Philippine Marine Biodiversity

From: http://philpost.gov.ph/web/cy2010-d...iodiversity/

The Philippine Postal Corporation (Philpost) will soon release the CY2010 Definitive (Regular) Stamps featuring the Philippine Marine Biodiversity. This move is in support of the need to popularize the conservation of marine biodiversity and to focus more on the beauty of marine life forms that abound in the country.

The Stamps Committee approved the issuance of regular stamps featuring Philippine Marine Biodiversity, as a sort of respite from the Birds Series which has been the theme for the Definitive stamps for the last three years.

Initial denominations will be Php1, Php10 and Php26. The second set of stamps feature marine lives identified in another five kinds of denominations, such as Php2,Php5, Php7, Php8 and Php20.00.

It will be initially available at the Postage and Philatelic Department, Door 203, Main Lobby, Manila Post Office Building, Liwasang Bonifacio, Manila.

The Philippines forms an ocean region that has long been recognized as the world's center of marine biodiversity. With the Malay archipelago, Papua New Guinea and Australia, the country forms the 'Coral Triangle,' so-called because of the abundance of its coral reef life. Some 400-500 species in 90 genera of reef-forming corals are believed to exist in this region. Sulu-Sulawesi Sea, a 900,000-square-kilometer marine eco-region that lies at the apex of the Coral Triangle (70% in the Philippines, 20% Indonesia, 10% Malaysia), is home to some 2,500 species of fish.

The Philippine center of diversity was found to have the highest species richness for all distributions combined as well as when shore fish distributions were treated separately