Why is fishing a problem for coral reefs?
JEREMY: The reason overfishing is a problem for coral reefs is it’s just a way of disrupting the natural balance in an ecosystem. Ecosystems aren’t perfectly stable. There’s always lots of variability. Hurricanes come and go. But there is a range of natural variability in an ecosystem. And overfishing removes the most important and abundant consumers in a natural ecosystem. Fish, of course, eat fish, but fish also eat seaweed. And seaweed is important because corals grow very slowly. They build skeletons of calcium carbonate, essentially cement skeletons. And they build those skeletons for the same reason a tree makes wood, to be able to grow up and get to the light because they need the light for the photosynthesis of the little algae in them. They’re all competing with each other and they’re growing up to get there. The hard cement skeleton is a way of doing that. But they also make a skeleton out of cement to protect them from things like parrot fish that come in and just grind them
