I was diving last sunday on a reef at the north coast of Dominican Republic and saw several brain corals with big holes on them , looks like it something or someone took a big and deep bite from the top of them.
I saw this happened only to brain corals . Those in the pics were between 60-70 ft. deep and the one photographed from the top was aprox 6 ft. across.
Last time i dove there was in 2002 and the hard corals there were healthy . That reef had a lot of big specimens of hard corals .
Anyone had seen something like this or have any idea about some disease or cause for this ?
Hope some coral expert can help with this
Thanks
Jose Alejandro
JA,
Hey buddy; these almost look like big chunks broken out or 'eaten' out, because the adjacent coral looks normal. Any thought on whether this could be parrotfish or something rather than disease?
That doesn't look like new damage to me, but even over 6 years there is no way parrotfish could do that surely !
I am guessing .. the space there could be where a sponge used to be .. i know that sponges had some diseases down and around that area .. and if the sponge died it would leave a weird gap like that.
The only other option running trough my head is man made damage .. and the other lump was laying around somewhere ? But as there is no eveidence of that I am thinking sponge.
Hallo Jeff !
I'm thinking that the holes were man made but being the missing part of the coral that big and in water that deep ( around 70 ft. ) i guess was difficult for someone to do that job also i don't think that piece of coral is worthy enough money for the effort... but in a poor country like ours you never know . Maybe they sell it as a ornamental or as scrub stones , etc ..... i don't know .
We are trying to do further investigations with some local marine biologists friends of mine and also with Reef Check , but hope that that is an isolated case and not a new trend or market ( in case that it was really man made ) . Anyway will be difficult to find out because seems that it happens some time ago ( you can see some algae growing on the surface of the hole ) .
Giles , thanks for your observation , that's an interesting point . Have you seen something similar at Cayman ?
Regards
JA
It looks like the living coral tissue died and that resulted in the underlying dead skeleton crumbling. Over several years without the living tissue depositing new skeleton, that amount of dead skeleton could easily erode. What killed the living polyps though? Competition from another organism like the sponge suggested or damage caused by animals/humans are probably both possible.
