500words

 I wrote my first piece on the Great Barrier Reef for a project in primary school.  I mostly remember my drawings of weird, vibrant coral and colourful fish.  At that time I thought that coral reefs were beautiful and healthy and home to wonderful creatures but actually they were already widely exploited for tourism and fishing and no doubt harmful chemicals and sediment were insidiously doing their untold damage. Reefs around the world are dying rapidly (approximately 50% in the past 30 years) due to increasing water temperature, changing sea levels and human activity including the development of resorts in the vicinity of these fragile ecosystems. The loss of coral reefs results in the potential loss of one of the planet’s most diverse ecosystems. There has been a move to construct artificial reefs to provide a habitat for organisms that are at risk of extinction through the destruction of natural coral reefs.   Radiocarbon studies have dated living coral colon...

Disclaimer: these facts may not blow your mind, but they really did blow mine. - Firstly, coral is an animal. I definitely thought it was a plant. In fact, coral belongs to a group of animals called cnidarians. The name comes from the Greek ‘knide’, meaning nettle, and sea anemones and jellyfish both belong to this group.  - Although they are sort of distant cousins, scientists have documented groups of coral working together to capture and eat jellyfish. A scientist, Fabio Badalamenti, who saw this crazy phenomenon, said he watched a jellyfish be captured in a matter of minutes by a “wall of mouths.”. He went on to say, “The jelly tried to move, to escape, but there was no way.” - Coral reefs are the largest structures on earth of biological origin. The largest coral reef on earth is the Great Barrier Reef, which stretches for 1,429 miles, over an area of approximately 133,000 square miles. It is so large that it can be seen from space. - In 2017 a family of seven from Adelaide, A...

Coral and sunscreen Coral polyps are tiny, soft bodied, marine invertebrates which are related to sea anemones and jellyfish. At the base of corals, there is a protective limestone skeleton which is called a calicle. Reefs begin when a polyp attaches itself to a rock and then divides, making thousands of clones of itself, called a colony. The colonies work as one individual organism, with the calicles of the polyps all joining together into one. Over hundreds and thousands of years, these colonies join together, creating a coral reef. Corals can have venomous tentacles that they stick out, usually at night-time to grab zooplankton or even small fish to feed on. However, coral get most of their nutrients from the algae which they host (this also gives coral reefs their interesting and vast range of colours). When under stress from things such as temperature change or water pollution, the coral will evict their algae boarders. This leads to bleaching, which can eventually kill the enti...

The Republic of Maldives is a small south Asian archipelagic state.  It has a total land size of 298m2, and consists of approximately 1,190 coral islands, grouped in a double chain of 26 atolls, spread across roughly 90,000m2.  As well as being Asia’s smallest country, it is also the world’s most geographically dispersed country.  The islands were traditionally difficult to navigate and the first maritime charts were only produced in 1836, later maps have been produced with input from satellites.  The reason why the Maldives (as the country is more commonly known) is of interest to a 500-word blog on coral, is, of course, because the country is composed of live coral reefs and sandbars.   An atoll is a ring-shaped coral reef, surrounding a lagoon, with channels between islets connecting the lagoon to the open sea.     The Maldives landmass is of coraline origin – highly complex structures.      Most of the islands are flat and sandy,...

  LOPHELIA PERLUSA  (A cold-water coral)                                                           Lophelia Perlusa Cold water coral grows in deep water seas especially, but not exclusively, in the North East Atlantic, at depths from 150ft to more than 10,000ft where sunlight is dim to non existent and water temperature gets to below 4’C.  These reefs, mainly made up of the species Lophelia Perlusa, provide sanctuaries and breeding grounds for a great diversity  of bottom dwelling marine species.                                                                                    First discovered more than 250 years ago,...

There are over 9,000 curry houses across the UK and really, who doesn’t love a curry? A couple of my favourites include Jack Monroe’s chickpea and peach curry , a crunchy and sweetly strange combination that has quickly become one of my new favourite comfort foods, self-proclaimed curry-evangelist Nisha Katona’s Bengali prawn and pea curry , and anything made with a tub of Chinese curry paste. But all these dishes taste so different and look so different, so what actually makes something a ‘curry’? The word curry is a catch-all term which has been adopted to refer to soup and stew dishes from India, South-East Asia and parts of Oceania. The fact that we categorise dishes from these diverse countries together explains why there is such a range of ‘curries’ on offer – really, these dishes are completely unrelated to each other. In fact, the term curry is derived from the Tamil word ‘kari’ which simply means ‘spiced sauce’.  When it comes to the herbs and spices used in these ‘spiced ...

  If you are thinking of a career change, please do not consider being a vanilla farmer in Madagascar.   By all accounts it is a horrible, dangerous and difficult job. Vanilla comes second only to the spice saffron in value, with a kilo of black vanilla pods selling for hundreds of pounds.   Natural vanilla bean extract only accounts for about 1% of the flavour produced (the rest is synthetic) but demand for real vanilla beans is rising because we increasingly demand “natural” ingredients in our products.     Most vanilla beans come from Madagascar, where the fluctuation in the price of vanilla takes a toll on the fates and fortunes of the local community.   Vanilla orchids only bloom and fruit annually so farmers must put all their efforts into a single crop and one payment per year.    No part of the farming or curing of vanilla beans is mechanised and children often miss school to help with the demanding work of hand pollination (neces...