A stark message in deathly white coral

SOMETHING TERRIBLE happened last summer beneath the startlingly blue Caribbean seas off the island of Tobago, where we have just been staying. The Buccoo coral reef, home to one of the richest marine ecologies in the world, turned a brilliant white. “It looked as if it had been bleached,” said my brother-in-law, a marine biologist. “It was a strangely beautiful sight, but in fact it was sick, so sick that we wondered whether it could recover.”

We inspected it from our glass-bottomed boat, and watched its dazzling display of exotic fish, dipping down through waving green tendrils, shivering over the strange, sponge-like surface of the coral. To our untutored eyes the reef looked pure and unspoilt. It has recovered, but the bleaching has weakened it. Like a human body infected by disease, it is in a fragile state, vulnerable to the stress of pollution and the shock of the next big hurricane.

Times Online