Scientific articles
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2013
This article, published by one of the Living Oceans Foundation Research Fellows, Sonia Bejarano, PhD and science team member, Professor Peter Mumby, looks at changes in the spear fishery of herbivores associated with closed grouper season in Palau, Micronesia.
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2013
Advances in management of precious corals in the family Corallidae: are new measures adequate?
Highlights: A recommended minimum harvest size of 80 mm was not adopted. Corallium rubrum resources above 50 m, instead of 80 m, are protected but enforcement is inadequate. Deep C. rubrum resources are being exploited without prior stock assessments. Inshore Pacific Corallidae are still primarily harvested with dredges. Pacific Corallidae landings have doubled and are dominated by dead colonies. Advances in management of precious corals in the family Corallidae: are new measures adequate?
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2013
Ecological Risk and the Exploitation of Herbivorous Reef Fish Across Micronesia
Nominally herbivorous fish play a variety of functional roles that are important in maintaining coral reef resilience, yet are major targets of spear fisheries in Micronesia. Although protection is afforded to iconic species in some areas, impacts of the fishery on the ecosystem are poorly understood. The goal of this study was to locate the major potential ecological threats from the fishery by integrating catch data with species-specific metrics of ecological importance and vulnerability to fishing. Region-wide and country-specific grounds for ecological concern were identified....
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2013
Coral reefs worldwide, even remote reefs, are impacted by global change - a combined multitude of large-scale and local stressors. COTS impacts and bleaching are key drivers of coral degradation. This scientific article on coral population trajectories looks at increased disturbance and possible management interventions that may be advisable as just leaving reefs alone, seems no longer a satisfactory option.
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2012
Given the threat of global climate change towards coral reefs and the endosymbiotic anthozoans that construct them, there is an urgent need to better understand the physiological response of these environmentally sensitive organisms. Unfortunately, many aspects of anthozoan biology are poorly understood, such as the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying the stability of their association with dinoflagellates of the genus Symbiodinium. For instance, it has only recently been demonstrated that the molecular composition of these mutualisms is temporally variable; specifically, Symbiodinium DNA content has been shown to vary significantly across the light-dark cycle, and such variation could have implications for...
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2012
To understand the effects of global climate change on reef-building corals, a thorough investigation of their physiological mechanisms of acclimatization is warranted. However, static temperature manipulations may underestimate the thermal complexity of the reefs in which many corals live. For instance, corals of Houbihu, Taiwan, experience changes in temperature of up to 10°C over the course of a day during spring-tide upwelling events. To better understand the phenotypic plasticity of these corals, a laboratory-based experiment was conducted whereby specimens of Seriatopora hystrix from an upwelling reef (Houbihu) and conspecifics from a non-upwelling reef (Houwan) were exposed...
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2012
Three independent line intercept transect surveys on northern Red Sea reef slopes conducted in 1988/9 and 1997/8 in Egypt and from 2006–9 in Saudi Arabia were used to compare community patterns and coral size. Coral communities showed scale-dependent variability, highest at fine spatial and taxonomic scale (species-specific within and among reef patterns). At coarser scale (generic pattern across regions), patterns were more uniform (regionally consistent generic dominance on differently exposed reef slopes and at different depths). Neither fine- nor coarse-scale patterns aligned along the sampled 1700 km latitudinal gradient. Thus, a latitudinal gradient that had been described earlier...
