Reef study puts an ODU professor in the limelight

NORFOLK

Expect to see and hear Kent E. Carpenter a lot the next few days.

The biology professor at Old Dominion University was scheduled to be on NBC's "Nightly News" on Thursday and on National Public Radio's "Science Friday" this afternoon.

He also has been interviewed for pieces by the BBC, the British newspapers The Guardian and The Independent, National Geographic, Scientific American and the journal Science.

Why all the fuss?

Carpenter is the lead author of the first global study of coral reefs and the hard, often beautiful plantlike creatures that compose them.

The results, published Thursday in Science, are dramatic: One-third of all reef-building corals are threatened with extinction, mostly because of environmental degradation and climate change.

Carpenter explained how the culprits are causing havoc.

Higher water temperatures from climate change are allowing more diseases and algae to thrive in the ocean s, he said. Too much algae and disease stress or kill the corals, which then cannot build their reefs.

The once-colorful reefs turn white, a process called bleaching, which indicates a sick or dying system. Add increasing amounts of mud and sediment sliding onto reefs from coastal development projects, such as hotels and roads, and a perfect storm of environmental ailments has been created, Carpenter said.

"When corals die off, so do the other plants and animals that depend on coral reefs for food and shelter," the Norfolk-based scientist said, "and this can lead to the collapse of entire ecosystems."

Carpenter and colleagues in the United States and 10 other countries spent nearly two years on the research project, compiling data on more than 700 coral species and visiting reef sites around the world.

The most vulnerable corals, according to the study, were found in the Caribbean Sea. There, fishing pressures, development, pollution and rising water temperatures are threatening many coral species.

The most surprising results - and the ones most alarming to Carpenter - were chronicled in the "coral triangle" between Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.

In this rich Pacific ecosystem, researchers documented a high percentage of corals as stressed and suffering - a condition few of the scientists expected to see.

"If trends continue there, you can expect to see a big hit on the reefs in the triangle," Carpenter said. "It could be devastating."

On Thursday, Carpenter was attending an international conference on coral reefs in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Reached by phone, he chuckled at the recent media buzz over the study.

"It's kind of crazy," Carpenter said. "I've been hanging out in the media room at the conference when I'd really like to be inside, listening to all the terrific papers being presented here."

Carpenter is not new to the big stage.

In 2006, the president of the Philippines, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, invited him to the capital and gave a speech applauding his team's research concluding that the most biodiverse waterway on Earth was a stretch of ocean off one of the islands there.

Arroyo then surprised the assembled scientists by declaring the Verde Island Passage as the country's first marine sanctuary. Carpenter called the event the proudest of his career.

With coral reefs, Carpenter said other studies have long detailed how such ecological structures are threatened throughout the world, including one released earlier this week by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that said about half of all reefs in the United States are in fair or poor shape.

His research differed, however, in that it looked closely at the individual corals that make up reefs, and found that the creatures themselves were at risk of disappearing.

"We pinpointed a rate of decline in the species," he said from Florida. "If they go extinct, so goes the whole ecosystem."

Scott Harper, (757) 446-22340, scott.harper@pilotonline.com