The Rainforests of the Sea: A Narrative Review of Coral Reef Science from Darwin's Ring to Assisted Evolution
Year: 2026
Type: review
Abstract: Coral reef science---the biology whose subject is the sea's rainforests and whose crisis is the century's warming---moved from Darwin's 1842 subsidence ring and Wells's and Goreau's zonation through Connell's diversity, Glynn's bleaching perspectives, and Hoegh-Guldberg's future to Hughes's resilience, Pandolfi's trajectories, Bellwood's crisis, van Oppen's assisted evolution, Hughes's recurrent bleaching, and Eddy's ecosystem services. This article presents a narrative review of that arc's canonical line: Darwin's 1842 coral reefs, Wells's 1957 corals, Goreau's 1959 Jamaican reefs, Connell's 1978 diversity, Glynn's 1993 bleaching, Hoegh-Guldberg's 1999 future, Hughes and colleagues's 2003 resilience, Pandolfi and colleagues's 2003 trajectories, Bellwood and colleagues's 2004 crisis, van Oppen and colleagues's 2015 assisted evolution, Hughes and colleagues's 2017 recurrent bleaching, and Eddy and colleagues's 2021 ecosystem services. The review is organized around three themes: Darwin's ring and the zonation, in which the subsidence's theory, the treatise's, and the zonation's ecology founded the reef's science; the disturbance's and the bleaching's era, in which the intermediate's disturbance, the bleaching's perspectives, and the warming's futures made the crisis visible; and the crisis's and the interventions', in which the resilience's, the trajectories's, the crisis's, the evolution's assistance, the recurrent's bleaching, and the services's decline carried the reefs into the intervention's era. It is concluded that coral reef science is the symbiosis's largest stage---and that its arc is the reef's reading from the ring's theory to the crisis's interventions.
Authors: Revista, Zen, BIOLOGY, 10
Institution: Faculdades Guarulhos
Language: English
Subfield: Ecology
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204814522