Coral Reef Preservation and Protection
Coral reefs cover less than 1% of the ocean floor, yet they are the most important habitat in the ocean. More and more coral reefs every are killed every year by careless humans not thinking of the destruction they are causing to the reefs in their paths. Over one hundred million dollars are being spent on coral reef restoration every year and unfortunately, still not much has changed to stop the destruction of the reefs. The government and non-government organizations put a great quantity of effort and money into the preservation of the coral reefs, but their efforts are not well enough known to the public. The public must be made more aware of the disaster affecting the coral reefs in order to make a change. The government must put barriers and limits on who can access coral reefs for the preservation and protection of them.
Coral reefs are soon to be extinct and forgotten about by the generations to come. Anthropogenic impacts cause the most destruction to the reefs. We, as humans, need to take responsibility for our actions and try our best to recover what we’ve destroyed. We still wonder if full recovery is even a realistic possibility. This is because “when the area of live coral in a reef drops below ~10% the erosion may begin to outpace the growth of new reef structures” (Polidoro and Carpenter 34). Once coral reefs start degrading they are harder to replenish: “substantially reducing anthropogenic impacts on coral reefs might at least buy us, and coral reef systems, more time to answer these questions” (Polidoro and Carpenter 35). We need to start checking on the corals and make sure there are many more live corals than deceased. Corals are made up of small, slow-growing animals called polyps that colonize together. The maximum they have the ability to grow in a year is 10 centimeters, but that would be a rare case. Just imagine how long a whole coral reef would take to regrow. It’s sad and almost...