will artificial reefs provide a new ecosystem to the dwindling species of marine lifeforms in the near future? The Loch Linnhe Artificial Reef complex, due to be built in Scotland, may answer this and other important questions about reef ecology.

In a unique partnership with the industry, researchers at the Centre for Coastal and Marine Sciences ( ccms ) laboratory at Dunstaffnage, near Oban in Scotland, hope to build one of the largest experimental reefs in the world. Construction of the 50,000-tonne Loch Linnhe Reef is scheduled to start in July 2000.

This is not the first attempt to create artificial reefs. In the 1960s and 1970s, for instance,