In Other News: Ain’t no ocean wide enough not the case for soft corals
"Eunicella verrucosa" by Matthieu Sontag/CC BY 2.0
Sometimes it’s easy to think of our seas as one big homogeneous mass of water. Apart from the occasional rocky outcrop, or isolated island, the waters around the UK appear, from above, to be one connected volume.
However, recent research on soft corals has shown that this is not the case, and unseen barriers as formidable as any mountain range, or vast river, are separating groups of animals so effectively, they’re becoming separate species. In the case of soft corals, genetic differences have been discovered between pink sea fans living off north-west Ireland, south-west Britain, and north-west France.
As yet, the cause of this genetic division isn’t fully understood, but these initial findings could have implications when it comes to creating Marine Protected Areas in the future, because to safeguard the full range of diversity of marine species, each species will need protection in multiple locations.
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