Folio xandra gagarin de castro graphic designer by xandra gagarin-de castro

January CARAMEL 18 -1148

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The color for January is Caramel. Pantone says that people born in January are logical, surefooted and that caramel is a color of substance and determination. The color caramel helps us feel stable and responsible by being more down-t-earth. Surrounding ourselves with caramel promotes practicality.

March AQUA 12 - 5409

The color for March is Fair Aqua. People born in March are dreamy and illusive. Surrounding ourselves in Fair Aqua helps you penetrate the barriers of appearances while increasing faith and psychic abilities.

July CORAL BLUSH 14 - 1909

The color for July is Coral Blush. Coral Blush is a gentle and soothing that reflects the cycles of the Moon. Surrounding ourselves with Coral Blush makes us more receptive to love and lifts the spirit.

October CERULEAN 18 - 3946

The color for October is Cerulean. Cerulean is a soothing color that promotes love, beauty, and balance. People born in October are peaceful and serene while the color inspires us to take action in our lives. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s also a month of beauty and enhancing beauty. Surrounding ourselves with Cerulean helps us keep balance.

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be found on a tropical ws, mangrove forests, ected and depend on old readers is a colorful we should care for it.

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Snorkeling over the reef A

s the tide comes in, it is time to put on a mask and snorkel and swim beyond the beach and the seagrass to theshallow reef flats made up of living and dead corals and sand patches. Do not go near the outer edge unless you are a good swimmer. The first things you will see are the corals. Those nearer the shore are mostly dead, looking like stones but home to many animals and algae. Don’t move them. Swim out further where the corals are more plentiful. There are hundreds of kinds of coral to see on a healthy reef. From tiny bushes to enormous fans, and from long whips to gigantic boulders, they are all animals.

Corals are nearly all made of thousands of tiny animals called polyps living together, except mushroom corals, so called because their skeleton looks like the underside of a mushroom; they are formed by only one polyp and can grow to 30 cm long or more. At the bottom left of the page, you can see the brown tentacles of an open mushroom coral. Next to it is a closed one. The hard, or stony, corals that make coral reefs have a rigid skeleton made

of limestone (calcium carbonate). Coralline algae make a similar compound called calcite, which helps form the reef structure. Some corals lack the hard skeleton and are called soft corals. Most hard and soft corals have millions of tiny algae called zooxanthellae living in their bodies. These algae use sunlight and nutrients in seawater to feed themselves and the corals. They give the coral its color. Corals also use their tentacles to catch small plankton for food, especially at night.

In the picture above, we can see a fan coral on the left over a boulder coral and below it stacked plate coral. Further right, most of the corals belong to the Acropora group; they have light skeletons and grow much faster than other corals. Acropora can be branching (staghorn), like that big pink one being explored by a parrotfish, or small and bushy, swirling, circular, or flat plates that reach several meters in width. With more than 100 species, they are the most common corals. More coral shapes can be seen on these two pages. What are those fish hurrying away? We’ll find out when we go diving.

On the beach A

beach near a coral reef is made of broken and ground up corals, coralline algae and shells, the skeletons of many other types of small marine animals, and sand made by fish that eat coral organisms.

Beaches usually look empty of life apart from us humans. But look closely and you might see small shells start to move. Pick one up and inside will be an angry hermit crab (top left, 1–6 cm), glaring with its eyes on stalks. You might even get a nip from its hairy claws. They don’t have a hard covering, or exoskeleton like other crabs, so they take an empty sea shell as their home.

These crustaceans as well as small fish, mollusks and worms, become food for shore birds. The tree-climbing coconut crab eats smaller crabs as well as fruits, seeds and the occasional coconut. Turtles are the best known tropical beach visitors, depositing their many eggs above the high tide level; the tiny hatchlings face those predatory birds and crabs as they scramble down to the sea. Humans are the major predators. Turtle eggs are popular foods in many tropical islands. And more predators, large fish, await the young turtles in the sea.

Below is a tropical beach, “the thin rooftops of an underground city”, in which countless millions of tiny animals are constantly cleaning the sand of washed-up, decaying organisms. Two newly hatched hawksbill turtles (8 cm) are making their way to the sea. A kingfisher bird (below right, 20-25 cm) and a Pacific egret (bottom, 50–60 cm) are watching with more than passing interest. Why?

On some beaches, many ghost crabs (left, 2–3 cm) can be seen darting sideways across the sand, each one defending its burrow and a small patch of sand. Soldier crabs (top right, 2 cm ) can sometimes be seen in the thousands–an army of them! They help clean the beach by eating detritus. Biggest of all is the coconut crab (right, 30–40 cm) that lives on land but returns to the seashore to deposit its eggs.

Marine slaters (left, 1 cm) crawl over and under beach rocks, sometimes by the hundred. Sandhoppers (bottom left, 0.5 cm) jump onto your feet, then quickly burrow into the sand. Washed-up timber may be covered in goose barnacles (right, 2 cm) . All these are crustaceans, meaning that they have a hard or crusty shell. There are so many kinds of small crustaceans that they can be called the insects of the sea.

Farming in tropical seas has been done in simple ways for many years. The drifting young, or larvae, of oysters and mussels settle onto rocks or posts set out in sheltered areas by fishers. The shellfish grow by feeding on plankton until they are harvested six to twelve months later. Oysters are sometimes grown on rocks set out between low and high tide in sheltered areas. They are carefully removed and fattened on trays for the market. Mussel farming on bamboo poles.

Right, a tropical green mussel. Above left, a well formed farmed oyster. Both about 6–9 cm.

Corals have long been harvested for construction, curios and ornaments, making lime for consumption with betel nuts, and nowadays also as live coral for aquarium enthusiasts. Coral farming is now becoming popular in many parts of the world. Finger-size pieces of colorful coral species are attached to small cement bases and these are in turn attached to an underwater platform. Within 6 months, fist-sized corals can be harvested for the aquarium trade; some are left for broodstock so growers do not need to keep taking coral from the reef. The blood cockle (they do have hemoglobin like us!) is also farmed in tropical seas. Baby cockles are gathered and spread out in a sheltered sandy growing area. The cockles live beneath the seabed and after several months are harvested with a long metal scoop.

Giant clams have been overfished and have all but disappeared in many countries. Now they are being farmed in some tropical islands to repopulate them as well as for food and for export as specimens for marine aquariums. They are spawned in hatcheries and distributed to farmers. Farming is easy because they need no feeding. Do you remember why? The biggest giant clam species (below right), grows to more than a meter long. The yellow one (below left) grows to about 30 cm.

In more open waters, seaweed (algae) farming is common. Families of fishers spread nets horizontally over sand or reef flats; pieces of seaweed are attached to the net. Sunlight and nutrients in the warm sea make the plants grow fast. After a few months the seaweed is harvested, and small pieces are left to grow again. In the picture above is a seaweed farmer’s house built over his farm. The open area on the left is used for sun-drying the seaweed.

Left, blood cockle (4–9 cm). Right: Small corals growing on an underwater platform. On the left side, soft corals. The other three rows are hard corals.