The Coral Triangle, a tropical marine region located between the Pacific and Indian oceans, is a true treasure of biodiversity.
Spread across some 6 million square kilometres, it encompasses waters around the Philippines, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste and the Solomon Islands, and is home to 76% of the world’s known coral species. Nicknamed the “Amazon of the sea”, the ecosystem surpasses reef areas such as the Caribbean and the southwest Pacific.
The region is home to approximately 605 species of reef-building corals, ten times more than in the Caribbean, according to the .
These corals provide habitat for six of the seven species of sea turtle, 37% of reef fish species and marine mammals, including dolphins, dugongs, blue whales and sperm whales. This multiplicity of life has made the Coral Triangle a central point of scientific study over the centuries, points out.
To researcher Nadia Santodomingoa coral specialist, explains to the website that this area contains the greatest diversity of marine species in the world, a phenomenon that scientists have been trying to understand for a long time.
In the 19th century, British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace studied the region to try to understand its unique biodiversity. Wallace developed the famous “”, which delimits distinct faunal regions, and contributed in parallel to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.
Today, researchers benefit from more tools to study the Coral Triangle, and evidence suggests that the region’s relatively turbid waters offer natural protection to several species. The ecosystem has remained a biodiversity hot spot for at least the last 20 million years, benefiting from multiple types of habitats and ideal conditions for the dispersal of larvae carried by ocean currents, according to the NGO.
The diversity of the Coral Triangle has accumulated over time, differing from temperate and polar marine regions, which suffered glaciations. THE unique geologysimilar to platforms, and the strategic location at the intersection of two oceans contributed to the high number of species in this magical place.
As expected, even the resilient Coral Triangle faces threats (overfishing, coastal pollution and ocean acidification caused by climate change) but the region’s corals appear to demonstrate resilience: turbid waters can reduce sunlight reaching corals, mitigating thermal stress and bleaching caused by rising temperatures.