Mesoamerican Reef

The second largest barrier reef system in the world after Australia's Great Barrier Reef, stretching more than 1,000 kilometers along the Caribbean coasts of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala and Honduras. It supports more than sixty coral species and over five hundred fish species, along with endangered marine turtles and the West Indian manatee, and its reef, mangrove and seagrass habitats together absorb wave energy that would otherwise erode the coastline they border, a service estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars a year to the region's coastal communities. Sustained coral bleaching from rising sea temperatures and stony coral tissue loss disease, a fast-moving coral illness first detected in the region in the 2010s, have driven significant coral cover decline across the reef system in recent decades. No single area figure is recorded here: sources describe the reef system's length in kilometers far more consistently than its total area in square kilometers, and inventing a number for a fact the sources themselves do not settle would be less honest than leaving the field blank.