Coral Triangle

The global center of marine biodiversity, a roughly six million square kilometer expanse of tropical seas spanning parts of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste and the Solomon Islands, named for the broadly triangular shape its three widest points of diversity trace on a map. It holds an estimated seventy-six percent of the world's known coral species and more than two thousand species of reef fish, along with six of the world's seven marine turtle species, all concentrated into a small fraction of the ocean's total area. The region is widely regarded as the evolutionary engine of Indo-Pacific reef biodiversity, from which many reef species are thought to have radiated outward across the wider Indo-Pacific over millions of years, though the exact mechanism generating this single diversity peak remains an active question in marine biogeography.