According to Elisabeth Mann Borgese, former and Honorary Chair of the International Ocean Institute, marine biotechnology may still be in its infancy, but Japanese scientists, who are leaders in the field, have already isolated 3,000 pharmaceutically active substances from marine animals and plants. Marine rainforests In tropical areas, mangrove swamps and coral reefs provide complex living communities that protect the coastline from erosion and serve as habitats for an extraordinary diversity of plants and fish. Cold water corals have been found in the North East Atlantic off Scotland. Coral reefs Corals are sedentary animals that live as a colony, producing a calcium carbonate skeleton beneath their layer of organic tissue. They live off tiny plankton and nutrients dissolved in the water.
Coral needs warm, shallow tropical water and often grows near to the surface.
Coral can usually cope with hurricanes and storms, while the Gulf war showed that reefs can resist oil pollution. Mangrove forests Mangrove forests are resilient, unique ecosystems that provide breeding grounds for fish as well as protecting coasts from erosion and the effects of storms, while filtering some noxious chemicals. They are, however, sensitive to oil spills and disturbances to the freshwater content of their environment. In some countries, mangrove forests are being cleared at a catastrophic rate to provide space for aquaculture fishponds - which do not perform the vital ecological functions of the mangroves, yet create toxic effluent. 1 Costanza et al, Nature, UK, vol.