Surprising Survivors in Troubled Oceans

 Marine biologist Prof. Yehuda Benayahu talks about his research subjects as if they were beloved pets. “My soft corals,” he calls them. Benayahu is one of the world’s few experts in these colorful underwater cousins of stony corals. He has spent countless hours diving into seas and oceans to collect the exquisite specimens.

Now Benayahu is cracking the mystery of why soft corals suffer no harm from the ominous ocean acidity—due to carbon-dioxide emissions, fossil-fuel burning and other pollution—threatening coral reefs, stony corals and other marine creatures such as mussels, snails and oysters.

“Three years ago, a colleague from Venezuela asked if he could send me some images and samples of soft coral that appeared suddenly in Caribbean reefs,” Benayahu tells ISRAEL21c from his lab at Tel Aviv University.

“The conclusion is that these are aliens introduced to Venezuelan reefs. They spread fast, overgrowing other reef organisms and killing them. And they have no local natural predators because they’re not indigenous.”

Other researchers have noted in recent years that soft corals seem to be edging out stony corals. This is worrisome because it is stony corals that provide the massive calcium-carbonate building blocks of coral reefs, which in turn are critical to the ecosystem as wave-breaks and as habitats for thousands of species of underwater creatures.

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