Jörg Wiedenmann
Professor Jörg Wiedenmann
University of Southampton
Head Marine Biology and Ecology Research Group
Head Coral Reef Laboratory.
Twitter: @theCoralReefLab
Location UK
Activity
-
Well done, Caroline! I fully agree that we need to protect the human (especially children!) from the harmful effects of sunlight as well as the environment. A good way are full body suits (eg. stinger suits) - they are light and very effective in blocking sun and they don't release chemicals!
-
Great suggestions, Mic!
-
Good to hear about your efforts, George! While it is good to do organised efforts, we should thrive to make it a general habit: If everybody picks up some pieces of litter when walking somewhere - on the beach or elsewhere - we can make big steps forward towards a cleaner environment.
-
Warm water corals can be found mostly between the tropics of cancer and capricorn around the equator. Many of them rely on the symbiosis with photosynthetic dinoflagellete. This symbiosis is most beneficial in nutrient poor, clear, warm waters. Also, they need to stay close to the surface for the symbionts to get enough light. This is why they are often...
-
Hi there, good observation! Please see also my reply to Angela T.!
-
"Cold water" corals can also be found in some warmer regions - however, they live often in depths in which the water is much colder than at the surface!
-
Hi Lee, the coral host has definitively some control over the symbionts. The symbionts are living inside the host cell, surrounded by cell membranes that act as barriers and enable the coral to control fluxes of compounds e.g. nutrients that are required by the symbionts to grow. Also, the corals seem to "sense" the quality of the photosynthetic products that...
-
Hi Andy, try pasting this web address in your browser:
https://theconversation.com/revealed-why-some-corals-are-more-colourful-than-others-36866 -
Many bioactive compounds are produced outside of the organism they were initially discovered in, using biotechnology and chemical engineering. We extract the genetic information encoding fluorescent proteins from a small piece of tissue - the above mentioned brain coral is still alive!
-
Some of them may, but it is unlikely all of them will. The symbiotic partnership is itself dependent on the environmental conditions and also the interaction with other species. If dramatic changes happen, those may also affect the symbiotic partner or the specific relationship with the host. Our research showed that corals in the most extreme coral reef...
-
@LindaB Many thanks, Linda! I am glad you enjoyed the course despite some of the "inconvenient truth" elements in it! Best wishes, Joerg
-
@LindaB Thank you for participating in the discussions! We will be preparing a report on the learner experience of this part of the MOOC and we would like to include some learner comments in an anonymised form (no identifying information will be included). Please let us know if you would agree to your comment being included as an anonymous quote in this...
-
Great directions, Marzena!
-
I think this is a quite sensible approach to safe water in the family home.
-
Agree, it is very tricky to strike a balance, but in my view making people custodians of the environment is a promising way forward as people will certainly do more to protect e.g. reefs if their businesses depend on their health or do more against climate change if it affects a habitat that they truly cherish. Of course, air transport is an issue, but again...
-
@JaneAnnesley Many thanks, Jane! I am glad you enjoyed the course materials!
-
You are correct, corals go back a long way. However, there were mostly different species living for instance in Jurassic reefs. Reef formation has ceased to exist on several occassions or shifted geographically over geological timescales.
If we look at the most extreme coral habitats today, we find only about 5-10% of the species compared to the most diverse... -
@JaneAnnesley
Thank you for participating in the discussions! We will be preparing a report on the learner experience of this part of the MOOC and we would like to include some learner comments in an anonymised form (no identifying information will be included). Please let us know if you would agree to your comment being included as an anonymous quote in... -
@LornaBointon Many thanks, Lorna! I hope you enjoyed the course! All the best, Joerg
-
@MargaretHunter Many thanks, Margaret! I hope you enjoyed the course! Please come back in the future - we will continue to update the material. Best wishes, Joerg
-
@DavidBrown. Many thanks, David! In particular for your time including further information! I am glad you enjoyed the course! Please come back in the future - we will continue to update the material. Best wishes, Joerg
-
@JohnCope Many thanks, John! I hope you enjoyed the course! Please come back in the future - we will continue to update the material. Best wishes, Joerg
-
@JanetBrinsmead Thanks a lot and yes, no identifying info will be included! I hope you enjoyed the coral chapters!
-
@LornaBointon Thank you for participating in the discussions! We will be preparing a report on the learner experience of this part of the MOOC and we would like to include some learner comments in an anonymised form (no identifying information will be included). Please let us know if you would agree to your comment being included as an anonymous quote in this...
-
@MargaretHunter Thank you for participating in the discussions! We will be preparing a report on the learner experience of this part of the MOOC and we would like to include some learner comments in an anonymised form (no identifying information will be included). Please let us know if you would agree to your comment being included as an anonymous quote in...
-
@KeithPottTurner Thank you for participating in the discussions! We will be preparing a report on the learner experience of this part of the MOOC and we would like to include some learner comments in an anonymised form (no identifying information will be included). Please let us know if you would agree to your comment being included as an anonymous quote in this...
-
@JanetBrinsmead Thank you for participating in the discussions! We will be preparing a report on the learner experience of this part of the MOOC and we would like to include some learner comments in an anonymised form (no identifying information will be included). Please let us know if you would agree to your comment being included as an anonymous quote in...
-
@JohnCope Thank you for participating in the discussions! We will be preparing a report on the learner experience of this part of the MOOC and we would like to include some learner comments in an anonymised form (no identifying information will be included). Please let us know if you would agree to your comment being included as an anonymous quote in this...
