Thursday, February 23, 2006

New Saltwater Reef Found


This is serious shit!

Please read carefully. A new reef has been found off the coast of Thailand. This is important because the world is losing it’s offshore wildlife as fast, or faster than the rain forests.
BANGKOK, Thailand - A coral reef spanning several hundred acres and teeming with fish has been discovered off the coast of Thailand and should be given protected status, the World Wide Fund for Nature said Wednesday.

Tipped off by local fishermen, WWF divers in January found what they say is a healthy, 667-acre reef in southern Thailand with over 30 genera of hard corals, and at least 112 species of fish.
I owned a saltwater reef tank when I lived in Texas and I loved that tank. I did not own anything that was exotic or that couldn’t be bread in captivity, just rocks, shrimp, and anemones. But it was still very fun and opened my eyes to a whole world out there under the sea that will soon be gone.

Now read this part:
A United Nations report in December found that close to a third of the world's corals have vanished, and 60 percent are expected to be lost by 2030. More than a third of all mangroves have disappeared, with the rate of loss greater than that of tropical rain forests, the report found.

The report found that reefs in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand were hardest hit by massive waves with damage reaching up to 30 percent in some places. But much like earlier studies, it found that human activities like illegal fishing and climate change pose the greatest risk to the future of these reefs.
Did you read that? "Human activities... pose the greatest threat." Okay, I'm paraphrasing there but you get the point. This is important shit man! We gotta take care of the reefs.

Go here to read the whole article