This doesn’t sound good.

Coral reefs off the southeast coast of Taiwan have turned black with disease possibly due to sewage discharge, threatening fragile undersea ecosystems and tourism, a study released Friday said.

The discovery on a problem long suspected but seldom documented shows that coral is suffering widely in waters up to five meters (16.4 feet) deep and 300 meters offshore from two outlying islands, said researcher Chen Chao-lun of Taiwan’s state-funded Academia Sinica.

I was lucky enough once to go snorkeling on a coral reef off the Florida keys once. The colors of the reef and the amount of life that lives there are just amazing. Believe me, diving down and finding that the reef was black would be a real shock. Time for somebody, possibly many somebody’s, to clean up their act, and their reef.