Suppose to be a leisure dive but turn out to be a sad experience to witness the coral reef going thru another mass coral bleaching.
The bigger the corals, the hardest they are hit!
Not just corals, sea anemones bleached too!
Hard corals, soft corals.... all bleached.
Free living Mushroom corals bleached too.
'Nemos' (Clown fish) celebrating White Christmas!
Comparison between bleached anemones...
Not only in Tioman, last week in Semakau, we saw a numbers of bleached coral as well (both hard and soft). Scary - not too sure what is happening!
ReplyDeleteThe average water temperature there is 29 - 30 C. Not sure this contribute to the bleaching...
ReplyDeleteWow and it wasn't done by us?
ReplyDeleteIt is kind of scary what is happening around us. Thanks for sharing, these are in fact very nice photos. Anna :)
Hi Anna - Not sure what happened yet. But is certainly not a good sign.
ReplyDeleteI also visited Tioman in September 2010 - almost all soft corals were completely white. It's really very scaring and I can't believe, that the only reason for bleaching is the increased temperature, because some corals in the shallow water where the temperature is much higher were not bleached and almost all in the deeper water were bleached (same species)...
ReplyDeletetemperature is just one of the reason....I'm sure there are more contributing factors!
ReplyDeleteHi Samson,
ReplyDeleteI stumbled upon your blog while I was searching for coral reef status at Pulau Tioman. I find that your observation are really helpful in my research case study. I wonder if we could correspond further on this matter.
Hope to hear from you soon.
Thanks!