Corals don't spread far from their birthplaces.Creating protected marine areas in one part of the Caribbean won't replenish distant coral reefs coral reefs, limestone formations produced by living organisms, found in shallow, tropical marine waters. In most reefs, the predominant organisms are stony corals, colonial cnidarians that secrete an exoskeleton of calcium carbonate (limestone). in the region, according to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. genetic research. Because free-swimming coral larvae Larvae, in Roman religion Larvae: see lemures. reefs in the region in our lifetimes, says Steve Palumbi of Stanford University Stanford University, at Stanford, Calif.; coeducational; chartered 1885, opened 1891 as Leland Stanford Junior Univ. (still the legal name). The original campus was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. David Starr Jordan was its first president. . "Coral gardens will need to be on every major island," he says. He and Steven Vollmer of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama, the only bureau of the Smithsonian Institution based outside of the United States, is dedicated to understanding biological diversity. in Panama studied the DNAin 262 samples of staghorn coral from the Bahamas to Panama and the YucatAn peninsula to Curacao. They judged the corals' relatedness by the degree of genetic similarity among the samples. They found that related corals live in "local villages" that are separated by no more than 100 km and sometimes as little as 2 km. The genetic differences among villages indicate that larvae produced in one locale rarely become established in another, the researchers report. Establishing "more conservation [areas] on smaller scales would probably do you more good than ... protecting one large location," Vollmer concludes. Palumbi and Vollmer are now examining their data in the context of ocean-circulation patterns to understand how currents influence coral genetics. |
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