Welcome to Panglao Marine Biodiversity Project 2004 Website!

• Richness, earlier similar intensive studies in the coral reef lagoon of New Caledonia have revealed 2,500-3,000 mollusc species per site, (this is more species than in the whole Mediterranean or the whole of New Zealand) and only 550 species on the island of Rapa in southernmost French Polynesia. If the gradients observed for corals are extrapolated to molluscs, we should expect numbers of molluscs species in the order of 5-10,000 in a Philippine site. We will also compare the results of this labour-intensive approach to the results of a Rapid Assessment Survey (RAS) approach, as conducted by Conservation International (CI), and to a quantitative sampling of soft bottoms, using grabs and biodiversity estimators.

• Rarity, a characteristic shared by complex tropical ecosystems (forest, reefs) is that most of their species are small and rare. At the Koumac site in New Caledonia, as many as 20% of the species are represented by single specimens, despite a sampling effort resulting in a total of 127,000 specimens. With semi-quantitative results obtained at 5 sites, it will be possible to evaluate the extent of different forms of rarity: species represented by low number of specimens, but with extensive ecological and geographical distributions (rarity s.s.); species locally abundant but with restricted geographical ranges (endemics); species with narrow ecological niche, vast geographical distribution, and indifferent number of specimens (stenoecious species).
  
•  Singularity, the issue of representativity is central to strategic planning for management of conservation areas. In New Caledonia, two sites only 200km apart have 40% or less of their biodiversity in common (i.e. 60% of the species are present on a single site). When the three sites are compared together, we found that they share only 22% of the total species and 50% of the species are found at one site only. In view of the expected magnitude of species richness (cf. 1 above), on the bottom until they are colonized by the fauna. These are techniques traditionally operated by local fisherman to collect seashells from deeper water (50-250 meter), and Balicasag is world famous for it's fisheries of deep-water seashells. Our research group does not have first hand experience of these nets, and though Mr. Quirino Hora, we are relying on the local know-how.