June 2, 2014 — The fish that live off the Malay Archipelago, between Southeast Asia and Australia, are among the most diverse in the world. Now researchers are reporting that the area owes its diversity to the stability of coral reefs over the past three million years.
The reefs provided fish a safe home and the means to diversify and evolve into new species, said Peter F. Cowman, an evolutionary biologist at Yale and an author of the new research, which appears in the journal Science.
“It really drives home the fact that the past shapes the present,” he said.
Using information from underwater sediment, the scientists were able to estimate changes in surface temperatures over time. From that information, they inferred where coral reefs were and how stable they were over time. They then compared those data with the current geographic distribution of more than 6,000 species of fish.
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