Ocean Sentry
(From nytimes.com) Butaritari, Kiribati – Corals are being covered and smothered to death by a bushy seaweed that is so tough even algae-grazing fish avoid it.
It settles in the reef’s crevices that fish once called home, driving them away. Dead coral stops supporting the ecosystem and, within a couple of decades, it will crumble into rubble, allowing big ocean waves to reach the beach during storms and destroy the flimsy thatched huts of the Micronesians.
The area affected, about four miles long and a mile wide, lies off the island’s main village, an underwater examination showed. It looked strikingly similar to Kaneohe Bay in the Hawaiian island of Oahu, where the seaweed also has spread out of control.
