Sea Monster

SeaMonster blog

  • Why are lionfish populations exploding across the Caribbean?

    Lionfish are an exotic fish now found throughout the Greater Caribbean and eastern Atlantic that have become incredibly abundant on many reefs, especially in the Bahamas and off North Carolina. Lionfish are a piscivore (a fish that eats other fish) and were introduced from the Indo-Pacific by the aquarium trade in the late 1990s off Florida. Mostly likely,…

  • How does trophic skewing affect the functioning of marine communities?

    My former PhD student Dr Pamela Reynolds and I just published a paper in PLoS One* that attempts to address this question. Trophic skew is an ecological term that describes changes in the relative number of species at different tropic levels, i.e., “species richness“.  In most natural food webs, there are more species at the…

  • Lying liar Bob Carter is at it again

    Here we go again. Our old friend Dr Bob Carter – climate change denier extraordinaire – is back at it; making counter-factual claims about climate change in another newspaper.  Bob is reported to be paid nearly $2000 a month by the Heartland Institute to sow confusion about greenhouse gases and global warming. Read more about this…

  • Corals and their housekeeping mutualists or the importance of having a diverse group of friends

    This is a guest post by Dr Adrian Stier Coral reefs are among the most species rich ecosystems on earth, but what most people don’t know is that the majority of reef biodiversity is housed inside the reef. Indeed, in the South Pacific, a coral the size of a basketball can house over 50 different…

  • Waimea River: How to make waves

  • North Carolina legislature makes history yet again, proposing to outlaw sea level rise

    [Editor’s note: OK, I know we live in crazy times, and getting crazier by the day. But this one is so utterly, bat-doo insane, masochistic and over-the-top that I can’t resist and must quote verbatim. By Scott Huler at From Scientific American blogs. John, Craig, Kevin Z, Andrew, et al — what the ___ is…

  • New underwater sculptures from Jason de Caires Taylor

    Underwater sculptor Jason deCaries Taylor has unveiled pictures of his latest works at the MUSA (the Museo Subacuático de Arte) in Cancun, Mexico. They include this stunning piece called Phoenix.                         As Jason says: Constructed from high strength pH-neutral cement and incorporating tensile stainless steel…

  • Happy International Day for Biological Diversity!

    Not only that but Marine Biodiversity (yeah, it caught us by surprise too — I think the Convention on Biological Diversity needs some marketing advice . . .) Anyway, they have a cool logo which is worth a post in its own right. Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, today, 22 May 2012, is the official International…

  • New evidence for catastrophic loss of coral reef sharks

    “[The] density of reef sharks has declined to 3–10% of baseline levels” This is the take-home finding from one of two new papers that help clarify just how much reef shark populations have declined. Nadon et al. 2012, Re-creating missing population baselines for Pacific reef sharks, just came out in the journal Conservation Biology. The team used a new database…

  • Coral reef grazing in Palau

    From Peter Mumby’s Spatial Ecology Lab at UQ [vimeo]http://vimeo.com/42031793[/vimeo]

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