AAAS annual meeting - sugar bleaching corals?

[jmkins]

Interesting article in tomorrows (02/24/06) issue of Science. I dont want to post the article here for the sake of publishing rights, but here is a brief summary. At a recent meeting of the AAAS it was announced that increased bacterial growth spurred by increased sugar concentrations may be responsible for coral bleaching and death. Experiments showed that 35% of corals exposed to sugars died vs. 7% exposed to nitrates or phosphates. The coral is killed by overload of symbiotic bacteria which eat sugar.

The entire article hasnt been published yet and this was just a brief summary of findings presented at the annual AAAS meeting. When it is published in its entirety I think we can get a better feel for the validity of the findings and what it may or may not mean for the hobby. Anyone have any thoughts on this, maybe anything that we should do away with or add if sugar levels move to the forefront of good husbandry?

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

Thanks for the heads up.

I'll check out the article when I get a chance. The result does not surprise me. I saw some corals brown up with, presumably, symbiotic zooxanthellae growth the one time I added sugar. Did they actually say symbiotic bacteria?