According to a new Wildlife Conservation Society study, reef fish levels along middle class coastal communities in Eastern Africa tend to be significantly lower– up to 4 times lower– than along areas bordering wealthy or poor communities.

Reasons for the disparity are numerous, and they involve a complicated interplay between traditional customs, economic development and population dynamics. But middle class apathy could also be to blame.

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Queen’s University, Ireland, has joined a project to try and save the horse mussel reefs off the Irish coast.

The horse mussel is an important biological tool because it ‘engineers’ water quality by filtering the water to obtain food, and is also an indicator of biological diversity because many other marine species rely on this bio-engineering behaviour for their own survival. The mussels, provide a vital stabilising effect that binds the seabed by linking living mussels, dead mussel shells and sedimentary deposits.

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The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is predicting severe bleaching for parts of the Coral Sea, near Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, and the Coral Triangle, causing immense damage to an important global marine environment over the next few months.

“This forecast bleaching episode will be caused by increased water temperatures and is the kind of event we can expect on a regular basis if average global temperatures rise above 2 degrees.” - Richard Leck, Climate Change Strategy Leader for WWF’s Coral Triangle Program.

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As have many other parts along the East Coast, the coastal regions of New York City just aren’t what they used to be in terms of biodiversity in general and oyster populations in particular. Oyster reefs used to cover hundreds of square miles off the shore before Europeans settled in the area, but they’re now pitiable shadow of their former selves. Worse still, when the oysters go, water quality suffers (thanks to the oyster’s prodigious water-filtering capabilities.)

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Aimed at kicking off the International Year of the Reef, the Bonaire 2008 expedition launched earlier this month and runs through Jan.30. A team of researchers from several universities is surveying the coral ecosystems off the island of Bonaire to try and understand why those reefs remain so healthy while others in the Caribbean are suffering.

Photos and videos from the expedition are being posted at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Ocean Explorer Website. NOAA is sponsoring the investigation.

Researchers are studying both the shallow and deeper-water regions of the Bonaire reef systems, using both divers and robotic devices called Autonomous Underwater Vehicles, or AUVs.

Three AUVs will explore the reef’s “Twilight Zone,” a little-understood area that lies about 65 to 150 meters below the ocean’s surface. The devices will measure features like water currents, temperatures, acidity levels, dissolve oxygen levels and more, enabling scientists to develop a “detailed snapshot” of the reef system at all levels.

“We believe this is the first science expedition using multiple AUVs to chart Bonaire’s reefs and likely the first to do so on coral reefs anywhere,” said Mark Patterson, expedition leader and a researcher with the Virginia Institute of Marine Science at the College of William & Mary. “This is important because of scale, AUVs obtain wide-area data, allowing scientists to pinpoint further investigation.”

Will researchers find the key to the Bonaire reef system’s health, and will it help us find ways to protect and save other reefs around the world? With some scientists predicting 98 percent of the world’s coral reefs could be doomed by 2050, the answers can’t come soon enough.