scleractinian corals and reefs of vietnam as a part of the pacific reef ecosystemscleractinian珊瑚和礁石的越南太平洋珊瑚礁生态系统的一部分.pdf

Open Journal of Marine Science, 2011, 1, 50-68 /10.4236/ojms.2011.12006 Published Online July 2011 (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/ojms) Scleractinian Corals and Reefs of Vietnam as a Part of the Pacific Reef Ecosystem Yuri Ya Latypov A. V. Zhirmunsky Institute of Marine Biology, Far East Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Vladivostok, Russia E-mail : ltpv@mail.ru Received May 12, 2011; revised June 1, 2011; accepted June 10, 2011 Abstract The paper analyzes both published and unpublished results of the investigations of Vietnamese reef building corals and reefs performed in the last decades of the twentieth century and first decades twenty-first. The state of the art in the study of reef-building scleractinian corals and reefs is presented. The scleractinian fauna of Vietnam is shown to match in species diversity (350 species of 80 genera) the tropical coral fauna of the Indonesian–Malacca fertile center, from which Indo-Pacific reef-building corals originated. The whole Vietnam coast from the Gulf of Tonkin to the Gulf of Siam is a biogeographically single whole and is a part of the Indo-Polynesian Province of the Indo-Pacific Area. Keywords: Vietnam, Reefs, Reef-Building Corals, Pacific Reef Ecosystem 1. Introduction till September, and the dry northeast, occurring in Octo- ber-April. Heavy rain showers during the wet monsoon 1.1. Brief the Ecological Characteristic and a period result in a huge (5 - 400 million m3) freshwater History of Studying influx and a su