Indo-Pacific

🎸 Artist Bio: The Indo-Pacific is a vast biogeographic region of Earth. In a narrow sense, sometimes known as the Indo-West Pacific or Indo-Pacific Asia, it comprises the tropical waters of the Indian Ocean, the western and central Pacific Ocean, and the seas connecting the two. The term is especially useful in marine biology, ichthyology, and similar fields, since many marine habitats are continuously connected from Madagascar to Japan and Oceania, and a number of species occur over that range, but are not found in the Atlantic Ocean. As a distinct marine realm, the region has an exceptionally high species richness, with the world's highest species richness being found in at its heart in the Coral Triangle, and a remarkable gradient of decreasing species richness radiating outward in all directions. The region includes over 3,000 species of fish, compared with around 1,200 in the next richest marine region, the Western Atlantic, and around 500 species of reef building corals, compared with about 50 species in the Western Atlantic. The term first appeared in academic use in oceanography and geopolitics. Scholarship has shown that the "Indo-Pacific" concept circulated in Weimar Germany, and spread to interwar Japan. German political oceanographers envisioned an "Indo-Pacific" comprising anticolonial India and republican China, as German allies, against "Euro-America". Since the late 2010s, the term "Indo-Pacific" has been increasingly used in geopolitical discourse. It is seen by some as a replacement for the "Asia-Pacific" regional concept which was pioneered by Australia and Japan in the 1970s and 1980s. As a geopolitical concept, the Indo-Pacific has a "symbiotic link" with the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or "Quad", an informal grouping between Australia, Japan, India, and the United States. It has been argued that the concept may lead to a change in popular "mental maps" of how the world is understood in strategic terms. According to the political scientist Amitav Acharya, the "Indo-Pacific" was a concept built by strategists. The Indo-Pacific started to gain ground in international relations literature as a geopolitical challenge by the U.S. toward China, which still prefers the regional term Asia-Pacific. The companion term "Euro-Atlantic" is often used by European leaders to denote a vaguely defined geopolitical space which is understood to include Europe and North America. The Euro-Atlantic term is also popular with Chinese leaders. In its widest sense, the Indo-Pacific geopolitically covers all nations and islands surrounding either the Indian Ocean or the Pacific Ocean. This definition encompasses mainland African and Asian nations who border these oceans, such as India and South Africa, Indian Ocean territories such as the Kerguelen Islands and Seychelles, Indonesia (which is within the bounds of both the Indian Ocean and the Pacific), Philippines, Taiwan, China, Korea, Japan, Russia and other Far East nations bordering the Pacific, as well as Australia and all the Pacific Islands east of them. The widest geopolitical definition also encompasses Pacific nations of the Americas such as Canada or Mexico, and the subarctic areas of the North Pacific, like Alaska's Bering Sea islands. ASEAN countries (defined as those in Southeast Asia) are considered to be geographically at the centre of the political Indo-Pacific.