What are some good websites on the Bermuda Coral Reef biome?

The warm, nutrient waters of the Gulf Stream pass through Bermuda and have helped establish a healthy ecosystem in the reef.

Rim reefs create a circle along the North Lagoon and are formed on the raised rim of the Bermuda platform. Here many hard corals can be found, such as Brain and Star corals as well as sea rods and sea fans as the large Gorgonia.

Branching corals as Madracis and Oculina, the fire coral Millepora alcicornis and soft corals as the sea rod Pseudoplexaura are known to flourish in the calmer environment of the waters inside the North Lagoon.

On the southern and south eastern side of the island, small and generally rounded reefs extend to the sea surface and have waves continuously breaking over them. This creates the illusion of the water boiling. The ?boilers? are part of the rim reef system.

Though Bermuda has been classified as an atoll (according to Charles Darwin one of the three major types of coral reefs) it would be more accurate to call it a pseudo atoll. Though Bermuda shares a lot of similarities with an atoll, there is a vast difference in the process that formed Bermuda and the process that forms an atoll. Over time sands in Bermuda have collected, been compressed and turned into solid rock ground by a process known as lithification (from the Greek word lithos meaning 'rock' and the Latin-derived suffix ?ific).

If you compare the land formations of Bermuda and the formations of genuine Pacific atolls, you can see that they are much taller.

An atoll is the third type of reef next to the fringing reef (an area along the shore where coral colonies have been able to grow) and the barrier reef (a coral zone separated from land by a lagoon). An atoll is a ring-like reef formation with a lagoon inside the ring.