coral bleaching

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

the stress response of reef-building corals to elevated seawater temperatures, ocean acidification, or other environmental disturbances in which corals expel the photosynthetic zooxanthellae algae living symbiotically within their tissues, causing the corals to turn white and lose the primary source of nutrients that supports their growth and reproduction; bleaching does not immediately kill corals but leaves them severely weakened, vulnerable to disease, and unable to calcify normally, and if stressful conditions persist for more than a few weeks the coral typically dies; mass bleaching events driven by marine heat waves associated with climate change have devastated the Great Barrier Reef, the Caribbean coral systems, and reefs across the Indo-Pacific, threatening the biodiversity of ecosystems that support approximately twenty-five percent of all marine species