-
@DavidBrown Thank you for participating in the discussions! We will be preparing a report on the learner experience of this part of the MOOC and we would like to include some learner comments in an anonymised form (no identifying information will be included). Please let us know if you would agree to your comment being included as an anonymous quote in this...
-
@LeeScott Thank you for participating in the discussions! We will be preparing a report on the learner experience of this part of the MOOC and we would like to include some learner comments in an anonymised form (no identifying information will be included). Please let us know if you would agree to your comment being included as an anonymous quote in this...
-
@LeeScott Thank you for participating in the discussions!
We will be preparing a report on the learner experience of this part of the MOOC and we would like to include some learner comments in an anonymised form (no identifying information will be included). Please let us know if you would agree to your comment being included as an anonymous quote in this... -
@LindaB Thank you for participating in the discussions!
We will be preparing a report on the learner experience of this part of the MOOC and we would like to include some learner comments in an anonymised form (no identifying information will be included). Please let us know if you would agree to your comment being included as an anonymous quote in this... -
Jörg Wiedenmann made a comment
It is good to read your thoughts! We would be interested to hear from you if the insights in our research has motivated you to engage more with the conservation of coral reefs or the environment in general and how you plan to do that!
-
This research is important to understand how a reef system might respond to restoration efforts and what potential opportunities are. However, at present, one should not be distracted from trying to remove the major causes of reef decline, climate change and a variety of local stressors including habitat destruction, nutrient enrichment and overfishing. One...
-
Let's hope we can protect reefs for a sustainable long-term use!
-
Indeed, the heatwaves of the recent year caused severe bleaching of the GBR, but also other drivers, for instance, outbreaks of crown-of-thorn starfish contribute to the decline. The water quality is another debated suspect...
-
Some of our work shows also the importance of the nutrient environment on heat stress tolerance of symbiotic corals:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877343513001917 -
Yes, corals have a great recovery potential and if the water conditions and local drivers are favourable, they can bounce back to within 10 years even after severe bleaching events. The problem is that severe bleaching events become more and more frequent (e.g. back-to-back bleaching years hitting the great barrier reef), preventing full recovery. As you say,...
-
Jörg Wiedenmann made a comment
I am trying to reduce my meat consumption. Hopefully getting down to once per week...
-
Yes, increasing the surface on which the sessile corals can attach themselves may sometimes increase their numbers. However, settlement area alone is unfortunately not sufficient -if the water quality or temperature do not favour coral growth, they will not be able to benefit from new habitats.
-
If you are interested in the relationships within this group, please have a look at the "Cnidaria" branch in the "Tree of Life":
http://tolweb.org/Cnidaria -
Yes, sometimes coral reefs get more colourful at the onset of bleaching. This may be due to the fact the algal symbionts are lost and the pigments of the coral host become more visible or their "glow" (fluorescence) is better stimulated by the incoming sunlight in the symbiont-depleted tissue. However, at the moment there is no fully conclusive scientific...
-
Yes, fully agree! While it is important to have some exclusion zones and no take areas, in my opinion a sustainable co-existence of human societies and nature is key.
-
If properly tested and certified, sunscreens should be safe for the environment and humans. A discussion on this is in "The Guardian"
today. In this piece, I also advocate that we need to be environmentally aware and should operate on the cautious side if comes to pollution of coral reefs on the local scale. However, we need to be absolutely clear that the... -
Here's a great video on a cone snail hunting down a fish:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=94&v=JjHMGSI_h0Q
...and some more info on the use of the cone snail toxins as painkillers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziconotide -
These are the links to our papers on this topic if you want get into a bit deeper. They are open access and can be downloaded for free!
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/mec.13041
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2018.00011/full -
Thanks for flagging! A blessing of the autocorrection, I assume...
-
It's amazing, isn't it? I am still blown away when I see it in real - despite 23 years of fluorescence research....
-
Yes, good explanation. Antarctica is a real continent with rocky margins, that provide the preferred substrate for corals to attach themselves (...something all corals need, both in cold and warm water. This can be a rock, a shell, a boulder or a shipwreck). Also, one needs to bear in mind that not all parts of the oceans are equally well studied. It might be...
-
Agree! It seems not to be enough these days that nature is fascinating and beautiful...
-
Glad you like our work! I would recommend trying to avoid harmful sunscreens when swimming among corals, but we need to bear in mind that the UV components of sunlight are also very damaging for humans, especially for kids! Therefore, people should never go without protection, especially under the tropical sun, but there are alternatives (other formulations,...
-
I was always puzzled about this phenomenon that the pigments emit light in a spectral range where the probability to be absorbed by the symbiont chlorophyll is low. Took a while to figure out what is going on... (and be reminded yet another time how "clever" nature is"...)
-
Good observations! We find a number of symbiotic sea anemones in the shallows of temperate waters- even up to the coast of Scotland (just collected a few to study the symbiotic partner...). In contrast, the real cold water corals don't have photosynthetic symbionts and can therefore also found in lightless habitats in the deep sea!
-
Indeed, corals can get sometimes more colourful during bleaching. However, some of them are very colourful when they are healthy or show a healthy response to deal with stress. Here we explain why this is the case:
https://theconversation.com/revealed-why-some-corals-are-more-colourful-than-others-36866 -
I agree - the symbiosis between the coral animal and algal symbiont is one of the most fascinating aspects of our work. I am always surprise how well they work together! We as human societies can probably learn a lot from them!
