Computational Ecology Group

Our paper titled “Do Behavioral Foraging Responses of Prey to Predators Function Similarly in Restored and Pristine Foodwebs?” has been published in PLoS ONE. This study compares coral reefs with different histories of fishing pressure in the Line Islands in the central Pacific Ocean and the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. We show that prey behavioral responses to changes in the level of predation risk they face are bidirectional, and therefore that marine reserves designed to restore depleted predator populations may also have unexpected effects on prey behaviour.

Maina’s paper, “Modelling susceptibility of coral reefs to environmental stress using remote sensing data and GIS models” (2008, 212:180-199) has been listed as one of the most cited articles published in the journal Ecological Modelling since 2007. Congrats Maina!

The special issue of Journal of Experimental Biology, Biophysics, bioenergetics and mechanistic approaches to ecology, has been published with our paper titled “Integrating physiological and biomechanical drivers of population growth over environmental gradients on coral reefs.”

From Inside JEB by Kathryn Knight: “Moving further out to sea, Joshua Madin from Macquarie University, Australia, considers the physiological and mechanical effect of water flowing over delicate coral reef structures (p. 968). Explaining how flows can affect corals on a number of different levels – physiological (photosynthesis, calcification and respiration) and mechanical (physical storm damage) – Madin and colleagues Mia Hoogenboom and Sean Connolly construct a model that integrates the biochemical and biomechanical impacts of wave exposure on individual corals. They then scale the effects up to the population level to predict the performance and distribution of scleractinian reef corals. The trio confirms their model by showing that their predictions for the distribution of Acropora hyacinthus corals agree well with the distribution found throughout the Indo- Pacific region. Ultimately, they intend to use their model to make predictions about coral distributions in response to anthropogenic climate change.”

Osmar, Josh and collaborators have had their paper about factors that shape reef fish biogeographic patterns within the Atlantic Ocean published in the Proceedings of Royal Society B [link] . Contrary to the current paradigm that dispersal on this group of fish are mainly mediated by their larval-biology, they found that adult-biology traits better explain patterns of endemism among distinct provinces. Depending on the nature of the oceanographic barrier that divides provinces, different traits determine the set of species capable of crossing it.

They analyzed the distribution of 985 tropical reef fish species in relation of two major oceanographic barriers: mid-Atlantic barrier, the large stretch of open ocean between Africa and the Americas; and the Amazon-Orinoco plume, the extraordinary freshwater and sediment discharge of those major rivers along the north-eastern coast of South America. For the mid-Atlantic barrier, the ability of species to live in floating debris such as logs, seaweeds and even human disposals great improve chance to cross the Atlantic Ocean. For the Amazon-Orinoco plume, species that are also associated to other habitats than reefs, such as sand and sponge bottoms, could live within the plume and cross it through a stepping-stone effect. For both types of barrier, species body size is a further significant predictor, probably increasing the chance of a population becoming established in the new area.

This paper has received media attention by Science Alert and Science Illustrated