"Coral Bleaching and Global Warming: The Verdict Is In" • Clay Cook, Ph.D. About the Lecture - 2006 Coral reefs are among the most beautiful and diverse environments in the world, but these special habitats are being threatened by both natural and man-made events.One of the major threats is coral bleaching. Reef corals respond to environmental stress by losing their symbiotic algae, thus appearing "bleached". The principal environmental stress that triggers coral bleaching is elevated seawater temperatures. In this talk, Dr. Clay Cook will discuss why bleaching is a serious threat to reef corals, how global warming is related to the increasing incidence of bleaching events, and why reef corals in particular are so sensitive to elevated temperatures. Dr. Cook will discuss the unique features of coral biology that are involved in the formation and maintenance of coral reefs and how these features are affected by these events. His topics will include coral bleaching and how waters from Florida Bay affect corals in the Florida Keys. About the Speaker Dr. Clay Cook is Senior Scientist at Harbor Branch and heads the Symbiosis and Coral Biology program in the Division of Marine Science. He received his B. A. in Biology and Chemistry from Rutgers University in 1965, and his Ph. D. (Zoology) from Duke in 1970. While a graduate student at Duke, he spent the summer of 1967 taking an NSF-sponsored course on the biology of reef corals at the Hawaii Institute of Biology and became enamored with the biology of animals such as corals that have plant cells (algae) growing in their tissues. He has studied this phenomenon (animal-algal symbiosis) ever since. Clay notes that, "There is real fascination in a topic which has its roots in cell and molecular biology and has such broad implications as the ecology and formation of coral reefs." He has held academic positions at the University of Georgia, the University of Western Ontario, and Ohio State University and research positions at UCLA and Northeastern University. Prior to coming to HBOI in 1993, he was a Research Scientist for ten years at the Bermuda Biological Station for Research. In addition to over 60 published papers, he has edited or co-authored three books on symbiosis and marine biology.

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