Author: Sabri Ben-Achour
Source: PRI's The World
June 28, 2012

"At the national aquarium in Baltimore, children ooh and aah at the colors of fish and coral waving and squirming in the Pacific Coral Reef tank in front of them. A fleshy colored Brent Whittaker, the aquarium’s senior director for biological programs, watches from a foot away. Whittaker says the colors in the corals actually come from symbiotic algae that live within them.

But one day, he says he came up to the tank and all the color was gone.

“The corals were bleaching,” Whittaker says. It turns out a construction crew doing renovation work was to blame. The lights were being left on all night long, which Whittaker says may have raised the temperature in the tank ever so slightly."

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