Abstract: By removing herbivores and promoting increases in macroalgae, overfishing is thought to indirectly cause coral disease and mortality. We performed three field manipulations to test the general hypothesis that overfishing and the subsequent alteration of coral reef trophic dynamics are a cause of coral epizootics. Specifically, we asked...
Abstract: Marine reserves have been advocated worldwide as conservation and fishery management tools. It is argued that they can protect ecosystems and also benefit fisheries via density-dependent spillover of adults and enhanced larval dispersal into fishing areas. However, while evidence has shown that marine reserves can meet conservation targets,...
Abstract: Coral reefs can undergo relatively rapid changes in the dominant biota, a phenomenon referred to as phase shift. Various reasons have been proposed to explain this phenomenon including increased human disturbance, pollution, or changes in coral reef biota that serve a major ecological function such as depletion of...
Abstract: Worldwide degradation of coral reef communities has prompted a surge in restoration efforts. They proceed largely without considering genetic factors because traditionally, coral populations have been regarded as open over large areas with little potential for local adaptation. Since, biophysical and molecular studies indicated that most populations are...
Abstract: Effective conservation requires rigorous baselines of pristine conditions to assess the impacts of human activities and to evaluate the efficacy of management. Most coral reefs are moderately to severely degraded by local human activities such as fishing and pollution as well as global change, hence it is difficult...
Abstract: BACKGROUND: Coral bleaching (i.e., the release of coral symbiotic zooxanthellae) has negative impacts on biodiversity and functioning of reef ecosystems and their production of goods and services. This increasing world-wide phenomenon is associated with temperature anomalies, high irradiance, pollution, and bacterial diseases. Recently, it has been demonstrated that...
Abstract A number of factors have recently caused mass coral mortality events in all of the world’s tropical oceans. However, little is known about the timing, rate or spatial variability of the loss of reef-building corals, especially in the IndoPacific, which contains 75% of the world’s coral reefs. Methodology/Principle...
Abstract: Very little is known about how environmental changes such as increasing temperature affect disease dynamics in the ocean, especially at large spatial scales. We asked whether the frequency of warm temperature anomalies is positively related to the frequency of coral disease across 1,500 km of Australia’s Great Barrier...
Abstract The south-western Pacific island countries were largely unaffected by mass coral bleaching during the intense El Nino of 1998, but experienced mass bleaching in 2000 during the subsequent strong La Niña. Nineteen reef locations were surveyed in eight geographic regions within the Fiji archipelago between mid April and...
Abstract: Historical (pre-1930s) seagrass meadows in Tampa Bay are believed to have covered 31,000 ha of the shallow bay bottom. Later, impacts to the bay from increasing population and industrial development of the Tampa Bay area have resulted in large seagrass losses. By 1982, approximately 8,800 ha of seagrass...
