Coral
is an important piece of the environment that we need to protect. I come from Australia and people have told me
about the swimming in the Great Barrier Reef.
The majority of these people say it is not as good as it has been in the
past. This is because of humans as we
use boats that anchor on the reef and also rubbish that gets blown into the
ocean. Coral grows very slowly and we
have come along and bit by bit destroyed coral that is thousands of years
old. We are only starting to protect the
Great Barrier Reef now.
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| Just some of the colourful marine life in Vava'u |
Vava’u
has hope as there is beautiful coral around in Vava’u and we need to protect
that by being careful where we anchor yachts, ships fishing boats etc. We also need to clean up the rubbish that’s
on the road and put it in the bin, otherwise people are going to be called lazy
and then I vote to change earths name to ‘The Laziest Planet in the Solar
System’.
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| Coral bleaching on a reef in Vava'u |
I
learnt another thing while snorkelling with a VEPA volunteer in the Neiafu bay
outside my place. This is a bad process called
erosion, where silt or mud is washed into the ocean when it rains and covers
the coral. Living in the coral is a
little plant called Zooxanthellae, which helps keep the coral alive. The coral provides a protective home for the
plant and the zooxanthellae provides food for the coral through the process of
photosynthesis (breathing in carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen). It’s just like trees only the fish use the
oxygen instead of land animals. The silt
covers the coral so the Zooxanthellae can’t breath and die and then the coral
dies. When coral is dead it looses all
it’s colour and turns white.
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| Vava'u's clear waters are fantastic for divers visibility. |
So
please get off the couch and help VEPA and other organisations with our
environment. Not just coral but tree’s,
animals (reptiles, fish, whales, land animals etc). So please help any environmental organisation
you can so we don’t have to change earths name to ‘The Laziest Planet in the
Solar System’.
By Ashlee Jones (student at Saineha High School)
