We came across this poster recently on Coral Housekeepers, and how fish help to maintain healthy coral reefs in the wild. It has been produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and explains in simple, easy-to-understand language how different groups of fish maintain equilibrium on functioning reefs by grazing algae, eating coral pests, and recycling nutrients, and we thought it was too good not to share, and pass on.
Coral reefs are all about beneficial relationships and it’s the same for our tanks. We need herbivores to graze nuisance algae, wrasses to eat pests, and fish, to fertilize our corals. And the deeper we dive into exploring the coral holobiont, the more we realize that there are complex, interdependent relationships going on inside individual coral polyps too. It’s all one big interconnected ecosystem.
The NOAA Education Portal is a huge, brilliantly put-together resource on aquatic ecosystems and much, much more, and we not only recommend it for new reefkeepers to gain a greater understanding of coral reefs, but we also recommend it to anyone who wants to know more about the planet’s oceans and how they affect just about everything else we connect with. Go to https://www.noaa.gov/education to find out more.
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