How Birds Can Help Coral Reefs Recover

BirdNote®
How Birds Can Help Coral Reefs Recover
Written by Conor Gearin

This is BirdNote.

    [Underwater ambi]
    [Hydrophone recording of coral]

Today kicks off Coral Reef Awareness Week. Coral reefs are hotspots of biodiversity, but they’re threatened by warming ocean temperatures, pollution, and overfishing. One thing to be aware of this week is how these underwater ecosystems are linked to birds in the skies above them.

    [Sooty Tern calls]

Heatwaves at sea can cause large amounts of coral to die off. Water that’s too warm causes corals to reject the beneficial algae that live within them and lose their color. The result is called coral bleaching. Although bleached corals don’t die right away, they’re at higher risk.

That’s where birds come in.

    [Sooty Tern fly-by]

Bleached corals need nutrients to recover and reproduce. And seabirds that nest on nearby land, like these Sooty Terns, are a great source of nutrients — well, their poop is, anyway.

    [Sooty Tern calls]
    [Sooty Tern call]

The seabirds eat small fish, and their guano often lands in the waters above the coral reef. Enriched with nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, coral reefs get a boost from the fertilized waters and can recover faster from bleaching compared to reefs without a thriving local bird population.

    [Sooty Tern calls]

The natural world is full of surprising connections that show us the importance of every link in the ecosystem. And birds are some of the most important connectors there are – from neighborhood parks to coral reefs.

    [Sooty Tern calls]

For BirdNote, I’m Ariana Remmel.

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Producer: Mark Bramhill
Managing Editor: Jazzi Johnson
Managing Producer: Conor Gearin
Content Director: Jonese Franklin
Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Sooty Tern ML559705071 recorded by PT Xiao, Sooty Tern ML134154 recorded by Gerrit Vyn, and Sooty Tern ML437068711 recorded by Skyler Bol.
Hydrophone recording of coral by Thalamus Lab on Freesound.org.
BirdNote’s theme was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
© 2024 BirdNote July 2024
Narrator: Ariana Remmel

ID# coral-01-2024-07-15    coral-01

Reference:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adj0390
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/coral_bleach.html