Imagine coming across in the wild a very large number of animals – together they might cover an area as big as an office carpark. In those circumstances, you would either flee in fear of the animals, or the animals would flee in fear of you.
That is, unless you are underwater and the animals are corals.
Most corals are like a like triffids in reverse. Instead of walking plants, they are stationary animals, at least most of the time.
They are exceptionally varied, diverse and beautiful. They are also threatened.
Only with the advancement of scuba diving in the past 30 years has the study of corals been possible in any great detail, though naming of species has been going on for at least two centuries. But barely have we had time to study, classify and understand corals in any detail and we are destroying them at an alarming rate. It has happened in our lifetime.
A new publication, for the first time, describes the corals of the world. It is an extraordinary work, in three volumes over 1382 pages with more than 4000 colour photographs. Corals of the World is by J. E. N. Veron and published by Australian Institute of Marine Science and CRR Qld Ltd. Mary Stafford-Smith is the Scientific Editor and Producer.
Coral reefs have been on earth for more than 500 million years and remnants of the earliest reefs can still be seen today. They have developed in spurts and disappeared in spurts – quite quickly in geological time.
Looking at coral while scuba diving is like a return to childhood. On land, adults walk or drive quickly to a destination, missing the detail. Children tend to study things closely, because everything is new to a child, and they do not have to travel far. Put an adult in scuba gear on a coral reef and the wonder return. You cannot travel far, anyway, because air and finning capacity are limited. So you can look at the fine detail in wonder.
The common names of coral are obvious from their shapes — fungus, leaf and plate, staghorn, brain and soft coral. (Genus Fungia, Montipora (and others), Acropora (and others), Favites (and others) and Tubastrea (and others) respectively (SUBS: keep genus names in caps please). The common names are also more specific and speak for themselves: yellow pencil; carnation, cactus, star column, rose, antler lettuce, boulder brain, brush and so on.
But bear in mind, genus and species of coral are not determined only by shape, but also by other characteristics.
Indeed the great joy of this book is to see corals differently, not just as pretty shapes.
Veron points out how endangered the reefs are. Global warming has been particularly destructive. The rapid (in geological terms) rise in world temperatures has resulted in bleaching and coral death quicker than corals can replace themselves. Rising sea levels pose a future risk. Dragnet fishing and ocean pollution are also having an effect.
The books comes as the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, under the UN Environment Program, posted its most recent report. It suggest that nearly three-quarters of the world’s reef are likely to disappear in the next 50 years, mostly in the Indian Ocean (where more than half the reefs have already been lost), Middle East and South-East Asia.
The Australian Great Barrier Reef and most of the Pacific have been largely spared – largely due to efforts by national governments.
One can hope that Coral Reefs of the World does not become a Domesday Book recording a snapshot of the past, but a continuing living document describing the best past of the oceans.