Sunscreen may be important for fighting skin cancer, but new research suggests it is toxic to coral reefs.
A recent study revealed the common sunscreen ingredient oxybenzone is highly present in the waters around coral reefs in Hawaii and the Caribbean, the University of Central Florida reported. The chemical has been shown to kill coral and cause DNA damage that prevents coral in the larval stage from reaching adulthood.
"Coral reefs are the world's most productive marine ecosystems and support commercial and recreational fisheries and tourism," said University of Central Florida professor and diving enthusiast John Fauth. "In addition, reefs protect coastlines from storm surge. Worldwide, the total value of coral reefs is tremendous. And they are in danger."
To make their findings, a team of researchers collected samples from Hawaii, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Eilat, Israel. They also performed lab experiments in which they exposed coral larvae and cells of adult corals to various concentrations of oxybenzone. They discovered the common chemical deforms coral larvae by trapping them in their own skeleton, making them unable to float within currents for distribution purposes. Oxybenzone also proved to cause coral bleaching, in which corals expel the crucial algae that normally live inside them and provide nutrition. Coral bleaching is the leading cause of coral reef mortality across the globe and the world recently saw its third major bleaching event.
"The use of oxybenzone-containing products needs to be seriously deliberated in islands and areas where coral reef conservation is a critical issue," said executive director and researcher Craig Downs of the non-profit scientific organization Haereticus Environmental Laboratory. "We have lost at least 80 percent of the coral reefs in the Caribbean. Any small effort to reduce oxybenzone pollution could mean that a coral reef survives a long, hot summer, or that a degraded area recovers. Everyone wants to build coral nurseries for reef restoration, but this will achieve little if the factors that originally killed off the reef remain or intensify in the environment."
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology.
