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Tsunami damaged corals in Port Blair
Coral reefs in the sea near A&N Islands chain may have suffered widespread damage from last week's devastating tsunami.
Breathtaking coral reefs in the sea near Andaman and Nicobar Island chain may have suffered widespread damage from last week's devastating tsunami, a senior official said on Friday.
Environmentalists are worried decomposing corpses, dead animals and trees left behind by the rushing wall of water could also affect the coral reefs that ring many of the more than 550 islands in the remote archipelago.
"The sheer mass of the wave could have broken fragile types of corals like 'branching' and 'leafy' coral. I fear widespread damage to the coral reef," DRK Sastry, the Zoological Survey of India's top official in the islands, said.
"When coral breaks, it forms rubble and the more dead coral, the more the impact on the impressive biodiversity of the coastal areas of the islands."
"Because of the putrefying matter, micro-organisms will affect the coral and cause diseases in the coral," Sastry said.
More than 10 days after the tsunami, authorities have been struggling to assess the extent of the damage to the emerald isles, but officials say the retreating waters of the tsunami could have dumped huge amounts of silt and sand on the corals.
The coral reef in the Andaman Islands, which lie closer to the epicentre of the undersea quake off Sumatra that triggered the tsunamis than mainland India, is said to be among the richest in the world in terms of variety and is home to around 200 coral species.
Experts say some of the reefs around Sri Lanka and Thailand would have been crushed by the huge tsunami waves that have devastated southern Asia, an environmental and economic setback that could take years to reverse.
Reef-forming coral grows only about half a centimetre (one fifth of an inch) a year.
In 1998, due to unusually high temperatures globally, coral reefs in parts of the Indian and Pacific Ocean suffered from bleaching or loss of colour.
But the coral reef in the Andamans, still not a big destination on the tourist map, recovered almost totally.
Authorities in the Andamans have their fingers crossed after the deadly tsunami that killed about 150,000 people in Asia, more than 15,000 of them in India.
"It is essential to allow the coral to recover. After such an event, there must be no further stress. It will be a tragedy if the coral is lost forever," Sastry said.
