Corals From The Gulf Of California And The North Pacific Coast Of America

This book documents and examines the state of health of coral reefs in the eastern tropical Pacific region. It touches on the occurrence of coral reefs in the waters of surrounding countries, and it explores their biogeography, biodiversity and condition relative to the El Niño southern oscillation and human impacts. Additionally contained within is a field that presents information on many of the species presented in the preceding chapters.

Two rather different elements combine to explain the origin of this volume: one scientific and one personal. The broader of the two is the scientific basis-the time for such a volume had arrived. Geology had made remarkable progress toward an understanding of the phys ical history of the Caribbean Basin for the last 100 million years or so. On the biological side, many new discoveries had elucidated the distributional history of terrestrial orga nisms in and between the two Americas. Geological and biological data had been combined to yield the timing of important events with unprecedented resolution. Clearly, when each of two broad disciplines is making notable advances and when each provides new insights for the other, the rewards of cross-disciplinary contacts increase exponentially. The present volume represents an attempt to bring together a group of geologists, paleontologists and biologists capable of exploiting this opportunity through presentation of an interdisciplinary synthesis of evidence and hypothesis concerning interamerican connections during the Cretaceous and Cenozoic. Advances in plate tectonics form the basis for a modern synthesis and, in the broadest terms, dictate the framework within which the past and present distributions of organisms must be interpreted. Any scientific dis cipline must seek tests of its conclusions from data outside of its own confines.

Most of the coral reefs of the American continent: the Brazilian waters, the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean are in Latin American countries, the subject of this book. For the first time, information on coral reefs of such a vast region is mined from reports, obscure journals, university thesis and scientific journals, summarized and presented in a way both accessible and informative for the interested reader as well as for the coral reef expert. The chapters of the book, divided by country and ocean, were written by either scientists from the countries or by those that know the area well. Reefs not documented in the past are described in detail here, including location maps. The natural and anthropogenic impacts affecting the reefs are presented, as well as sections on management, conservation and legislation in each country. Nineteen chapters, plus an introduction, present information of coral reefs from Brazil to Mexico, and from Chile to Cuba.