Coral Reefs

The above video is a bit vintage, but it helps identify the wonders of the coral reef ecosystem. Coral reef take up 0.1% of the ocean's subsurface, but they are home to 25% of marine life. That is a huge deal. Coral reefs are also thought to be more biodiverse than even tropical rainforests because the specialization of each species that inhabit the reef system.

I bring up coral reefs because they are in danger of becoming the first actual ecosystem that humans drive to extinction. While coral reefs are suffering from a range of maladies, each one can be traced back to human impacts. It is true that coral reefs are very sensitive, and in all other mass extinction events that have occurred on this planet, reefs were one of the first things to go. However, never before have another species been the cause of the ruin of this entire system. If we lose the corals, it could be tens of millions of years before they return.

I would like to share two excerpts from Dr. Peter F. Sale's book, Our Dying Planet. Dr. Sale is an expert in coral reef ecology. The first excerpt is about the importance of coral reefs to humans now. The second excerpt is what coral reefs are actually telling us about ourselves.

Hectare for hectare, coral reefs are economically the most valuable of all coastal marine ecosystems, whether one measures only the products we obtain from them or includes the environmental services they provide. With a growing world population that is increasingly coastal, these valuable ecosystems are only going to become more valuable if we can keep them with us. Their shoreline protection value alone will increase as sea levels rise and storm intensity increases. The economic cost of their loss will be felt.

Coral reefs are already telling us that pollution and overexploitation of biological resources can act synergistically to tip an ecosystem from one state to another, one of substantially lower economic value for us. They are also showing us how local stressors of various types can interact with climate change factors to result in less satisfactory outcomes for an ecosystem than if each operated separately. And their obvious decline in many locations over the past half-century is driving home to us just how serious our overuse of this planet may be.

We need coral reefs to survive and we need to get the whole globe on board. We couldn't live with ourselves if we lost the rainforests of the world. Why should we let their marine equivalents disappear? Help raise awareness of the dire state of coral reefs by bringing it up in conversation. They aren't gone yet, so there is time to save them.