Reefs
in sentence
211 examples of Reefs in a sentence
Oyster
reefs
also covered about a quarter of our harbor and were capable of filtering water in the harbor in a matter of days.
He dreams of coral
reefs
and plankton.
There is an area that is the oceans, coral
reefs.
We've actually kind of made an ethical choice in society to not have coral
reefs.
Ocean acidification is a really big issue that people are concerned with, as well as ocean warming, and the effects they're going to have on coral
reefs.
On the scale of decades, in our lifetimes, we're going to see a lot of damage to coral
reefs.
Now, as the past few slides about coral
reefs
may have suggested, I do indeed spend much of my time as a researcher thinking about human-microbe interactions, specifically on coral
reefs.
From the bigger perspective, I spend my time thinking about these relationships, because too many
reefs
are going from looking like the picture on your left to the picture on your right.
I see the microbes on the coral reefs, both the good ones and the bad ones, trying to link their micro-scale behaviors to this big picture of: How do we help the reef that looks like the right back towards something that looks more like the left?
We hope that we can sometime clean up oil spills, or we can gather or collect plastic in the ocean, or we can have swarms of our machines controlled by multi-player video game engines to control many of these machines, to monitor coral
reefs
or to monitor fisheries.
And the reason that is, is because in a place like this island, a lot of the sand is made of biological material because the
reefs
provide a place where all these microscopic animals or macroscopic animals grow, and when they die, their shells and their teeth and their bones break up and they make grains of sand, things like coral and so forth.
But this is very important for delicate environments, such as coral
reefs.
And our scientists from FIU, MIT, and from Northeastern were able to get a gauge for what coral
reefs
do when we're not around.
And predator-prey behavior is an interesting thing, because as we take away some of the predators on these coral
reefs
around the world, the prey, or the forage fish, act very differently.
What we realized is not only do they stop taking care of the reef, darting in, grabbing a little bit of algae and going back into their homes, they start spreading out and disappearing from those particular coral
reefs.
At 19, I won a research competition for my research on coral reefs, and I ended up speaking at the UN Convention of Biological Diversity, presenting this research.
These jobs are also done by the plants, the animals and the ecosystems on our planet, including the ecosystems I study: the tropical coral
reefs.
Coral
reefs
are farmers.
Coral
reefs
are security guards.
Coral
reefs
are chemists.
The molecules that we're discovering on coral
reefs
are increasingly important in the search for new antibiotics and new cancer drugs.
And coral
reefs
are artists.
So for all of these reasons, all of these ecosystem services, economists estimate the value of the world's coral
reefs
in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year.
We have trampled the
reefs
physically with our boats, our fins, our bulldozers, and we have changed the chemistry of the entire sea, warmed the waters and made storms worse.
And on the eastern end of the island, where the
reefs
are intact and thriving, you could barely tell a tropical storm had passed.
It's hardly even a metaphor because many of our
reefs
now are literally bacteria and algae and slime.
Now, this is the part of the talk where you may expect me to launch into my plea for us to all save the coral
reefs.
Whether I see it in a tweet, in a news headline or the glossy pages of a conservation brochure, that phrase bothers me, because we as conservationists have been sounding the alarms about the death of coral
reefs
for decades.
How would we get someone to care about the world's coral
reefs
when it's an abstract thing they can barely understand?
They attach in the place they find most suitable, they build a skeleton underneath themselves, they build a mouth and tentacles, and then they begin the difficult work of building the world's coral
reefs.
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