Coral reefs are highly dynamic ecosystems. They all have a degree of resiliency, which enables them to bounce back after being hit by storms, starfish plagues or disease. They go through phases of loss and growth. This is natural. In an article published in one of the world's leading academic journals, Science, authors Mark Spalding, Senior Marine Scientist for The Nature Conservancy and Barbara Brown, Newcastle University, look at the broad issues surrounding the current situation of coral reefs and together highlight points of hope. This paper describes how many corals are showing some degree of adaptive capacity to both warming and to acidification, more than some scientists were expecting. Spalding notes that such adaptive capacity, alongside the natural resilience of reefs can enable them to recover even from quite severe perturbations. For example, most reefs in the British Indian Ocean Territory and the Seychelles, which lost virtually all their coral in 1998 due to warm-water induced coral "bleaching", showed good recovery within a decade.
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