The Reef Revealed

You know that image we've all had, the one of a reef filled with colorful little fish darting between corals? Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but that’s actually absolutely, and completely wrong. Kingman Reef, regarded as the most natural reef on Earth due to its isolated area that protects it from pollution and many other problems that plague our reefs, shows how it really is out there.

On land, we are used to a food chain where there are many grazers and few top predators. In a healthy reef, it is the exact opposite. 25 pound red snappers with fangs, sharks, and other big predators are the most common sight, contributing to over 70% of the biomass.

The small fish are also present in massive swarms. They reproduce extremely fast to make up for the fact that so many of them are eaten by predatory fish. In fact, parrotfish will sometimes even change sex to make sure there are enough of them to keep their reproductive rates up.

To also follow-up from the parrotfish post, a healthy ocean zone such as Kingman reef only has 1 million bacteria per milliliter of water because parrotfish and other small herbivorous fish graze on the algae and keep bacteria levels low. Around populated islands such as the Line Islands, samples show up to 15 million bacteria, using up oxygen and suffocating coral, allowing more and more slime to strangle the reefs.

Kingman reef is a sign that our very idea of reefs as havens of colorful little fish is actually an unhealthy reef. Instead, reefs are the home to many of these fish but many more predators and large ocean fish who spawn and grow there.

Even Kingman reef isn’t completely safe from our influence though. Only one shark during the White Holly research vessel’s voyage there was actually a fully-grown, matured adult over 20 years old. The rest were still adolescent sharks, so it seems that shark finners had attacked some of this population in their yearly 100 million shark catch which goes on to be sold as shark’s fin soup in places like Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore at up to $100 a bowl.


If you want to learn more check out Alan Weisman's The World Without Us.
It's a great book (a bestseller) and it's got some neat stuff. The chapter where we got our information for this post is chapter 19: The Sea Cradle.
Here's the Amazon page: Click here

If you want to learn more about Kingman's Reef, here's the Wikipedia page.

posted by Sage @ 9/02/2008 09:09:00 PM Comments: 0