Florida's Reefs: Stoney Coral Disease and How Fast It Killed the Entire Reef System since 2014 - Culprit is Not Climate Change

The Florida reef system has suffered an extremely rapid loss which amounts to total devastation. Coral Reefs are the Rain Forests of the Sea.


Why is this an extremely important litmus for us as humans and our survival?


Reef systems provide for all the creatures in the sea, but they also provide for us food-wise humans, show the amount of toxins we dump into the sea environment, and currently, they are rapidly becoming extinct globally.


I'm an amateur diver and biologist that has worked in this situation part-time for many years. I saw the reefs in Florida in the late 70s when I was a teenager and have watched the mind-blowing loss over the past 10 years.


Although some people say it's climate change and others say nothing it comes down to basically one major issue the overuse of nitrogen. Let me repeat this the key word is "Nitrogen" a fertilizer used to grow crops, but mostly from idiots using it to make their lawns/plants nice and green for show. The over-building and influx of people moving to Florida have devastated so many natural habitats is almost incomprehensible, yet our greed factor and the general lack of awareness on what we're doing to the earth that actually supports us is criminal. Climate change and currents are a small fraction of the issue, and reefs over thousands of years have been able to weather those, but the addition of too many people living in Florida and the willful ignorance of legislature there due to the overuse of nitrogen have poisoned the reefs into extinction levels.


Article and Map showing how fast and where it started.


[link to cdhc.noaa.gov (secure)]


"Stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD) is a highly lethal coral disease that was first reported off the coast of Florida in 2014 and has since spread rapidly throughout the Caribbean. The disease affects over 20 coral species and is now present on reefs in 18 countries and territories. The large geographic scale of this outbreak, high lethality of the disease lesion, and broad susceptibility among coral species make SCTLD unprecedented in its ecological impact, and likely make it the most deadly coral disease outbreak in history."

https://imgur.com/Zqb10kf

Last Edited by Matrix Doctor on 06/06/2023 10:16 AM