Word: reefs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Democratic fund raiser John Huang has been out of sight in Washington, but he was practically stalking the President last week in Australia, where Clinton played golf with Greg Norman, ogled the scalloped opera house in Sydney and stomped through a rain forest near the Great Barrier Reef. No matter where Clinton went to get away, he found himself deflecting questions about Huang and his former boss, Indonesian banker James T. Riady. "Mark Twain said every dog should have a few fleas," the President quipped; "keeps them from worrying so much about being...
Large fish, it turns out, are among the most critical of all reef inhabitants, especially herbivores like parrotfish that eat seaweed. Fast-growing seaweed is always threatening to engulf the reefs, but it is usually kept in check by grazing fish. About a decade ago, a team of marine scientists conducted an experiment off the coast of Belize that proves this point. To keep fish out, the researchers surrounded a section of coral the size of a small pasture with a chicken-wire fence. Within 10 weeks, they found, the area inside the fence had been completely overgrown by seaweed...
...reef is like a complex machine with many redundant components; when one malfunctions, another usually takes over. By the middle of the past century, for example, Jamaica's expanding human population had devastated the stock of seaweed-eating fish. Still, the reefs that surrounded the island looked healthy. Why? The answer, says the Smithsonian's Jackson, is sea urchins, which are also herbivores and which temporarily filled in for the missing fish. In 1983, however, the urchins succumbed to a mysterious disease. All of a sudden Jamaica's reefs crashed. With no urchins to crop back the seaweed, Jamaica...
Unhappily for reefs, humans upset the balance between corals and their competitors in many ways. Consider the erosion that accompanies deforestation and agriculture. No longer restrained by tree roots, tons of soil laden with nitrogen and phosphate washes into rivers and then sweeps into the sea, forming a muddy plume that may be hundreds of miles long. As this nutrient-rich water flows over a reef, it stimulates the growth of all kinds of algae--including the microscopic diatoms and dinoflagellates that nourish such reef animals as the crown-of-thorns starfish. In recent years hordes of these coral-devouring...
...dwindling of reefs in the world's oceans, scientists acknowledge, will not immediately destroy the organisms that build them. Many corals spawn en masse, releasing a vast pinkish slick of fertilized eggs that ride ocean currents for hundreds of miles. In the natural cycle, one reef rises as another declines. This cycle is what humans are now disrupting, however, and no one can foresee what the consequences will be. Creating more marine preserves can help, but even if the reefs are patrolled by armed guards, they may not be able to withstand the twin juggernauts of exploding population...