Matheus A. Mello-Athayde
PhD candidate
University of Queensland
@https://twitter.com/MMelloathayde
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
Matheus is a current PhD student and research assistant at the Coral Reef Ecosystems Laboratory from The University of Queensland. Matheus has a double degree in science, Bachelor of Science (teaching degree) and Bachelor of Biological Science with Honours (Marine Biology Major) from Santa Cecilia University (Brazil).
Matheus is a passionate and dedicated marine biologist, wildlife and underwater photographer. He grew up snorkelling the coast of Brazil, learning to appreciate and protect the ocean’s biodiversity. Since he was a teenager, he has been involved with marine science and started to work as an Aquarist and Marine Education Officer on the largest public aquarium in South America at the time (Acqua Mundo, Brazil).
While undertaking his bachelor’s degree, he worked on different scientific projects, including biometric data acquisition and scientific identification on one of the most extensive collections of preserved sharks and rays in Brazil, at the centre of studies of Elasmobranchii, NUPEC. He contributed as a biologist on a centre of rescue and rehabilitation of marine animals at the Gremar Institute, Brazil. While at Gremar he worked on an educational outreach program funded by the Guarujá city council as a teacher for public high schools’ students. He also worked for the University of Sao Paulo as a marine educator and snorkelling guide on a marine ecology outreach project. Matheus had a passion for the zoology of invertebrates, his honours degree project focused on the ecology of rocky shore environments, which led him to start a work internship with corals reefs at the University of Sao Paulo.
He joined the CRE laboratory as an occupational trainee research assistant in January 2011. Since then, he has been working and collaborating on a wide range of scientific projects. He has experience collecting field samples to undertake long-term in-situ and laboratory experiments, laboratory analyses, scientific data collection, statistical analyses, and modelling.
Matheus was awarded a full doctoral fellowship on a research project entitled “Porites cylindrica (Dana, 1846), a resilient coral found on the Great Barrier Reef: present and future coral physiology”. The overall aim of Matheus’s PhD thesis is to understand better how corals with different life-history respond to changes in the present and future abiotic environments. His PhD project utilized the state-of-the-art laboratory automated control system for studying the effects of ocean acidification and warming. His research project was also one of the firsts to incorporate the newest automated underwater incubations system in order to measure in situ calcification and metabolic rates.
The hope for the coral reefs is going beyond finding “super corals” that would be able to resist bleaching and survive stressful thermal events but find corals that also can maintain a higher percentage of coral cover, by growing rapidly upwards to counter sea level rises, maintain high recruitment levels and increase their skeletal density to prevent breakages due to the wave energy that coral reefs might be facing in the future.
Current projects and collaborations
Publications
Web profiles
Main Collaborators
Associate Professor Sophie Dove (The University of Queensland, Australia)
Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg (The University of Queensland, Australia)
Dr Selina Ward (The University of Queensland, Australia)
Dr Kristen Brown (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
Professor Amatzia Genin (The Hebrew University, The Interuniversity Institute for Marine Science in Eilat, Israel)
Dr Veronica Radice (Old Dominion University, USA)
Dr Pim Bongaerts (California Academy of Sciences, USA)
James Cook University researchers have found brightly coloured fish are becoming increasingly rare as coral declines, with the phenomenon likely to get worse in the future. Christopher Hemingson, a
Researchers working with stakeholders in the Great Barrier Reef region have come up with ideas on how groups responsible for looking after the reef can operate more effectively when the next bleaching
A new study has delivered a stark warning about the impacts of urban growth on the world’s coral reefs. As coastal developments expand at pace around the world, a year-long study of coral on a reef
Alarming new research shows global warming of 1.5°C relative to pre-industrial levels will be catastrophic for almost all coral reefs – including those once thought of as refuges. Associate Profes
Abstract: Molecular approaches have revolutionised our understanding of the systematics and evolution of most branches on the tree of life, including corals. Over the last twenty-five years molecula
Abstract: Outbreaks of crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) are a major driver of coral decline across the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) and compound upon the impacts of increasingly frequent and severe coral
Abstract: Being a new staff member at JCU, I will start with a short overview of my research. Next I will zoom in on a specific topic that I have been interested in for a long time: the impact of e
Abstract: The harsh truth is that, despite exciting innovations and increases in activity, ocean conservation is not succeeding, at least not fast enough. This is my conclusion from the last decad
This talk is the last of the parachute science seminar series organized by the ARC CoE Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI) committee. Abstract Universities and institutions across th
This talk is the second of three on parachute science being organized by the ARC CoE Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI) committee. Abstract For millenia, Traditional Owners have hel
This talk is the first of three on parachute science being organized by the ARC CoE Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI) committee. Abstract Parachute science is the practice whereby
ABSTRACT Climate change loss and damage is known as the “third pillar” of international climate governance in addition to mitigation and adaptation. Although there is no agreed upon definition,
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