[Coral-List] Source for "coral occupy <1% of the seafloor but house more than 25% of species"

Hanny Rivera hrivera28 at gmail.com
Fri Dec 11 03:25:54 UTC 2020


Hi all!

A while back, I had written asking for help tracking down the source for
this statement. Thank you to all who responded and helped! There were a
number of folks who also asked me to let them know what I found. Sorry for
the long delay! A recent twitter post reminded me I hadn't followed up.

Anyways: The original reference (at least the most original that I could
find) is McAllister 1991. I had to do a lot of digging to find the actual
paper, though I finally came across it here:
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ptid=uc1.31822009136755&view=1up&seq=22
As you might see, it's not entirely clear where the numbers come from
though.

Dan Barshis
had pointed me to Smith 1978 (https://www.nature.com/articles/273225a0) as
a more viable source for the area estimation (though it's a bit outdated) and
Fisher et al 2015 (
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982214016236) as a
reference for species richness on reefs.

A more recent area estimate is Spalding et al. 2001 (
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308597X17300635) which
was pointed out to me by Dennis Allemand

Dennis Allemand also has several other references for species #s that live
on reefs in his paper (
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352485518305978?via%3Dihub)
on page 2.

Thanks again all! Hope this is helpful for folks going forward.

Best, Hanny

-- 
Hanny E. Rivera, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer
Boston University, Biology Department
Davies Marine Population Genomics Lab
https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannyrivera
http://sites.bu.edu/davieslab/members/


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