Paris – Coral reefs that survive rapid bleaching fuelled by global warming remain deeply damaged, with little prospect of full recovery, researchers said. Sixteen years after the 1998 El Niño ravaged coral in the Indian Ocean’s Seychelles archipelago, no reefs had recovered their original growth rates and barely a third were expanding at all, they reported in a study, the first to track coral health over a two-decade period. A dozen of 21 reefs tracked from 1994 were still struggling in 2014 against leafy algae, sea urchins and parrot fish to restore their original balance of shallow-water flora and fauna.

Agence France-Presse. (2017, January 26). Climate-ravaged corals recover poorly-study. Manila Bulletin, p. B8.