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WONDERS OF NATURE
Great Barrier Reef. Nature miracle
For two thousand three hundred kilometers from the island of New Guinea to the Tropic of Capricorn, an almost continuous ridge of three thousand reefs and thousands of islands stretches along the eastern coast of Australia, which together make up an amazing and most beautiful creation of nature - the Great Barrier Reef.
Due to the fact that many islands increase their area during low tide, and others generally appear from under the water only during these hours, it is impossible to establish the exact size of the territory of this unique natural structure. According to conservative estimates, the area of the coral barrier reaches three hundred and fifty thousand square kilometers, that is, almost equal to the territory of Germany. Among the islands of the Great Barrier Reef, there are coral, almost not rising above the surface of the sea, and the so-called high, composed of ancient rocks and covered with forest. They usually form their own coral necklace around them. But all of them, together with underwater reefs and shoals, form a single hill, equal in length to the distance from Murmansk to Odessa and extending in places three hundred meters deep. And the creators of this, without exaggeration, gigantic structure are tiny living organisms, coral polyps. They, like their relatives - sea anemones and sponges, belong to the class of coelenterates. But, unlike their soft relatives, coral polyps hide their body in a hard calcareous shell. Millions of these fused shells form the coral reef. So the Great Barrier Reef is the most grandiose structure on Earth, built by living organisms. And neither the Great Wall of China nor the Channel Tunnel can compete with it. The exploration of this gigantic barrier off the coast of Australia was initiated by the great navigator James Cook. His sailing ship Endeavor became the first ship to sail through the narrow strait between the Great Barrier Reef and the mainland. Traveling more than a thousand kilometers without maps along the most difficult fairway, replete with shoals and underwater rocks, was, of course, a miracle of nautical art. But even the famous Cook had to experience the treachery of the local waters. His "Endeavor" nevertheless stumbled upon a coral reef, damaged the hull, and only by throwing all the guns and part of the cargo overboard did the English captain manage to get off the cliff and get to the shore. Over the past two centuries, hundreds of ships have been damaged or sunk on the reefs of the Australian coral barrier. Even in the XNUMXth century, maritime disasters occurred here. And the geographical names in this part of the Coral Sea speak for themselves: Cape Trouble, Tormenting Bay, the Islands of Hope ... It is not for nothing that the waters in the Great Barrier Reef attract numerous treasure hunters of sunken ships like a magnet. The first coral reefs on the site of a giant coral barrier arose millions of years ago. But its main part is about five hundred thousand years old. During this time, coral polyps managed to build buildings with an average height of one hundred and twenty meters. Reef construction continues even now, although it is not easy to notice. After all, the "houses" of polyps grow very slowly. It takes a whole year for a sprig of coral to grow only five centimeters. The width of the Great Barrier Reef ranges from three hundred meters in the north to five kilometers in the southern part, and from the coast of the mainland it is removed at a distance of thirty kilometers (near the Cape York Peninsula) to two hundred and fifty (near the Tropic of Capricorn). Describing the underwater kingdom of the Great Barrier Reef, stunning in its beauty and diversity of life, people do not skimp on magnificent epithets and comparisons: "The world of blue dreams", "The greatest architectural structure of nature on the whole planet", "Amazing underwater forest", "The eighth wonder of the world", "Breathtaking underwater scenery", "The richest marine ecosystem in the world". Indeed, in terms of the number of inhabitants and their strikingly picturesque appearance, the Great Barrier Reef has no equal in the oceans. There are about four hundred species of corals alone here. Some of them look like a human brain (they are called "brain"), others look like strange lacy mushrooms, branches or curtains, others look like deer antlers. They are hard and soft, white and colored, and once in their fabulous underwater kingdom, you begin to think that you find yourself in some fantastic garden among outlandish unearthly flowers: blue, blue, green, yellow, orange, pink, red and even black . But corals make up only a tenth of the population of the underwater barrier. In addition to them, more than four thousand species of mollusks live on the reef, from snails to giant meter-long bivalve tridacna, as well as sponges, sea anemones, crayfish, crabs, starfish, sea urchins and many algae. But the main decoration of the waters of the Great Barrier Reef is, of course, fish. In terms of the exotic