Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
bumpheads will scare up. Colorful shrimp swarm over the reef, catching
small creatures that hide among the corals. Wentletrap snails attack the cor-
als directly, sucking the life out of them.
The corals in open-ocean reefs are limited by shortages of essential
nutrients, but even so they support a riot of life that occupies many nested
and interdependent ecological niches. But some tropical communities have
extra resources that open up even more ecological niches and make them
even more likely to play a role in the evolution of new species. Recently I
approached the source of the unusual richness of one of these tropical com-
munities through a series of stages.
The northeast part of the Indian Ocean, bounded by the Andaman Island
chain on the west and the coasts of Thailand and Myanmar on the east, is called
Figure 60
This reef, off the eastern end of the Spice Island of Misool, just south of New Guin-
ea's westernmost tip, is one of the lushest I have seen. Covered with soft corals, it is ruled by a
lordly yellowbanded sweetlips (
Plectorhinchus lineatus
). Open ocean reefs that are far from land
are not usually this exuberant, because the water is lacking in essential nutrients, but the waters
around Indonesia's Spice Islands carry a rich supply of both inorganic nutrients and plankton.
