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Stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD) is a disease of corals that first appeared off the southeast coast of Florida in 2014. It originally was described as white plague disease . [ 1 ] By 2019 it had spread along the Florida Keys and had appeared elsewhere in the Caribbean Sea .
It includes all of the stony corals, most of which are colonial and reef-forming, as well as all sea anemones, and zoanthids, arranged within five extant orders. [2] The hexacorallia are distinguished from another class of Anthozoa, Octocorallia , in having six or fewer axes of symmetry in their body structure; the tentacles are simple and ...
The coral benefits from the nutrients produced photosynthetically by the alga which provides part of its needs for growth and calcification. [ 11 ] The coral also has a relationship with Diadema antillarum , the long-spined urchin, whose grazing helps to reduce the effects of shading, as well as the overgrowth of macroalgae .
Florida's coral reefs are currently undergoing an unprecedented stony coral tissue loss disease. The disease covers a large geographic range and affects many species of coral. [85] In January 2019, science divers confirmed that the outbreak of stony coral tissue that extends south and west of Key West.
This marine environment has been degraded in a variety of ways. Corals have been experiencing an increasing number of diseases. There is black-band disease which infects major coral reefs such as Montastraea annularis. [4] The most severe diseases are stony coral tissue loss disease, the white-band and white plague disease. [4]
tissue loss resulting from disease in a brain coral species. There are some visible signs that a coral has a disease. This includes, but is not limited to, tissue loss, abnormal coloration, and mistakes in skeleton structure. [5] These symptoms show that corals have diseases, but they can also be caused by environmental factors.
Dichocoenia stokesi is a massive colonial coral that forms rounded humps up to 40 centimetres (16 in) in diameter or thick plates. It is recognisable by the fact that many of the corallites, the stony cups from which the coral polyps protrude, can be oval, or elongated.
Stony corals are members of the class Anthozoa and like other members of the group, do not have a medusa stage in their life cycle. The individual animals are known as polyps and have a cylindrical body crowned by an oral disc surrounded by a ring of tentacles. The base of the polyp secretes the stony material from which the coral skeleton is ...