Coral marches to the poles

Nicola Jones - 

Corals around Japan are fleeing northwards, according to a new study. One type has been spotted 'sprinting' at 14 kilometres a year, thanks to a lift from ocean currents.

That means ocean ecosystems could shift rapidly in the face of climate-change impacts such as warming seas, the authors say.

The study, due to be published in Geophysical Research Letters1, is the first documentation of coral mass migration, but matches up with several other observations.

As early as 2004 in Florida, for instance, staghorn and elkhorn corals were observed farther north than their usual ranges2, and in Australia, reef-dwelling fish have been found farther south than before.

Hiroya Yamano of the Center for Global Environmental Research in Tsukuba, Japan, and his colleagues checked out records of corals seen in Japanese waters since the 1930s. Here, sea surface temperatures in winter have increased by 0.7–2.4 °C over the past 100 years.

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