The first comprehensive survey of reef-building coral species suggests that one-third of them are in danger of extinction, a sevenfold increase in just the past decade. If current trends continue, the authors predict a mass die-off among the engineers of some of the world’s most important and diverse ecosystems.

In the new study, a team led by marine biologist Kent Carpenter of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, censused 704 reef-building coral species and rated them according to International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) standards of extinction risk. One-third of those species fall into the threatened or near-threatened categories, which are considered at increased risk for extinction, the researchers report online today in Science. The highest concentration of jeopardized species lives in the Caribbean Sea and in the “Coral Triangle” of the western Pacific, an archipelago spanning parts of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and nearby areas. Using current figures and extrapolations from historical data, the researchers estimated that in the 1990s less than 5% of the 704 species would have been placed in the threatened or near-threatened IUCN categories.

So what? Well coal reefs are the bed rock of much of the food chain of many parts of the ocean and as I’ve said in the previous post the food chain is a very important thing to us when it comes to food from the ocean.

Source: Swan Song for Corals?