我们都听说，由于许多因素，珊瑚礁有灭绝的风险，并因气候变化和珊瑚漂白而加剧。无休止的漂白珊瑚礁的鸟瞰图肯定确实可以引起刺激性的插图，而且毫无疑问，任何形式的巨大死亡都不是我们希望大自然的任何部分。
However for all of the urgent threats imperiling our beloved coral reefs until recently coral reef ecologists hadn’t really estimated the number of corals that actually exist throughout the oceans, and the Pacific Oceans in particular. Many different environmental and governmental bodies describe pretty much all stony corals as vulnerable to extinction but how can you make that kind of claim when you don’t actually know the population of a species?
According to the researchers: “手指 - 孔子小动物是我们检查的十个最丰富的物种之一。它也不被认为非常容易受到珊瑚漂白的影响 - 但目前由IUCN列出，容易受到全球灭绝的影响“. We wouldn’t say that Pandas are critically threatened with extinction if we either didn’t know how many there were or if there were more Pandas than people!
Twelve of the 80 corals listed by the IUCN as vulnerable to extinction were estimated to have populations greater than one billion colonies. Even in massive coral reef systems like the Great Barrier Reefs surveys showed an average of 30 corals per square meter – even after several years of wide-scale bleaching – which adds up to tens of billions of corals on the GBR alone.
Altogether the estimates of coral abundance from Indonesia to French Polynesia amounted to between 300,000,000 and 800,000,000 coral colonies or a nice ballpark of half a trillion corals. These estimates have huge implications for ‘coral restoration’ as you would have to plant and grow a quarter of a billion adult coral colonies to increase the coral cover of the GBR by百分之一！
这些珊瑚阿布的估计ndance pertain only to Pacific corals as clearly the situation is much more dire in the Atlantic Ocean, especially where species likeAcropora palmata已减少到其以前丰度的1％。我们并不是说不应该进行本地化的珊瑚修复，而应以维持当地的生物多样性，恢复栖息地以及通过珊瑚种植和旅游业提供可持续收入的目的来完成。
当您大声说出“半万亿珊瑚”时，这确实使您想知道实际上可以产生的野生珊瑚的收成如何影响。野生珊瑚收集的慷慨总数约为来自不同国家的各种物种的1,000,000个菌落，但这占估计总人口的百分之一。当然，某些物种可能会在本地收获，但是当手动劳动手动完成时，它似乎并没有真正与气候变化，沿海开发和珊瑚漂白剂的批发生态系统破坏相比。Nature Ecology]
