Coral reefs and associated marine fauna around the Arabian Peninsula

Introduction

Bahrain is an archipelago of 33 natural low-lying islands, with coral reefs that were historically known to be among the most extensive in the southern basin of the Arabian Gulf (Riegl 2003; Purkis and Riegl 2005; Kavousi et al. 2014).

However, in the last four decades, reefs have undergone a significant decline due to intense bleaching events (Uwate and Shams 1999) and other anthropogenic impacts. Large-scale coastal development in pursuit of socio-economic growth has added 12.8% to the Kingdom’s total land area between 1961 (690 km²) and 2020 (785 km²) (World Bank 2020).

Similar to other reefs in the Arabian Gulf, coral reefs in Bahrain are subjected to extreme environmental conditions, with seasonal temperatures ranging between 16-35°C (Burt et al. 2011; AlMealla 2020), coupled with high salinity levels of about 45 psu in the eastern waters and 55.1 psu in western waters (Al-Wedaei et al. 2011). Reefs are found in shallow waters at depths of 4 m to 18 m depending on their location. To date, there is only one scientific peer-reviewed paper from over a decade ago (Burt et al. 2013) published specifically on the reefs of Bahrain. Although there are a few published reports and chapters that have reported on the Kingdom’s reefs, these remain fairly limited, they lack new local knowledge, and are now outdated. Therefore, through this chapter we aim to provide an overview of coral reefs in Bahrain that combine both local knowledge and scientific published information, thus providing new insights and generating a better understanding of the reefs in Bahrain.