After way too many hours searching and reading I’ve decided to pick the topic of coral bleaching. The article I selected was Mass Coral Reef Bleaching: A Recent Outcome of Increased El Niño Activity? published by Ecology Letters in 1999. This article focuses on the past patterns of coral bleaching and the pattens of el nino events, explaining there is a major connection between the two due to the loss of zooxanthellae, a small organism that lives mutualistically with the coral. The little organism can’t live in warm water and thus dies when el nino occurs. El nino is simplistically known as a serge of warm water and tropical storms. As the warm water kills the organism the coral looses its color, turns white, and becomes very fragile/susceptible to diseases. It only is able to recover when something like la nina, a serge of cold water, allows for the organism to thrive in the coral again. The coral then returns to its colorful, healthy state. This information is what I want to bring to the surface and convey to the audience.
Since coral bleaching is caused in mainly by the warm waters of El Nino but can begin to be reversed by la nina, creating something within a young age group will be a challenge with these large scientific ideas. For the adult audience I was thinking of writing something similar to the short articles found in papers such as the L.A Times, Times Magazine, or a newspaper article. This would be about one page long at most, just to sum up the larger ideas since that is what is found within these genres. There is a lack of explicit scientific language and talk of data found in other research. In this magazine/online article or short newspaper piece, I would simply summarize the information within the article. This would include a brief description of the study that was done, the data that was found, and what it all means in terms of the bleaching of the coral reefs around the world. I also plan to include an explanation of the difference between el nino and la nina as they both have vastly different but equally important effects on the coral reefs and are central to understanding the material from the article I found. This would only be appropriate for an adult audience as it does not seek to entertain but rather to inform. This would be lacking the colorful images and creative word play I hope to be able to include in the piece for a younger audience. I have trouble coming up with something more “creative” for an adult audience such as the one that I am envisioning. For the newspaper piece I imagine people in their 40s who are concerned about the problems in the world the live in as someone with an interest in science would be most likely to read the article.
The piece that is directed towards a younger audience would likely have to be at a more educated young audience such as children 5-6th grade. A background in the basic concepts of science is needed to truly understand what is going on. To target this audience something with pictures of healthy coral and unhealthy coral would be necessary so they can see the difference, as well as captions with them that say what makes coral healthy and unhealthy. This could be a kind of poster that ties in the information from the article. Something to target an even younger audience could be a simple picture book, this would require finding pictures that are colorful and simple for children, preferably cartoonish. In this book there could be a little story about how the coral gets sick (aka white, fragile) from the warm water called el nino, but when la nina comes back the coral gets healthy and colorful again. A road block with this option would be the images used as they would be difficult to find. If anything realistic pictures could suffice, they would just have to be simplistic to show the difference between the healthy and not healthy coral. Drawing attention to the amount of fish on each kind could help this problem as children may be able to understand that if the coral isn’t healthy the fish wont live on it anymore. This project for the younger audience will be a bit of a challenge.
