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A group of scientists from Victoria University of Wellington were alarmed to discover sponges, which are typically a rich chocolate brown, were bleached in more than a dozen sites near Breaksea Sound and Doubtful Sound in Fiordland.
In some parts, as many as 95 percent of the sponges were bleached, said James Bell, a marine biology professor at the university.
“Our initial estimates are there are at least hundreds of thousands of sponges likely to have been bleached and maybe even many more than that,” he said.
Bell’s team discovered the mass bleaching during a research trip last month. The species, which is