Prochlorococcus, a genus of bacteria that’s key to oxygen production in the ocean, tends to disappear when faced with marine pollution. It lives throughout the sunlit layer of tropical oceans and, while it doesn’t necessarily play a key role in coral biology, its abundance is a sign of a healthy coral reef ecosystem. A growing […]
  • An increasingly common way to keep tabs on coral reef health is by measuring microorganisms in the local seawater.
  • Microbial-based coral reef monitoring is excellent at detecting nutrient and health changes on a reef and can draw attention to environmental disturbances; microbes are particularly good at sending such signals because they react quickly to pollution.
  • This type of monitoring can help provide a fuller, faster and lower-cost picture of reef health than visual surveys alone, the most common current method.
  • Two marine scientists explain the “why” and the “how” of microbial-based reef monitoring in a recent paper.

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