Phillip Osborn

Hi Marty! I apologize for the late response. Unfortunately, these are not my pictures. I pulled them from the internet because they provide clear differences between different coral morphologies. You raise a very interesting point regarding the correlation between ocean levels and coral bleaching. Corals' current growth rate hovers around the rate that sea levels are rising, so it is possible that rising ocean levels have a negligible impact on the amount of light that a coral receives. However, disease due to rising ocean temperatures, in addition to overfishing and ocean acidification, could slow corals' growth rate so that they cannot grow at the same rate that oceans are rising. In addition, shore erosion and suspension of ocean sediments are likely to increase with increasing sea levels, decreasing the amount of available light to the corals. It is possible that this aids corals that may be bleaching due to light stress, but too much turbidity may smother reefs and accelerate the rate of reef mortality.