he is now almost certain that the Reef is not going to recover to what it looked like even five years ago, not to mention thirty years ago. If the global warming trends continue the Great Barrier Reef will be destroyed, he said.

“We will have some sort of tropical ecosystem, but it won’t look like coral reef, there might be more seaweed, more sponges, a lot less coral, but it will be a very different ecosystem.”

Verge of Extinction

More than 500 species of land animals could be lost within 20 years as Earth’s sixth mass extinction of wildlife accelerates, scientists warn. They say that such losses could pass the tipping point for the collapse of civilization as we know it.

“When humanity exterminates other creatures, it is sawing off the limb on which it is sitting, destroying working parts of our own life-support system,” said Stanford University’s Paul Ehrlich.

An international research team writes in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: “Extinction breeds extinctions.” They say that wildlife trade and other activities have already wiped out hundreds of species.

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