Off the wire
• Cote d'Ivoire's army chief appeals for peaceful elections  • Rwanda's First Lady urges African girls to take careers in ICT  • Singapore Tourism Board partners with major Chinese digital players to attract Chinese tourists  • 26 dead in Philippines due to Typhoon Koppu  • Albanian population living in extreme poverty increases: World Bank  • China's tax revenue up 7.6 pct in first three quarters  • Xinjiang to train more farmers to boost employment  • 17-year-old swimmer Zhang Yufei expected to be next butterfly queen  • 2nd LD: Syrian president visits Russia for talks with Putin -- Kremlin  • China, ASEAN consult on South China Sea COC  
You are here: 　 Home

Common ingredient present in sunscreen killing coral reefs: research

Xinhua, October 21, 2015 Adjust font size:

A common sunscreen ingredients is toxic to coral and contributing to the decline of reefs around the world, a new research showed.

Oxybenzone, an ingredient in sunscreen lotions and personal-care products that protects against the damaging effects of ultraviolet light, is damaging fragile coral reef systems, according to a study published on Tuesday in the Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology.

The UV-filtering chemical can be fatal to baby coral and damaging to adults in high concentrations. It damages coral's DNA, makes coral more susceptible to potentially fatal bleaching and acts as an endocrine disruptor, causing baby coral to encase itself in its own skeleton and die.

The American Academy of Dermatology says oxybenzone, also known as BP-3, is one of the most widely used sunscreen ingredients. The chemical compound found in many brands of sunscreen worldwide is an emerging contaminant of concern in marine environments produced by swimmers and municipal, residential, and boat/ship wastewater discharges, according to the study.

Oxybenzone leaches the nutrients out of coral and bleaches it white. Coral bleaching is the main cause of coral mortality. The chemical poses a hazard to coral reef conservation and threatens the resiliency of coral reefs to climate change.

Researchers examined the effects of oxybenzone on the larval form (planula) of the coral Stylophora pistillata, as well as its toxicity in vitro to coral cells from this and six other coral species.

The study found that the most popular tourist spots have the highest concentration of oxybenzone, which helped explain why scientists aren't seeing baby corals in many established reefs in resort areas.

"We have lost at least 80 percent of the coral reefs in the Caribbean," researcher Craig Downs told local media.

"Any small effort to reduce oxybenzone pollution could mean that a coral reef survives a long, hot summer or that a degraded area recovers," Downs said. Endi