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. 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 th.