Reef-Building Corals of Vietnam as a Part of the Indo-Pacific Reef Ecosystem

The paper analyzes both published and unpublished results of the investigations of Vietnamese reef-building corals and reefs performed in the last decades of the twentieth century. The state of the art in the study of reef-building scleractinian corals and reefs is presented. The scleractinian fauna of Vietnam is shown to match in species diversity (366 species of 70 genera) the tropical coral fauna of the Indonesian-Malacca fertile center, from which Indo-Pacific reef-building corals originated. The whole Vietnam coast from the Gulf of Tonkin to the Gulf of Siam is a biogeographically single whole and is a part of the Indo-Polynesian Province of the Indo-Pacific Area.