Abstract
The degree of species diversity as well as the density of communities of reef fish are unknown in any other aquatic ecosystem of our planet (Marshall 1965; Ehrlich 1975, Ehrlich et al. 1977). Coral reefs harbor about a third of all species of bony fish. The biomass of fish on reefs could attain 2 t ha-1. This raises the question how does the reef ecosystem feed such a large mass of fish, which, being a final trophie link, have a low efficiency in using the consumed food for growth (some 0.1–0.15). It is quite obvious that these phenomena are extremely important from the point of view of general biology and general ecology (Odum and Odum 1955; C.L. Smith 1978).
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© 1995 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Sorokin, Y.I. (1995). Coral Reef Fish. In: Coral Reef Ecology. Ecological Studies, vol 102. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-80046-7_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-80046-7_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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