As well, we thank our loyal readers for bringing up cool and informative stories to our attention. (Such as this one, thank you Dennis).

A National Geographic article suggests that a study has been completed on how sunscreen can trigger a virus that can ultimately kill a coral. Apparently, the chemicals in your sunscreen can cause a virus to replicate at a rapid level, and thus quickly killing the coral. Please check your sunscreen bottles, and be mindful of these ingredients:

Several brands of popular sunscreens were tested and all had four ingredients in common: paraben, cinnamate, benzophenone, and a camphor derivative.

As well, this article explained that in terms of the amount of sunscreen being diluted into the oceans:

The researchers estimate that 4,000 to 6,000 metric tons of sunscreen wash off swimmers annually in oceans worldwide, and that up to 10 percent of coral reefs are threatened by sunscreen-induced bleaching.

For the rest of the article, please click on here.

What can you do? Look for biodegradable sunscreenat your local health food store. Don’t cheap out on the health of our oceans and corals. You can make a simple change, and help not spead this virus.

The researchers conducted surveys of ten sites inside and outside marine reserves of the Bahamas over 2.5 years. These reefs have been severely damaged by bleaching and then by hurricane Frances in the summer of 2004. At the beginning of the study, the reefs had an average of 7% coral cover. By the end of the project, coral cover in marine protected areas had increased by an average of 19%, while reefs in non-reserve sites showed no recovery.

More on this can be read here.

The Environment news Service reported on Jan 14th that a German coral importer out of Portland, Oregon was sentenced to serve three years on probation and pay a criminal penalty of over $35,000 for smuggling more than 40 tons of coral. Did you hear that smugglers, the good guys win again.

I just wished that they can incorporate a 1 year prison sentence into the verdict. It would serve him good, and detract others.

For more on the story, follow the link here.

…his discovery that sponges have one of the fastest cell division rates ever measured, and instead of growing they discard the cells. Essentially, the sponges recycle carbon that would otherwise be lost to the reef.

The sponge was able to take up the colossal amounts of organic carbon that De Goeij had measured, but where was the carbon going: the sponges weren’t growing. De Goeij tested to see if the cells were dying and being lost, but he couldn’t find any evidence of cell death.

This article focused on Jasper De Goeij’s, a former student of Marine biologist Fleur Van Duyl from the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, which lab tests showed how quickly sponges replicated their cells, and their ability to consume organic carbon. For the rest of the article, you can visit it here.

ReefCentral Gone For Good? and Was ReefCentral hacked? will get you up to speed.

Here’s the money shot:

First, I would like to apologize to all of our members, sponsors and even our staff. We had a breach in our security systems, allowing easy access [by a hacker] to our very important files and database. Most of these items were either corrupted or completely deleted. We made the mistake of placing our back ups on the same server as which we operated the site on (yes, we know, a HUGE mistake).

As for our sponsors, as per our agreement [very similar to user agreement] in the event that something like this happens, unfortunately this is a issue and loss we must share. All sponsors who have paid up until down time will not be refunded. If you have yet to send your sponsorship dues, please do not, as once it is sent we cannot refund it. If you are setup on a subscription basis, please cancel subscriptions as soon as possible.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me and I will be more than happy to assist you as best as possible.

Once again, I would like to apologize for everything to everyone. Like BeerGuy has already stated, website will be updated with more information regarding the situation that has shut us down.

-mhurley

There’s a lot of discussion on Twitter and I think that NanoReefBlog sums it up best:

Yeah, I agree, the amount of valuable info lost to the hobby is the worst part of the RC disaster.

Some of the information is available via Google cache.  It’s easy to do a search by site, then hit the cached link.

So, if you want to search for something like “yellow tang ich”, type “site:reefcentral.com yellow tang ich” into Google, then hit the cached link and you’ll get something like this.

It’s not perfect and will likely be missing most of the pictures, but it’s something.  All that information isn’t gone, it’s resting.  Get it while it lasts, I’m not sure how long Google will keep that data cached.

Also, as glassboxdesign pointed out, there’s also the wayback machine, but it only has information up to 2007.

I’m going to go double check the database backup procedure for frag’d it.

Update

The whole thing is turning  out to be one big hoax?  That’s a big WTF.

To the folks spreading rumors and making up quotes, it’s pretty sad when you have to resort to lying to try and get members.

