Populations (cont.)

One more way to look at the species in a coral reef would be to look at their age-structure pyramids. Basically, these graphs show how much of an individual is living at each certain age. For example, many of the fish when they are young do not survive, therefore few make it to adulthood and old age. The age-structure pyramid would look something along the lines of this:

However, it is usually very hard to create these graphs for marine animals, any animal in fact, because of a lack of research and the difficulty of collecting this data. Age-structure pyramids are more often used to represent human populations.