Many of these conditions are not limited to the 'Third World' — what is happening to the Florida Keys is a well-studied example of runaway damage that even designation as a marine sanctuary can not prevent. James Porter, of the University of Georgia, who has followed the decline of Florida's coral reefs for almost two decades, has noticed alarming loss of coral species over the length of the Florida Keys and a strong trend, that has occured more rapidly than expected, toward total loss of reef-building corals. Based on current rates, he predicts that Looe Key Reef — long been considered one of the finest and most complete coral reef systems in the Keys — will be essentially dead within a couple of decades. One reef that he surveyed lost something like 80% of its coral cover over the course of a single year. Although that is a fairly extreme case, the prognosis for the rest of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary does not appear much more optimistic. Results of Dr Porter's water sampling and in situ experiments suggest that the primary reason for coral decline may be flow of basically stagnant, warm water from Florida Bay. Formerly a thriving seagrass ecosystem teeming with life, that supplied the reefs and adjacent habitats in the Gulf of Mexico with new supplies of fish life, Florida Bay is now considered to be largely a 'dead zone.' High nutrient levels, in concert with the Bay's shallow maximum depths, have resulted in algal blooms that poison the water and deplete it of oxygen. Much of Florida Bay has been rendered inhospitable to life, and the rest is inevitably following, barring extensive and immediate remediation. It is this water that sinks beneath the waves of the Atlantic and flows directly over the patch and barrier reefs of the Keys. Florida Bay's problems can be traced back to high inputs of nutrients from agriculture in south Florida and halting of freshwater inputs from the Everglades (the result of wholesale and terribly destructive damming and water diversion by the US Army Corps of Engineers decades ago). The same spurious flood control measure has effectively doomed the Everglades, that used to flow from the south side of Lake Okeechobee — the death of the Everglades, Florida Bay, and the Atlantic coral reefs of Florida are inextricably linked.

In the tiny island nation of the Maldives, located in the Indian Ocean, the reef itself has been removed in many localities and sold for export to countries such as the US (where coral harvesting has been banned domestically), and used locally as a cheap source of building materials in what has traditionally been a poor country. The growth of the tourist economy, largely based on European divers, has resulted in unprecedented levels of coral mining that the government is now attempting to control. In one ironic twist of fate, divers are accommodated in hotels built of the same coral they paid huge sums of money to see underwater. Massive brain corals, that may have taken thousands of years to grow, are crushed to make cement for hotel walls. In another twist of fate, the existence of the Maldives as a nation is threatened by an ocean that is no longer calmed by fringing reefs. Serious flooding has resulted and it is conceivable that the nation has doomed itself to a watery grave.

The Philippines lie within the area known as the 'Coral Triangle' — the center of marine biodiversity. In Philippine waters (and those of the neighboring nations of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea) are more coral species, more fish species, and pretty much more of everything than any other reef system in the world. Evolution of coral reef species is generally believed to have started in this region and radiated outward to other parts of the world, making the area the cradle of coral reef environments. Pollution from the Philippines' huge population, in many places allowed to enter the sea virtually without restriction, has combined with incredible erosion of sediments through decimation of rainforest to turn many reefs into underwater deserts. In many areas where reefs survive, they are on the brink of destruction thanks to the efforts of coral miners, dynamite fishers, and those who collect exotic fishes for the aquarium and restaurant trade using cyanide or other poisons. These poisons kill coral and fishes indiscriminately and even those few fishes that reach their destination alive usually die within a short time. Currently, the greatest direct threat is from ships collecting reef fishes for the live food trade in Southeast Asia, that dump barrels of sodium cyanide into lagoons and on to reefs, leaving in their wake an underwater desert where once the center of marine biodiversity could be found. It is solely because of the remoteness of many reef systems in the Indo-Pacific that they are safe from the direct depredations of man, but, at the current rate at which we are poisoning the oceans, they are not indefinitely so.