Loading ...A new article published by Science Magazine says that coral reefs are responsible for a large portion of marine bio-diversity.
[O]f the 6,615 seabed invertebrates surveyed in the so-called Paleobiology Database, 1,426 evolved in a reef ecosystem. and the result is not just an artifact of reef and shallow-water fossils being relatively more studied. “Reefs are actually rare compared to other habitats,” Simpson notes. “If anything, there is a bias against finding that reefs are cradles.”
The bad news is, reefs are able to quickly recover from mass-extinctions.
That’s likely because “reef-building as a process had to recover from mass extinction events, because the ecosystem engineers that built reefs were severely affected,” says marine scientist Richard Aronson of the Florida Institute of Technology, who was not involved with the study. “Reefs in general were not available to enhance biodiversity rebound because they first had to be reconstituted as viable ecosystems.”
The study was lead by Wolfgang Kiessling from Humboldt University in Berlin.
In the hobby since 2001, and has seen all kinds of fads come and go. As he gets older, Jeff is developing more and more of a conscience towards environmental concerns, especially towards reefs. Currently, he writes from Ontario, Canada, but would rather be snorkeling on a reef.