Posted by Franko on February 21, 2002 at 14:06:28:
Riveted as I am to the discussion of pizza toppings and sheepsheads, I had a little time to go back and reread the research article in Science, and thought I might throw in an additional thought or two.
The main purpose of the article was not just to say "Eek! Tropical reefs are under threat!", but rather to study the types and degrees of threat around the world to arrive at a list of "hotspots," or most-threatened reef systems. They did this by crunching a whole lot of different kinds of data. The main criteria they used, though, were to look at reefs that (a) host a high number of species that aren't found in other geographic areas, and (b) are at threat because of particular practices in that area (land development, fishing with explosives, etc). The idea is that these are the areas where numbers of species could most easily get wiped out altogether.
Based on their analysis, they ranked the following as the world's most-threatened reefs, in descending order of mean threat scores:
Philippines
Gulf of Guinea
Sunda Islands
South Mascarene Islands
Eastern South Africa
Northern Indian Ocean
South Japan
Cape Verde Islands
West Caribbean
Red Sea and Gulf of Aden
New Caledonia
Great Barrier Reef
Gulf of California
Hawaii
Western Australia
Easter Island
St. Helena and Ascension Island
Lord Howe Island
The report was specifically on coral reefs in tropical areas, so I guess Kevin's secret sheepshead spots couldn't make the list.