coloring and the multiplicity of species and forms, neither the flowering mountain meadow, nor the world of Disney's fabulous films can be compared with the kingdom of coral fish. Only a small fraction of this multicolor can be seen in the marine aquariums of zoos. After all, the number of fish species in the bizarre coral forests of our planet reaches several thousand! And the Great Barrier Reef is no exception. One and a half thousand representatives of the ichthyofauna graze in its underwater thickets, washed by the warm waters of the Coral Sea. The names of many of them speak for themselves: butterfly fish, wrasse, clown fish, puffer fish, parrot fish, blenny, hedgehog fish, cardinal and even ... fly fish. And besides them, sea bass and moray eels, stingrays and sharks, groupers and sea pikes and many other representatives of the fish kingdom are found here. On the islands of the southern part of the Great Barrier Reef, large sea turtles come at night to lay their eggs in holes dug on the beach. Then they cover the masonry with sand, tamp it down and swim back to the sea. The offspring that were born have to independently dig their way to the surface and get to their native sea element along the wet sand of the coral beach. Here are turtles, in which even the shell has not yet hardened, and dangers lie in wait. Thousands of sea birds living on the islands are just waiting for this moment. Dive down, they grab the baby turtles one by one, and only a few manage to get to the saving water. The islands of the Great Barrier Reef are home to as many as two hundred and forty species of birds. These are petrels, phaetons, frigatebirds, boobies, terns, fulmars, white-bellied eagles and many others. But there are few mammals in the waters surrounding the reef. Mostly whales and dolphins. And besides them, the dugong, a close relative of the sea cow, grazes in the thickets of algae between the islands. Beautiful underwater forests and meadows, sparkling with all the colors of the rainbow, seem invulnerable at first glance. Still - after all, they are stone, and what can threaten a stone? But it turns out that coral reefs are just as vulnerable as any other creation of wildlife. And the recent disaster that happened to the Australian reef, once again reminded of this. In the 1960s and 1970s, the existence of the Great Barrier Reef was threatened by a sharp increase in the number of starfish. The danger came from one of the species of these echinoderms, bearing the beautiful name "crown of thorns". Huge, reaching half a meter in diameter, a starfish with numerous tentacles turned out to be a terrible enemy of coral polyps. Sticking to their buildings, the "crown of thorns" releases digestive juice into the holes of the coral "houses" and digests the polyps, leaving behind a dead zone. In a year, one star can destroy life on six square meters of a reef. The exaggerated increase in the number of these once rather rare polyp-eaters, as it turned out, was associated with the disappearance in many places of the Great Barrier Reef of their natural enemies - predatory newt snails. Because of the large beautiful shells, souvenir hunters collected tons of newts for sale to tourists. As a result, freed from the natural limiter of their numbers, starfish began to multiply intensively, and entire sections of the coral barrier turned into a lifeless sea desert. Now hunting for newt snails is prohibited, scuba divers armed with poison syringes are fighting the "crown of thorns", and little by little the natural balance on the reef is being restored. But in many of the destroyed areas of the Great Barrier Reef, life will return only in twenty to thirty years. Warm waters, deserted beaches, an abundance of small secluded islands and the opportunity to spend long hours in an exceptionally picturesque underwater kingdom attract hundreds of thousands of tourists to this amazing corner of the Earth. Some of them are limited to excursions on ships and boats in order to devote the rest of the time to getting to know the equally unique wildlife of the Australian coast. But more purposeful lovers of marine fauna settle on the islands for two or three weeks, tirelessly watching and filming coral worlds with a video camera. Although the Australians have established a marine reserve here, only a few particularly vulnerable areas of the Great Barrier Reef are under strict protection. And according to the reviews of travelers who have traveled a lot around the planet and scuba diving off the coast of the Maldives and Seychelles, the Hawaiian Islands and the Galapagos archipelago, who have seen the coral thickets of the Caribbean and Red Sea. French Polynesia and the Palau Islands, the underwater world of the Great Barrier Reef is unparalleled in scope and diversity. It is not for nothing that thousands of tourists fly and sail across half the world to distant Australia to enjoy the incomparable charm of the blue lagoons and straits, in which the innumerable living treasures of the Great Barrier Reef lurk. Author: B.Wagner
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