Functional versatility supports coral reef biodiversity

Functional versatility supports coral reef biodiversity.

We explore the role of specialization in supporting species coexistence in high-diversity ecosystems. Using a novel ordination-based method to quantify specialist and generalist feeding structures and diets we examined the relationship between morphology and diet in 120 wrasses and parrotfishes from the Great Barrier Reef. We find that wrasses, despite their morphological diversity, exhibit wea...

Ecology. Coral reef biodiversity--habitat size matters.

Coral reefs are the most diverse of all marine ecosystems (1), with estimates of reef species ranging from 600,000 to more than 9 million species worldwide (2, 3). This biodiversity is most pronounced in the western Pacific and Indian Oceans (1, 4), but decreases with increasing distance from the Indo-Australian archipelago. For example, reefs in the central Indo-Pacific have more than 10 times...

Coral Reef Biodiversity— Habitat Size Matters

The author is with the Marine Biology Research Division, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California-San Diego, San Diego, CA 92093-0202, USA and Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Balboa, Republic of Panama. E-m ail: [email protected] Rainforests of the sea. Biodiversity in the Indo-Pacific region was measured by counting the total numbers of species in the 13 most spe...

Coral Reef Biodiversity in the Face of Climatic Changes

Sleeping Functional Group Drives Coral-Reef Recovery

The world's coral reefs are in decline, with many exhibiting a phase shift from coral to macroalgal dominance . This change is often associated with habitat loss and overharvesting of herbivorous fishes, particularly parrotfishes and surgeonfishes . The challenge is to reverse this decline and enhance the resilience of coral-reef ecosystems . We demonstrate, by using a large-scale experimentall...