#warmingoceans — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #warmingoceans, aggregated by home.social.
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"Corals Spin Tiny Vortices to Get Oxygen, but Not if It’s Too Hot
At first glance, corals present as little more than colorful rocks — piles of lobes, stalagmites, and branches poking out from the seafloor.
They are anything but. Corals are complex creatures that form enduring colonies, and just like other animals they need oxygen to live. Across the living surface of coral, a frantic dance of survival takes place, invisible to our eyes and unknown to science before 2014. The tiny dancers are hairlike cilia, and new research into these microscopic structures is revealing just how active corals are in determining their own fate.
Corals aren’t fortunate enough to have a consistent supply of oxygen, and they can’t change location to seek it out. During the day, the tiny polyps that make up a coral colony get plenty of oxygen from the symbiotic algae that photosynthesize within their tissues. But at night that process stops, and a coral polyp’s only source of oxygen is the water around it. Then it’s do or die for the cilia. Using mechanisms scientists are still trying to understand, the cilia wave around to generate fast-moving vortices of water that circulate oxygen to the coral’s outer tissues, in addition to helping keep the colonies free of sediment.
A study published in Science (opens a new tab) in May 2026 provides new insight into how organisms with no brain or musculoskeletal system can generate and regulate this process — and what happens when the water around them warms up. Warmer water naturally carries less oxygen, which prompts corals to move their cilia faster and faster, as if gasping for breath. Above a certain temperature, the system starts to work against itself; the furious beating of cilia uses up any oxygen the coral’s tissues can absorb, and then the polyps can suffocate in the less oxygenated water. Biophysicists, marine biologists, mathematicians, and modelers are now collaborating to better understand the physiological and hydrodynamic forces at work, and how they correlate with bleaching patterns, coral disease, and mass die-offs."
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😢 A #MarineHeatWave caused seabird deaths off California. El Nino could worsen the die-off
‘We don’t know how bad this is going to get’
By JULIE WATSON
Updated 1:25 PM EDT, July 1, 2026SAN DIEGO (AP) — "Within minutes of walking on a #SanDiego beach, marine ornithologist Tammy Russell found the feathered carcasses — one after another.
Some were mixed in with washed up kelp. Others were under rocks."Each month, scientists and volunteers conduct surveys of dead #seabirds and find what Russell describes as a grim assessment of the impact of a massive marine HeatWave that has lingered for months off parts of the California coast.
"The surveys that have been carried out by various organizations for decades help build a baseline of information on beached sea life to detect threats and their impact.
"Many seabirds, including California #BrownPelicans, #loons and #grebes, starved to death in recent months as record-setting ocean temperatures decreased the band of cold, nutrient-rich surface water where #krill, #anchovies and #sardines thrive near the shore, said Russell, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
"We’ve been seeing #cormorants walk to shore and then just die within the hour. I mean one time it happened within 15 minutes, and I’ve never seen that before,” Russell said. 'That has been heartbreaking for me and we’re seeing this happening across the whole coast.'
"Scientists fear the die-off could worsen with the recently formed El Nino, the natural warming of parts of the central Pacific that alters weather worldwide and spikes global temperatures."
Archived version:
https://archive.ph/jsx3D#ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #PacificOcean #ElNino #WarmingOceans #OceanDieOff #Seabirds