Coral Reefs 1 - Abiotic Factors Gizmo | ExploreLearning Gizmos (2024)

FAQs

What are the abiotic factors in coral reefs? ›

The coral reef ecosystem is made up of biotic and abiotic factors. The biotics factors are plants, crabs, fish, and coral. These biotic factors create multiple food webs in this ecosystem. The abiotic factors are water, temperature, sunlight, salt, and waves.

Final answer: In reef organisms, primary producers are typically photosynthetic protists like dinoflagellates, diatoms, and multicellular algae. These producers, through the process of photosynthesis, provide food and essential nutrients to a wide variety of marine life, thus fueling the ecosystem's productivity.

Coral and fish communities showed dramatic declines from 1977 to 1996 due to massive harbor construction and suboptimal land management practices on the watershed. More recently, corrective measures in the form of watershed stabilization and fishing regulations have been implemented.

Diet. Boulder Star Coral has a symbiotic relationship with algae that lives in the corals tissues. the algae provides energy through photosynthesis. The coral feeds on plankton and small organism that passes through the water column.

The most important abiotic factors include water, sunlight, oxygen, soil and temperature. Water (H2O) is a very important abiotic factor – it is often said that “water is life.” All living organisms need water.

Some of the abiotic factors in a coral reef include water, temperature, sunlight, oxygen concentrations, carbon dioxide concentrations, sand, rocks, and shells.

The primary producers are blue-green algae, phytoplankton, zooxanthelle, seagrass, and brown algae.

Coral reefs provide habitat for a large variety of marine life, including various sponges, oysters, clams, crabs, sea stars, sea urchins, and many species of fish.

In a coral reef ecosystem, the primary producers are plankton and algae. Primary consumers include sea cucumbers and parrot fish. Secondary consumers include sharks, dolphins, eels, sea horses, jellyfish, and starfish. Decomposers are mainly bacteria.

The first mass global bleaching events were recorded in 1998 and 2010, which was when the El Niño caused the ocean temperatures to rise and worsened the corals living conditions. The 2014–2017 El Niño was recorded to be the longest and most damaging to the corals, which harmed over 70% of our coral reefs.

Is coral going to be extinct? ›

Corals are endangered. 90% of coral reefs could disappear by 2050.

Increased ocean temperatures and changing ocean chemistry are the greatest global threats to coral reef ecosystems. These threats are caused by warmer atmospheric temperatures and increasing levels of carbon dioxide dissolved in seawater.

As much as 90 percent of the organic material the algae manufacture photosynthetically is transferred to the host coral tissue. Due to the need for sunlight to conduct photosynthesis, this type of energy production happens during daylight hours.

Healthy Coral: Coral and algae depend on each other to survive. Corals have a symbiotic relationship with microscopic algae called zooxanthellae that live in their tissues. These algae are the coral's primary food source and give them their color Stressed Coral: If stressed, algae leaves the coral.

Shallow water, reef-building corals have a symbiotic relationship with photosynthetic algae called zooxanthellae, which live in their tissues. The coral provides a protected environment and the compounds zooxanthellae need for photosynthesis.

A coral reef is an underwater ecosystem. It's home to thousands of plant and animal species, to living and nonliving things, that all depend on each other. Nonliving things include the air, water, sunlight, soil, and minerals that animals, plants, bacteria, and other living things need to survive.

The biota in the ocean is all living plants and animals. A few abiotic factors are temperature, salinity, pressure, dissolved gases and depth. The components are not that easily summed up.

Pollution, overfishing, destructive fishing practices using dynamite or cyanide, collecting live corals for the aquarium market, mining coral for building materials, and a warming climate are some of the many ways that people damage reefs all around the world every day.