De Silva, M.W.R.N. <br/><br/>
Status of the Coral Reefs of Sri Lanka 

 - Tahiti,  International Coral Reef Congress,  1985, 
 - 6p. 
 - 5th International Coral Reef Congress .
<br/><br/> Although reefs fringe a major part of the coastline of Sri Lanka many are sandstone reefs with scattered colonies of scleractinian corals. The better known Coral-reefs are those that fringe the northeastern coast near Trincomalee, the southwestern coast near Galle and the southern coast near Dondra (Fig.l). Information on Sri Lankan corals and coral reefsscanty and almost non-existent but for the early works of Ridley <1883), Ortnann (1889) and Bourne (1905) who carried out studies on limited collections of corals from Sri Lanka, then known as Ceylon. More recently, De Bruin (1972) has reported the la rge scale destruction of coral reefs off Trincomalee in the east coast by the 'Crown of Thorns' starfish BlfiBSi* D® Silva (1981, 1983 and 1985) and Salm (1981) have highligted.some of the factors such as coral mining and the use of explosives that have led to the degradation of the coral reefs and discussed problems of managing Sri Lanka's coral reefs. Mergner and Scheer (1974) have studied the physiographic zonatton and the ecological conditions of some fringing reefs at Hikkaduwa on the Southwestern coast of the island. Plllai (1972) has reported a total of 90 species of stony corals for Sri Lanka divided among 39 genera of which 27 genera and 70 species were hermatypic. Although Scheer (1984) lists some 40 scleractinian coral genera for Sri Lanka several that he has counted as separate genera should have been counted as belonging to one- genus eg. E§£iL‘ffi£££>£si IE&£EUa2£££&> > <P l e ^ i ^ s e a n d should have been placed under one genus and not counted as three genera. Work is underway by the author and his associates at the National Aquatic Resources Agency to bring out a list of corals for Sri Lanka based" on presently accepted genera and species of corals following the the recommendations of the UNESCO/UNEP coral taxonomy training course held in Phuket, Thailand in 1984.