Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

To what extent has the human inflicted damage on the Great Barrier Reef…

- - - - Reefs cover less than 1/10 of 1% of the ocean floors
      - Polyps extract calcium carbonate from water and use it to build stony housing for itself
      - The GBR is the largest coral reef > stretching 1,400m along the coast of NE Australia
      - Every reef has a sharply defined boundary- a drop off, The drop off protects the reef from the ocean's waves
      - Coral reproduction: One night a year using the rise in water temperature and phases of the moon all corals spawn. The entire reef reproduces at the same time and billions of fertilised eggs are carried away by ocean currents.
      - Resource- Blue Planet
      - Lava drift through the sea and even if just one settles a reef will begin to form > the lava grows into a polyp in just a few day and from there colonies will start to branch off.
      - Each polyp's flesh iis supported by a limestone skeleton
        
        Below the gut is the place where the most growth
        happens, the liver deposits a lattice of limestone.
        
        Below the limestone skeleton
        it's bare as living coral tissues
        have vacated. This limestone is
        the hard structure which forms
        the foundations of the reef.
        
        Corals overgrow each other and can chemically detect each other's presence > polyps extrude their guts and digest their rivals alive leaving behind only the white skeleton
        
        Coral rely on many symbiotic relationships e.g. between them and the endosymbiotic zooxanthellae in their tissues and the crabs that live inside the coral which protect them from crown of thorn starfish which digest coral.
        
        During stormy and hurricane season the reef structure's under threat- a whole reef can be destroyed in one big storm> in time new lava will settle creating a new reef amongst the rubble
        
        Maximum cross fertilisation
        
        Late spring where tidal currents are weakest and a few days after the full moon, the corals of the GBR spawn
        
        some are males so release sperm
        some are female so release eggs
        but some are both so release egg sacks
        prewrapped in sperm
- - - - Transplantation and sale of the farmed coral