The Last Coral Reefs

There’s only one way to lower a $20,000 custom-made camera from a swaying fishing boat into the open sea: very carefully. And that’s exactly how Manuel Gonzalez-Rivero’s colleagues handled the SVII camera as they nudged it overboard, into the bathtub-warm waters off the coast of Belize. Once submerged, the beach-ball-size camera snapped a photograph of the protected Glover’s Reef every three seconds. Later, computers would analyze the pictures, providing a close-up look at one of the most valuable marine ecosystems in the Caribbean. And we have to see it today, because coral reefs may not be here tomorrow. It’s a cliché to call coral reefs the rain forests of the ocean, but if anything, that understates their ecological value. They occupy less than 0.1% of the sea area, yet “between one-fourth and one-third of everything that lives in the ocean lives in a coral reef,” says Nancy Knowlton, who holds the Smithsonian Institution’s Sant Chair in Marine Science. Fish are not the only beneficiaries. The net economic value of coral reefs globally is almost $30 billion a year, and some 500 million people around the world depend on coral reefs for food, coastal protection and tourism.This appears in the April 14, 2014 issue of TIME.
Source: TIME: Top Science and Health Stories - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Coral Reef Environment mapping Source Type: news