Most of the time on the news we see stories about entire coral reefs bleaching and dying and the cause of the coral decline is blamed on climate change.
Nature is very resilient and sometimes things happen that just go to show how wildlife can come back if the stresses are removed from the environment that caused the wildlife to die off in the first place.
Kauai coral has a story all of its own because it died off before we had a substantial rise in sea temperatures, and then it grew back during the time when other coral reefs were dying due to climate change.
I started shooting videos of Kauai corals back in 2006 and wrote a few articles at the time saying how healthy the coral reefs were along the North Shore. I have done over 1,000 scuba dives along the North Shore since 2006 and I have over 70 dive sites.
I was diving so often to make a movie about Kauai marine life to be shown in our local schools. Then in 2012, I started to see an odd disease showing up on our rice corals and I sent pictures of it to Dr. Greta Aeby at the University of Hawaii. She responded right away and said to make sure and let her know if it gets worse.
By 2013, over half of our North Shore corals were diseased and I alerted UH, the USGS, NOAA and Scripps Institute. Within six months, all of the agencies had come to Kauai upon my request to study this massive coral disease outbreak.
We did DNA tests on the infected corals and confirmed it was an outbreak of the infectious cyanobacterial disease. By 2014, the USGS Infectious Disease Department declared the North Shore an epidemic of an infectious disease, which brought in a lot of news coverage, including the front cover of the Los Angeles Times
By 2015, over 80 percent of our corals had died and not one agency had figured out what was causing the disease outbreak. I started doing some research and found out that the U.S. military during the 2014 RIMPAC event was using a lot of sonar and electromagnetic energy near shore from Nualolo to Pila’a and they started this training using submarines in 2012.
This was the exact time that the disease started. Does sonar and electromagnetic energy used underwater harm corals? Turns out that no one had ever even studied the subject. I got a meeting with the Navy at PMRF and showed them the timeline of the reef dying and they decided to move their operations 50 miles offshore. Since then the corals have grown back.
There is a huge benefit that came from our corals dying from 2012 to 2015 and that is the amazing fact at how fast the corals have grown back since 2016. We all thought that corals can only grow an inch a year, but we have thousands of corals on video that have grown over 3 feet in eight years.
This new information is just stunning and now gives us hope that we can have our coral reefs restored in much less time than we thought a few years ago. We now know that our corals can grow quickly even in sea water temperatures that have increased by several degrees.
Did the U.S. Navy cause the North Shore corals to die? We really don’t know, but currently over along Oahu’s North Shore the corals have died and the Navy is doing submarine training right offshore. The rebirth of Kauai corals is just amazing and seems to be unique to our beautiful island, so lets enjoy it while we can.
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Terry Lilley is a marine biologist living in Hanalei Kaua‘i and co-founder of Reef Guardians Hawai‘i, a nonprofit on a mission to provide education and resources to protect the coral reef. To donate to Reef Guardians Hawai‘i go to www.reefguardianshawaii.org.