The truth is that during an upgrade to mySQL we encountered an error that needed to be corrected. Unlike most sites, our database is very large and routine checks can take quite a long time to run. That’s one of the reasons why we’re one of the few sites that runs a full nightly backup. We’ll be back this morning with virtually zero data loss. Sorry to disappoint the folks forging the emails.

The phrase ‘virtually zero data loss’ is interesting.

Update x2

Here is what the BeerGuy said on RC in regards to this event:

Regardless of what rumor you’ve heard, we’re still here. We still have our database and we weren’t hacked.

If you’ve been paying attention to some of the talk about the board, we’ve been planning an upgrade for some time. On our archive site, the work is already complete and that has been our test site.

Yesterday, as a preliminary step to the upgrade, we upgraded our database software. The update fleshed out some table inconsistencies that the previous software version overlooked. Once those issues were resolved we had to update some SQL code because of a change in the way that some statements were being parsed by the new version.

Right now Searching has been disabled because that table is very large and it impeded checks that needed to be run. It’ll be returned to service as soon as things stabilize.

Thanks

Not a cool practical joke!

“There is no way out, no loopholes. The Great Barrier Reef will be over within 20 years or so.”

They would be the world’s first global ecosystem to collapse. I have the backing of every coral reef scientist, every research organization. I’ve spoken to them all. This is critical. This is reality.”

Coming from a person who is an expert in his field, this is very grim news.  I truly hope that our coral reefs show the resiliency which we currently see in our enclosed systems. I had personally witnessed corals withstand temperatures of 88′ or more, for longer periods of time. Corals are tough. I hope Charles is wrong.

Please look around. Poke here and there. Uncover every link, as we have aplenty. There will be room for features, polls, comments, and fun. If you haven’t subscribed now, or RSS’d us, now is your chance. You do not want to be the guy who didn’t know the scoop on why flatworms are bad for your reef. Or why we use T5 bulbs instead of NO. Be the guy or gal to know the facts.

Lastly, do not forget that we have a bank account reserved for information. We will drain our account daily to fill you with reefy goodness! So see you tomorrow? Same addy, same reef channel!

So what do you think? Let us know!

A company out of NJ named Reefmakers, is set to establish the second largest international reef off of the Florida Keys. The WWII ship, which was used to track missiles and aircraft, is going to be the new home for many fish species and hopefully corals. The 8.6 million dollar project, is years in the making, and will be paid by dividends from the new found diving and snorkeling business.

The Yahoo! article also said:

Preparation for sinking has taken months of inspections and cleanup to remove contaminants. Workers hauled off more than a million feet of wire, 1,500 vent gaskets, dozens of watertight steel doors, 81 bags of asbestos, 193 tons of potentially cancer-causing substances, 46 tons of garbage that could come loose and float to the surface, 300 pounds of materials containing mercury and 185 55-gallon drums of paint chips.

I hope that the people at Coral Restoration Foundation in the Keys, start to repopulate the reef using this new wreckage. Imagine the endangered staghorns A. cervicornis creating a forest around the ship, teaming with life. I will attempt to contact the team at CRF to see if they have any initiatives to use the wreckage as a reef re-population point. Stay tuned.

Yesterday, the WWF proclaimed that the world’s richest reef sanctuary tabbed the Coral Triangle, encompassing East Timor, Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines and the Solomon Islands, could be wiped out by the end of this century (yes, 91 years to go) . Climate change, ocean acidification, and human destruction are all major causes for concern. This Yahoo! article also added that:

Collapse of the reefs would send food production in the region plummeting by 80 percent and imperil the livelihoods of over 100 million people.

With too little action on climate change, “you get a world in which you have perhaps tens of millions of people homeless by the inundation of coastlines through rapid sea level rises,” report lead author Ove Hoegh-Guldberg said.

What I would be more interested in is how we are going to remove the excess CO2 gasses that are acidifying our oceans. Apparently the ocean doesn’t have enough capacity to neutralize the carbon dioxide gasses that are making the water acidic. Even 0.1 pH changes in ocean’s range can drastically have an impact on the underwater life. I know through experience that corals are a lot more resilient to temperature change, rather than pH change.

Here is a thread that sparked my interest, as it has a lot of scientific discussion on ocean acidification. What do you guys think is the main problem that plagues our oceans? Do you tink there is anything that we can do?

For more on this, read here!