As we are Raleigh bound for school, I and a few undergraduate volunteers have been starting to look at the video footage taken on the artificial reef along Eastern Shores (click her for more detail). Our primarily goal for these videos is to look at relative fish abundance and diversity along our reef treatments. So far, we have seen […]
To make artificial reefs of course (more pictures here). Obviously a much larger scale, but the exact same idea as our cinder block reefs on Abaco and other islands – increase fishery production by concentrating fish “pee”. Likewise, this might well be benefit of the new sculpture garden on New Providence (the garden is a just […]
Our main project this past trip was to begin to develop a food web for an artificial reef. That is, using direct diet studies and chemical analysis, develop a complete model of what eats what on a reef. One of the most fun parts of this is examining Nassau grouper diets. They have a large enough mouth that you make […]
This short video is of one of our first reefs we built back in March 2009. Please excuse the mess – crawfishers don’t seem to reassemble the reefs after their haul. What was noticeable was the abundance of small Nassau grouper (5-24 inches). Some of the reefs (just 40 cinder blocks) had as more than 20! I can’t help but think […]
That would be “fish pee”! Loggerhead Productions with a video of our research in Haiti.
We are back on Abaco checking out the reefs we built last summer. Incredible how many fish have moved to them just 5 months after they were built. One of projects this trip will be to compile a complete food web of one reef – what are all of these fish eating? We will provide updates as we go.
Here is a 15 second video clip from some of the underwater video footage I took on my experiment in Eastern Shores a few weeks ago. Within about 25 minutes of the camera being underwater, a very large and curious Loggerhead sea turtle decided the camera would […]
Martha Zapata was one of our super undergraduates at Florida International University. Her Honor’s Thesis was published today in the journal Caribbean Naturalist. She describes the turnover in fish assemblages on natural and artificial reefs from day to night. Most of the fish leave the reef at dusk to forage and then return before dawn. This is the dynamic […]
BREEF’s new sculpture garden getting lots of international press – two stories here and here. One of our experimental artificial reefs is associated with this project as well.
Three papers fresh off the presses. Two more on lionfish (some comments on lionfish mania here) and the other from Lauren Yeager, former FIU graduate student. The first paper deals with the critical question of whether lionfish prey are naive to lionfish. They suggest the answer for beaugregory damselfish is both yes and no. Their data suggest that […]