サンゴのバイオミネラリゼーションと炭素循環

抄録

  Corals are surviving and adapting to drastic change in Earth’s history and create nanometer to planetary scale complex structures throughout geological time. Once coral larvae settle on the rocky substrate, coral biomineralization occurs to produce their skeletons and coral growth and accumulation of their skeletons with other organisms and sediments eventually form coral reefs where maintain the highest diversity in marine ecosystem. Coral-algal symbiosis is sensitive to global and regional scale environmental changes and coral skeletons are useful to reconstruct the century scale climatic and environmental changes with high temporal resolution such as global warming, ocean acidification, and ocean pollution. Coral calcification plays important role to long to short term carbon cycles via their cellular level of organic and inorganic carbon production in coral-algal symbiosis. Therefore, understanding coral biomineralization is crucial to figure out the better evaluation of global climate changes and carbon cycle in the past and future.