This post was originally published on this site.
THE CARIBBEAN’S living reef architecture is disappearing within our lifetime, threatening the future of Caribbean fisheries, beaches and marine tourism. Across the Caribbean, prolonged heat stress bleaches and then kills corals at an unprecedented scale, with the back-to-back marine heatwaves of 2023 and 2024 being the worst our reefs have ever endured. The two species that built our shallow reefs for millennia – staghorn and elkhorn coral – were hit hardest, and very few survive today.