Future too warm for baby sharks
New research has found as climate change causes the world’s oceans to warm, baby sharks are born smaller, exhausted, undernourished and into environments that are already difficult for them to survi
ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies
James Cook University Townsville
Queensland 4811 Australia
Phone: 61 7 4781 4000
Email: info@coralcoe.org.au
Abstract: Habitats are degrading worldwide and such change leads to a major loss of biodiversity. This talk will summaries our recent research that explores how the degradation of coral reefs affects how fish assess risk. For fish that closely associate with live coral, the loss of live coral nearby can modify important olfactory cues that indicate risk, alter how they learn the identity of predators and their ability to pass this information to other. These fish are no longer able to develop a neophobic, risk averse, phenotype and die much faster than when not affected by cues from degraded coral. Luckily, they can still learn risk from other non-affected species, but this learning mechanism not as efficient as learning first hand and leads to reduced survival. Determining the mechanisms that underlie why some species are affected while others are not will improve our understanding of species resilience to coral degradation.
Biography: Professor Mark McCormick has been studying fish communities on temperate and tropical reefs for 30 years, and is a world expert on the early life history of fishes, producing over 200 research papers. He has been funded extensively through the Australian Research Council to examine the processes that regulate the numbers and distribution of fishes on today’s reefs, and those we may see in the future. His research has focused on the interconnections between fish life-stages; from how environmental change affects parents and their larval offspring, through to who survives the gauntlet of mouths as the larvae return to reefs to become breeding members of the fish community. His current research projects involve determining the impact of habitat degradation and anthropogenic noise on fish communities.
New research has found as climate change causes the world’s oceans to warm, baby sharks are born smaller, exhausted, undernourished and into environments that are already difficult for them to survi
A new study shows the coastal protection coral reefs currently provide will start eroding by the end of the century, as the world continues to warm and the oceans acidify. A team of researchers led
A team of scientists led by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (Coral CoE) won one of the nation’s top science awards at tonight’s ‘Oscars of Australian science’, the Eureka P
An analytical tool will be used to assess the climate risks facing historic World Heritage sites in Africa—the ruins of two great 13th century ports and the remains of a palace and iron-making indus
Abstract: It is a little over a decade since research commenced into the effects of anthropogenic ocean acidification on marine fishes. In that time, we have learned that projected end-of-century
Abstract: Increased uptake of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere has caused the world’s ocean to become more acidic. Different marine habitats are known to have varying ranges of CO2 across mul
Abstract: The Allen Coral Atlas (http://allencoralatlas.org) partnership uses high-resolution satellite imagery, machine learning, and field data to map and monitor the world’s coral reefs at unp
Abstract: Climate change is causing the average surface temperature of the oceans to rise and increasing the frequency and intensity of marine heatwaves. In addition, absorption of additional CO2
Abstract: Marine environments are a concealing medium, where observations of natural fish behavior are challenging. In particular, the geographic and depth distributions of migratory top predators ar
Abstract: Invasive species management can be the the subject of debate in many countries due to conflicting ecological, ethical, economic, and social reasons, especially when dealing with a species s
Abstract: Ocean acidification, the increase in seawater CO2 with all its associated consequences, is relatively well understood in open oceans. In shelf seas such as the Great Barrier Reef, processe
Abstract: The backdrop of legends and movies, the deep sea has always been unfathomable because we had no idea what existed there. Once thought to be barren of life, we now know this couldn’t be
ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies
James Cook University Townsville
Queensland 4811 Australia
Phone: 61 7 4781 4000
Email: info@coralcoe.org.au