TITLE:
Scleractinian Corals and Reefs of Vietnam as a Part of the Pacific Reef Ecosystem
AUTHORS:
Yuri Ya Latypov
KEYWORDS:
Vietnam, Reefs, Reef-Building Corals, Pacific Reef Ecosystem
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Marine Science,
Vol.1 No.2,
July
25,
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ABSTRACT: The paper analyzes both published and unpublished results of the investigations of Vietnamese reef building corals and reefs performed in the last decades of the twentieth century and first decades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.