A basic introduction

Hello.
I'm a coral reef researcher living in Australia. I'm originally from Louisville, Kentucky.
I've been very stressed and frustrated lately: my research shows that humanity is killing itself. 

Coral bleaching is caused by our pollution and overfishing. But, there's a very simple and cheap remedy for this: stop ignoring the problem!

My research also shows that corals are very very well adapted to bleaching...such that susceptible corals recover fastest, and resistant corals prolong bleaching as long as possible (e.g. partial mortality) but will eventually succumb to death from bleaching if conditions persist.

For my thesis, I completed a long-term experiment on coral bleaching. I mocked the thermal environment of the 1998 bleaching event...and moved corals from treatment tanks to recovery tanks once they had bleached. This was a very unique design, as I specifically measured the bleaching of a coral and left time variable, such that I made a new scale of observing time, the bleaching day (=0, negative is before and positive is after). Then, there was the problem of dimensionality...because I had random replication amongst branches (controlled site on branches)- and each branch was in a different phase of bleaching....so I had to take a big old mathematical step back. Differential calculus should be applied to study whole coral colonies (or anything more than one polyp for that matter).

Essentially, this two year experiment showed that corals had very high survival, and used various mechanisms to survive (partial mortality, tissue resurrection, sunscreens, fluorescence, fragmentation, etc.). Moreover, the corals that had tissue sloughed all resurrected tissue (because they have perforated skeletons which allows the tissue somewhere to remain hidden), and these bits of tissue survived the experiments. Even when all of my water flow suddenly stopped (from apparent after-effects of a cyclone, however I still think there's more to it than that, as many tried to stop my research before this point because I was pregnant and they didn't want me to be on an island...I'm fine and my little girl is so strong :)....

I'll stop here today, but realise that corals will be fine. They have been around for millenia, much much longer than us. They are called the canary in the mines...I say it should be the phoenix in the mines.

And, let me just note that for corals, brooding species (not spawners, but brooders who, like us get "pregnant") who have separate male and female colonies (like us) and who transmit genetic diversity to their young (like us) prolong bleaching, but suffer the highest mortality when they succumb.