The Year the Reefs Bled White: Q3 2016’s Mass Bleaching and Jamaica’s Most Severe Coral Crisis in a Generation

Briefing

• The 2016 global mass bleaching event was the most extensive in recorded history, affecting 75% of monitored reefs worldwide.
• Jamaica’s north and south coast reef sites recorded significant bleaching through July and August 2016.
• Some previously resilient reef sites experienced bleaching mortality that researchers described as severe.
• Tourism operators received guest complaints about reef condition during the summer season.
• Marine scientists called for emergency no-anchor and reduced-pressure zones at bleaching-affected sites.

The summer of 2016 arrived with the ocean already warm. The El Niño event that had been building through 2015 had elevated sea surface temperatures across the tropical Pacific and Atlantic, and Caribbean sea temperatures through the summer of 2016 exceeded the bleaching thresholds at reef sites around the basin for a sustained period that the coral had no capacity to withstand. By August, NOAA’s coral bleaching watch was recording Alert Level 2 conditions — the highest level of thermal stress — across large sections of the Caribbean, including Jamaica’s north coast.

The monitoring teams that deployed to Jamaica’s reef sites through August and September 2016 documented what they found with photographs, video, and systematic transect surveys. The images — pale, bleached coral skeletons where living tissue had been weeks earlier, fields of white stretching across reef sections that had been coloured with life — were the most stark visual record of Jamaica’s reef decline since the Diadema die-off of the 1980s. The quantitative data was consistent with the visual impression: significant bleaching mortality at multiple monitored sites, in some cases affecting species and locations that had shown relative resilience in previous bleaching events.

Tourism and the Bleached Reef

The summer peak season of 2016 coincided exactly with the bleaching crisis. Snorkelling tours, dive operations, and glass-bottom boat excursions were operating over bleached reefs while the bleaching was occurring. Guest reviews and feedback collected by tourism operators in Q3 2016 included complaints about reef condition that previous summers had not generated in comparable volume. For some operators who had been running reef tours for years, the 2016 season was the first in which the product they were selling was visibly, materially different from what they had been selling in the same waters the previous year.

The Scientific Response

University of the West Indies marine scientists and their research partners responded to the 2016 bleaching event with calls for immediate management interventions at the most heavily affected sites: mandatory use of mooring buoys to eliminate anchor damage, restrictions on boat traffic volume over bleaching sites, temporary closures of the most sensitive areas to human activity, and enhanced monitoring to document the post-bleaching recovery trajectory. Several of these recommendations were adopted by individual resort operators with water sports operations; few were implemented systematically by the government or by the licensing authorities that could have made them mandatory. The bleaching event, like the management failures it exposed, was documented and discussed. The structural conditions that produced it remained unchanged.

Related: Property Market Analysis | Latest Jamaica News

Follow Jamaica Homes on Youtube @jamaicahomes and Instagram @jamaica_homes and on Facebook @jamaicahomesnews Send us a message or email us at onlinefeedback@jamaica-homes.com or editor@jamaica-homes.com