Life on the Mean Reefs

摘要

The short, nasty existence for reef-dwelling fish at two primeval atolls suggests that intensive fishing elsewhere has skewed predator-prey dynamics. Imagine an atoll in the time of Eden. It would be teeming with fish, a few big ones and a lot of little ones swarming among the coral reefs. Think again, says a group of marine biologists who have been studying the Line Islands south of Hawaii. Led by researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California, they are comparing Kingman and neighboring Palmyra— U.S. possessions that are among a handful of Pacific atolls virtually untouched by humans—with Fanning and Christmas, which belong to Kiribati and respectively have some 3000 and 6000 residents.