General
Great Barrier Reef home to giant donut-shaped structures with unique animal and plant communities
Giant donut-shaped limestone mounds sitting in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, called Halimeda bioherms, have been building up on the seafloor off the Australian coast since the last ice age.
Key points:
- The donut-shaped “bioherms” are at least 10,000 years old, but scientists aren’t sure how they get their shape
- Researchers found more than 1,300 species living on the formations, with around 40 per cent of those species not found on the surrounding inter-reef
- The bioherm structure, which can be up to 300 metres wide, is formed from the exoskeletons of algae and acts as a “significant” carbon sink
It turns out the 10,000-year-old domes with sunken centres, which measure up to 300 metres across and 20m tall, host plant and animal…
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