NetDoc:
Rick, I used to think that ALL sand was geoogically produced... a parrot fish destroyed my theory with one single poop. But Archaman said and it is THIS statement that has me puzzled, and I would love to hear his elucidation before the "sparkling carbonate" material hits the sea fan.
Argh! Doesn't anybody know what a phycologist is anymore? Oh poo... ha ha, I said poo.
A little story about "weed".
Back before science was popular and butchered by the media, folks called
scientists prowled the coral reefs. They looked at the fishes, corals, and other critters in a balanced, holistic manner curiously lacking in today's world. Many of these scientists were of the more exciting "
I study fishes" type. These people watched parrotfishes poo clean sand all over the reef and thought "AHA! That's where all this pretty carbonate sand comes from!"
Of course, being
fish people, they neither cared nor understood much of anything else going on at the reef. But being "popular" scientists, they spread this gross exaggeration of parrotfish pooping prowess far and wide, where it was hailed by the non-scientists as gospel and placed on the internet, where it was written as gospel.
Enter the
marine ecologist, whose job is to integrate many aspects of marine science to build a cohesive picture of the functional community. Thoroughly examining the studies of not just fish people but other scientists, marine ecologists discover a small and often overlooked cadre of researchers, the
marine botanists (AKA
phycologists). Their purview is the similarly underrated and overlooked world of algae and plants. All along botanists knew that many species of tropical algae incorporated calcium carbonate into their tissues, and when they died episodically their skeletons disassociated into mass piles of sand. Botanists also took stock of the huge abundance of these plants, far more common than corals or even those dang fishes that got all the media attention. They calculated that the bulk of biologically formed carbonate sand in tropical areas came not from parrotfish poo (which was never well quantified anyway), but from the lowly seaweeds. The
phycologists whispered this grand secret to their pals the
marine ecologists (who always liked them as much as the fish people... more even), where it was disseminated in many of the better texts and journals. Alas many of the
fish people never read these, or if they did, felt indignant about having all the attention going to miserable plants, however justified. Hence the stubborn persistence of parrotfish poo in the general literature today.
