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Eastern Tropical Pacific Coral Reefs

  • Reference work entry
Encyclopedia of Modern Coral Reefs

Part of the book series: Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series ((EESS))

Introduction

Background

In his coral reef book of 1842, Charles Darwin indicated that there were no coral reefs in the Eastern Tropical Pacific (ETP). Afterward, reef-building corals from the region were described (e.g., Verrill, 1870; Pourtalès, 1875; Crossland, 1927; Durham and Barnard, 1952; Durham, 1966), but the idea that there were no coral reefs in the region persisted (Stoddart, 1969) until the early 1970s when Peter W. Glynn documented coral reefs in Panamá (Glynn et al., 1972), Colombia (Glynn et al., 1982), Galápagos (Glynn and Wellington, 1983), and Costa Rica (Glynn et al., 1983). We now know that coral reefs are present in the region and many have been described, including those from México (Reyes-Bonilla, 2003), Clipperton Atoll (Glynn et al., 1996), El Salvador (Reyes-Bonilla and Barraza, 2003), Costa Rica (Cortés and Jiménez, 2003), Panamá (Maté, 2003), Colombia (Zapata and Vargas-Ángel, 2003), and Ecuador (Glynn, 2003). Recently, the coral reefs of Pacific Nicaragua...

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  1. Centro de Investigación en Ciencias del Mar y Limnología (CIMAR), Universidad de Costa Rica, 11501-2060, San José, San Pedro de Montes de Oca, Costa Rica

    Jorge Cortés

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  1. James Cook University, Townsville, Australia

    David Hopley

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Cortés, J. (2011). Eastern Tropical Pacific Coral Reefs. In: Hopley, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Modern Coral Reefs. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2639-2_72

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