If there is one consistent thread with students whom I collaborate with, it is their penchant for finding rather trying field sites. Currently it is Jennifer Sweatman, a graduate student at FIU. She details her project here. Please let her know if you want to get stung by jellyfish – she would be happy to share the nematocysts……
My research focuses on human impacted […]
Three new papers from former lab members. A quick summary of each to follow….
Upside-down jellyfish paper – Betsy Stoner, now a post-doc at the University of Miami, conducted an expansive experiment to see if the upside-down jellyfish (Cassiopea spp.) affect seagrass habitat and the animals that live in it. This is important because she previously demonstrated that these jellyfish thrive […]
This video was taken just 3 hours after we built one of our artificial reefs on West Andros. This site is the extreme (and I mean very extreme) endpoint opposite Haiti. This was the crux of the project plan – construct reefs at sites across broad gradients in fish density and nutrient availability. West Andros has perhaps the lowest fishing pressure in […]
Feature story through the University of Georgia on Jake Allgeier’s research
and recent publication.
As we posted last week, a major research focus this summer is building a series
of artificial reefs across the Caribbean. In The Bahamas, we wanted to find a site
with human-derived nutrient input and a second site without. For the impacted
site we had targeted Marsh Harbour proper, with a backup being Hope Town
Harbour. To our surprise, in each place, there is almost […]
We have written much about the role of nutrients in fueling seagrass productivity (see here for instance), and we have also linked to recent papers on why the form of a nutrient matters for corals (see here and here). A recent paper from our lab looks at fish excretion from another angle: what is the ratio […]
One of activities on this trip was to change out the nutrients diffusers
for our long term enrichment experiment (more information in previous
post here). The experiment has been running for almost 3 years –
the longest seagrass enrichment experiment ever, as far as we know.
In the lab, my indefatigable lab […]
The second day in the field was pretty uneventful. We checked all of our
artificial reef habitats and today’s observations were consistent with
two previous thoughts we have shared…..
-Juvenile Nassau Grouper, like the one above, are everywhere (previous
post on this here). On our 40 cinder lock reefs, I […]
Coral reefs have long been a sort of scientific enigma; a diverse and productive ecosystem in the middle of a nutrient desert. Darwin himself puzzled over the existence of coral reefs on his famous journey on the H.M.S. Beagle. One explanation given for the existence of coral reefs is an efficient […]
The Haitian government has just declared boundaries of the first marine
protected area in the country!! This stemmed from The Nature Conservancy’s
concerted efforts with many collaborating partners. Information from our
surveys (see here and here) fed into the site selection. Also exciting, we
have preliminary support from the Haitian government […]